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. What is
Speaker 1: something from your search history that is revealing about who
Speaker 1: you are?
Speaker 2: I yesterday was looking up the public pool hours in
Speaker 2: New York because I'm a huge, huge, huge advocate of
Speaker 2: going to the public pools in New York City because
Speaker 2: everybody's like, I mean, itw gross the public pools, like
Speaker 2: I'd rather go to a hotel, and I'm like, okay,
Speaker 2: but the pools are run by the city and have
Speaker 2: like really intense guidelines about how clean they have to be.
Speaker 2: And you know who doesn't have those guidelines any hotel.
Speaker 2: I don't know if any hotel pools are getting cleaned.
Speaker 2: And the way that the public pools in New York
Speaker 2: are so I'm a huge fan freezing cold if you
Speaker 2: live they're super They're like because they're like cooling centers,
Speaker 2: like they're four people, especially if you don't have air
Speaker 2: conditioning in the summer. They're also the location of a
Speaker 2: lot of the free lunches that get you know, for students,
Speaker 2: so in the summer you're not in school, that's where
Speaker 2: they do it. I love, love, love the public pools,
Speaker 2: but I was I've never gone early enough to know
Speaker 2: what time they opened, so I was like, I guess
Speaker 2: I should find out. And it's eleven, which I think
Speaker 2: is a little close for me, so I don't know
Speaker 2: if I'll ever get there at opening, but noon feels.
Speaker 3: Right right, right right. Did you grow up in New York?
Speaker 4: In New York?
Speaker 2: No, Yeah, I grew up in Maryland. But I've been
Speaker 2: here for sixteen or seventeen years, which is crazy because
Speaker 2: I'm twenty.
Speaker 3: God so much just kidding.
Speaker 4: I would never want to be twenty again, my god.
Speaker 5: Oh yeah, some of the most chaotic times in my
Speaker 5: life because like La, the pools in La are just
Speaker 5: because of the ambient heat, not always like super but
Speaker 5: you definitely cool off.
Speaker 3: But then we also have like all those like splash parks.
Speaker 5: Now we're just basically equivalent like an open fire hydrant, yeah,
Speaker 5: a like foam ground area to make it sae yeah
Speaker 5: for kids.
Speaker 4: I love the public pools in LA though, too. I
Speaker 4: used to go swim in those when I lived there.
Speaker 4: They're the best.
Speaker 3: I love the proofs.
Speaker 4: I guess that's that's something about me. I love pools.
Speaker 1: It's I've talked before and hear about how my first
Speaker 1: job out of college was as a pool boy at
Speaker 1: the Soho House, the roof deck of the Soho House
Speaker 1: when that had just opened, and I was in charge
Speaker 1: of just to your point about them not having regulations,
Speaker 1: I was in charge of like the chlorine levels.
Speaker 3: Also.
Speaker 1: Yeah, they were like like there was Oh no. I
Speaker 1: had somebody who like knew more about it, who checked
Speaker 1: with me every once in a while, but I was
Speaker 1: like doing the pH testing and yeah, and I was
Speaker 1: in no way equipped to do that. I had to
Speaker 1: like pull a drowning kid out of the pool one
Speaker 1: time I there. I was there during the blackout of
Speaker 1: whatever year that was, yeah, two thousand and three, and
Speaker 1: everybody like came to that pool. It was a tiny pool.
Speaker 1: It was like halfway between a pool and a bath tub.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it's like the size of a couch.
Speaker 1: But everyone thought it would be a cool place to
Speaker 1: hang out. And it was like milky by the end
Speaker 1: of it. Because I didn't know what I was doing.
Speaker 1: They just like put whoever's up there in charge of
Speaker 1: like the chlorine levels.
Speaker 5: Yeah, because like on the other side, like in Vegas,
Speaker 5: their pools, Like if you open your eyes under the water,
Speaker 5: it will just strip like membranes from your like eyeballs, so.
Speaker 1: Your eyes turns like five shades, Like, yeah, you just
Speaker 1: have white walker eyes open them underwater. What is what's
Speaker 1: something that you think is overrated?
Speaker 6: I think that Wes Anderson is overrated?
Speaker 7: What the job for saying? What exactly about less Anderson?
Speaker 6: I think, Look, I he just tells the same quirky
Speaker 6: little story over and over again. Granted I have not
Speaker 6: seen Asteroid City yet, so maybe this one will just
Speaker 6: blow me away and I will be excited again. To
Speaker 6: be clear, there was a time period where I did
Speaker 6: like his work, but I don't know, Maybe I think
Speaker 6: it's just like too repetitive. I don't know. And but like, yeah,
Speaker 6: I get it, like he's an a tour so he's
Speaker 6: going to have a distinct style that he kind of
Speaker 6: just keeps recycling over and over. But like, I don't know,
Speaker 6: I just like find his quirky little quirkiness a bit
Speaker 6: tiresome these days.
Speaker 7: What era.
Speaker 6: I would say, Well, the for me was fantastic mister Fox.
Speaker 6: Hell yeah, that's probably my favorite of his and leading
Speaker 6: up to but then like after that, I felt like
Speaker 6: there was just a declose moon Rise Kingdom. I think
Speaker 6: that one was like, okay, fine, and then and then
Speaker 6: again another controversial take here, but I thought that Isle
Speaker 6: of Dogs was speaking of toilets.
Speaker 7: Yeah, oh gosh, I think that's totally fair. I okay,
Speaker 7: here's my experience watching almost every was Anderson film. She
Speaker 7: was like, gosh, that's really pretty Ohen Wilson. He's always delightful.
Speaker 7: Costume should get credit. Wow, the fits are fitting. That
Speaker 7: movie was that. I'll never watch it again and don't
Speaker 7: revisit Wes Anderson films. They're like very beautiful. I feel
Speaker 7: like they have just en a story to avoid being
Speaker 7: music in pieces, you know what I mean. You've seen
Speaker 7: a movie in the museum.
Speaker 6: Yeah right, but it's like, tell me the plot of
Speaker 6: any Wes Anderson movie. You can't like, I can't do it, Like,
Speaker 6: I don't like, they just don't stick with me. I
Speaker 6: feel like it's just like you see a frame and
Speaker 6: you're like, wow, look at all that headroom. That's nice,
Speaker 6: and look at this misan sen whoo and then you're like,
Speaker 6: but what was the plot and also why did I
Speaker 6: watch it?
Speaker 1: Yeah, feel like he is going to be the least
Speaker 1: likely filmmaker too for you to be like, Oh, he
Speaker 1: really surprised me on this one. This is this is not.
Speaker 1: I did not see this one coming. I think his
Speaker 1: like French Dispatch, was his attempt to do something different,
Speaker 1: and I think it's like it's it's definitely my least
Speaker 1: favorite of his movies.
Speaker 6: I skipped it. I couldn't be bothered.
Speaker 1: Yeah, but it's it also seems like I don't see
Speaker 1: that many people like Riding for that one usually, Like
Speaker 1: I feel like his movies are some people really like it,
Speaker 1: some people really hate it, and you know, it's it's
Speaker 1: kind of random, Like I really like Grand Budapest Hotel,
Speaker 1: but I don't like a lot of the ones around that,
Speaker 1: and that's kind of the only later era one that
Speaker 1: I really enjoy. But a lot of people like really
Speaker 1: love The Life Aquatic. I've never really connected with that
Speaker 1: one either, But yeah, French Dispatch felt like people were like, huh,
Speaker 1: we're we're not going with you on this one. There
Speaker 1: are some really good performances in it. Yeah, I don't know,
Speaker 1: I like part of me wants to see the Asteroid
Speaker 1: City one because I don't know, it just looks like
Speaker 1: the he's instead of trying to do something different, He's like,
Speaker 1: I'm going to do the same so hard.
Speaker 6: Oh you didn't like it when I tried something new,
Speaker 6: Well fine, I'll do the thing again. Yeah.
Speaker 1: How about if Wes Anderson tried to make a Wes
Speaker 1: Anderson movie. He like got jealous of all the people
Speaker 1: being like on social media being like what if your
Speaker 1: day was a Wes Anderson movie?
Speaker 7: And like wild to me that he was upset about that,
Speaker 7: Like I was really trying to.
Speaker 1: Was he upset about that? Yeah?
Speaker 7: Oh wow, Yeah he came out he was like I
Speaker 7: would never look at those and people realize it's like
Speaker 7: people are just homaging.
Speaker 3: You felt like that.
Speaker 7: I think that the highest form of flattery is like
Speaker 7: the entire Internet got together and was like, I think
Speaker 7: your aesthetic is so utterly charming. I'm gonna place myself
Speaker 7: inside of it.
Speaker 4: It was I really liked to meet.
Speaker 7: I thought it was cute, disappointing court your fan base, please.
Speaker 7: I think it's this is the best ap para social
Speaker 7: relationship can be. Is just to say hey, guys, I
Speaker 7: see you and I liked what you did and thank
Speaker 7: you and then just move on.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 8: I don't know.
Speaker 1: I wonder if it's also like you. It would just
Speaker 1: be like he's worried. It would like fuck him up
Speaker 1: a little bit to see everybody's like version of him,
Speaker 1: the way that like seeing someone do an impression of
Speaker 1: you can be a little unnerving for the first time.
Speaker 7: You know, that is fair that Okay, maybe, or.
Speaker 1: Maybe he's just an asshole. I couldn't possibly imagine a
Speaker 1: universe where that's true.
Speaker 7: That's from Wes Anderson. That's got his quote directly. So okay,
Speaker 7: So Wes Anderson said about the memes, I'm very good
Speaker 7: at protecting myself from seeing all that stuff. If somebody
Speaker 7: sends me something like that, I'll immediately erase it and
Speaker 7: say please, sorry, do not send me things of people
Speaker 7: doing me, because I do not want to look at
Speaker 7: it thinking.
Speaker 6: Is that what I do?
Speaker 7: Is that what I mean? I don't want to see
Speaker 7: too much of someone else thinking about what I try
Speaker 7: to be, because God knows, I could then start doing it.
Speaker 7: So to your point, Jack, this is a form of
Speaker 7: self protection. And now I dismissed love his fans.
Speaker 1: Yeah, okay, all right. Also he does betray in that quote,
Speaker 1: like a little bit of like a thing I always
Speaker 1: suspect about anybody who got famous before like a certain
Speaker 1: point like that they just like don't know how technology works,
Speaker 1: because like if someone sends me something, I erase it, like,
Speaker 1: what do you mean you RaSE it the link that
Speaker 1: they sent to you?
Speaker 6: They delete it from Internet dot com.
Speaker 1: Oh man, what's something you think is underrated? Teresa?
Speaker 9: Okay, there's this really cool taco spot right around where
Speaker 9: I live. It's like my neighborhood. But it's just a
Speaker 9: guy who sells tacos in front of his house, and
Speaker 9: he's really cool and it's underrated obviously because you guys.
Speaker 4: Don't know about it.
Speaker 9: But I want to kind of out because I love
Speaker 9: this so much. Literally, I feel like it's like I
Speaker 9: don't want to say I manifested it, because obviously this
Speaker 9: man is an individual person who has his own life
Speaker 9: and needs. But I was thinking right before I move, like, oh,
Speaker 9: it would be really cool to just I think I
Speaker 9: was just having existential dreams about you can't tell, like
Speaker 9: what's my future and livelihood?
Speaker 4: So it's like what if I just.
Speaker 9: Like opened a little restaurant in my garage. But that
Speaker 9: was mostly like I don't actually want to do it,
Speaker 9: but I was just thinking the idea of like, let's
Speaker 9: just go back to It reminds me of like Taiwan,
Speaker 9: where people just have these little eateries and you know
Speaker 9: your neighborhood and you enjoy your community and it's nice
Speaker 9: and and it doesn't have to be you know, a
Speaker 9: Chipotle or bought by Facebook. But then, like the first
Speaker 9: week I lived here, I saw a sign that was
Speaker 9: just like handwritten I just like in Spanish, I said,
Speaker 9: like Tacos Fierness East Abado, like Fridays and Saturdays. And
Speaker 9: my first thought was like, oh, that must be good
Speaker 9: because if it's a handwritten sign, it's not advertised.
Speaker 4: He's only doing it up two days of the week.
Speaker 1: Just go sheer love of the game.
Speaker 9: Yeah, but Friday comes around, I'm like, oh, I can't wait.
Speaker 9: First time I go. And he said it was the
Speaker 9: first time he was doing it too, So oh, mine
Speaker 9: line's coincided.
Speaker 5: Yeah, and so and did You're like I made you
Speaker 5: do this, Like I've never heard of tacos before.
Speaker 9: Yesterday He's like, I just spun tuously appeared, but no,
Speaker 9: he like started this little business in front of his
Speaker 9: house and he's so good. He just like starts cooking
Speaker 9: in the afternoon on Fridays, and then around five he
Speaker 9: started telling it like I was trying to buy it,
Speaker 9: like at like two, and he was like it's.
Speaker 3: Not ready yet.
Speaker 9: And then now, but they're so good and it's so cute,
Speaker 9: and he's been doing it now for the last couple
Speaker 9: of weeks every Friday Saturday, and there's like a crowd,
Speaker 9: and he started here's by Papa's Talk Tacos Papa Jose,
Speaker 9: And like every week I go there, there's like a
Speaker 9: new sign now, like he's like adding more marketing. Like
Speaker 9: now there's a sign down the street along like the
Speaker 9: you know the main street, that has an little arrow
Speaker 9: that says tacos. And then the other day there was
Speaker 9: one that you could scan the QR code and follow him. Oh,
Speaker 9: Tacos Papa Jose.
Speaker 1: It's actually brilliant marketing strategy. Could you actually give him
Speaker 1: my number? I actually want to reach out to him
Speaker 1: about getting his brand online. That's it. That's really like
Speaker 1: a cool thing because I feel like the lemonade stand model,
Speaker 1: like you you never hear that applied anything else. It's
Speaker 1: just like kids trying their first taking their first whack
Speaker 1: at capitalism.
Speaker 4: It's like very and they don't know it's because they're cute.
Speaker 9: That's why they're selling it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, right, right, But like if you're good at making stuff,
Speaker 1: why not do a little talk.
Speaker 9: It's so good and it's like like it's homemade and
Speaker 9: there's like, you know, people sitting around. There's usually like
Speaker 9: a TV and his family's hanging out, so it's like
Speaker 9: really nice. But also like the first weekend, I think
Speaker 9: there was a graduation, so a lot of people were coming.
Speaker 9: But also he just said he I asked them how
Speaker 9: we advertised, and he just said he was posting on Facebook.
Speaker 9: So I mean, whatever, fuck it, Zuckerberg, But like that's
Speaker 9: kind of nice. I don't know, there was something really
Speaker 9: like sweet about just like it's good and he's just
Speaker 9: urgently trying to do it that way. But in my mind,
Speaker 9: I'm like, oh my god, what if this is the
Speaker 9: next sting type funk because that's how you hear about
Speaker 9: these like huge eateries. They always start from.
Speaker 3: Just okay, So then maybe you need to get in
Speaker 3: as an investor.
Speaker 1: Yeah, ground investor. This is how you get the Wilding's
Speaker 1: name after you.
Speaker 3: Yeah you do. You can stand up and it's gonna.
Speaker 9: Be called Taco's.
Speaker 4: Mama Teresa.
Speaker 3: I did a leverage buy out. I got chased this
Speaker 3: outside of town. It's all mine now.
Speaker 1: This idiot made the mistake of showing me his process
Speaker 1: for making.
Speaker 3: Meary recipe true capitalists.
Speaker 4: They're also only two dollars nevery good.
Speaker 3: That's the other thing.
Speaker 9: I'm like, oh so so near Salazar, but I'm like
Speaker 9: this place that's great. Yeah.
Speaker 5: I love like I love local food, local eateries. It's
Speaker 5: it's so funny when you meet people like I don't know,
Speaker 5: maybe it's just being an Angelina, like I've never grown
Speaker 5: up with like the fear of street food. And also
Speaker 5: maybe just like in Japan to in Asia, like they're
Speaker 5: just like in Japan they're called Yatai's where they're just
Speaker 5: like fucking people just throw up a tent and ship
Speaker 5: and a grill.
Speaker 3: Yeah, like they're serving outside of a train. Yeah yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 3: So like it's it's always funny me.
Speaker 5: People are like, I don't know about that. I'm like,
Speaker 5: you have clearly not felt the love of street food.
Speaker 4: That I will so you can't get stick of you.
Speaker 9: Like when I went back to time, wanted, I hadn't
Speaker 9: been for a while, and I just like late, I
Speaker 9: got something that probably had been out for hours. I
Speaker 9: was like, I'm going to be like, yeah, you gotta
Speaker 9: know how to be a little savvy about what time
Speaker 9: and where which stands are going to.
Speaker 3: But I like to just say, yeah, it's because you've
Speaker 3: been out of country too long. Yeah it was. It
Speaker 3: wasn't their fault.
Speaker 9: It was you, wasn't They were like, why would you
Speaker 9: buy this meat thingless?
Speaker 3: It was clearly a shoe on a stick. I don't know.
Speaker 5: I thought it was like a gag, like a fun shape.
Speaker 1: All right, let's take a quick break and we'll come
Speaker 1: back and talk about cocaine, and we're back and back
Speaker 1: in our crack days. I worked on an article about
Speaker 1: like cognitive biases that affect our ability to understand money,
Speaker 1: and like the piece really like zoomed in on examples
Speaker 1: of how traditional media interacts with a brain that was
Speaker 1: designed millions of years ago for an animal that was
Speaker 1: trying to survive the food chain, and like our brain
Speaker 1: is designed to process like fairly simple visual stimuli in
Speaker 1: a pretty straightforward way. That tree has fruit on it.
Speaker 1: Remember that tree. And then you know, the point in
Speaker 1: the article was like if you only show the person
Speaker 1: who won the lottery on TV and not the you know,
Speaker 1: billions of people who lose the lottery every day, it
Speaker 1: creates a imprint of like that's the fruit tree, that's
Speaker 1: that's the place to go, and like that is so basic.
Speaker 1: That's such a basic thing that just feels like so
Speaker 1: quaint and antiqu antiquated compared to the modern world that
Speaker 1: we're existing in, where the increasing use of AI to
Speaker 1: create intentionally false stories, use of like technology really seems
Speaker 1: to be accelerating things to in some cases like make
Speaker 1: them worse or at least there's a feeling that that
Speaker 1: is the case in like day to day our day
Speaker 1: to day lives. And so we wanted to talk about
Speaker 1: kind of all the ways that the modern world is
Speaker 1: sort of this fun house mirror that our brand's ability
Speaker 1: to interact with it like just warps and stretches, and
Speaker 1: it's it's not going well. It seems like based on
Speaker 1: some of these statistics that you pulled, Jason.
Speaker 8: Well, I wanted to pull some stance because when we
Speaker 8: talk about like people being anxious or depressed or whatever.
Speaker 8: These days, it's not just talking about vibes like you
Speaker 8: can look at the statistics. So, suicide rates been climbing
Speaker 8: in the USA for the last twenty years. Around two
Speaker 8: thousand is when most of these trends started to skew higher.
Speaker 8: That is a distinctly American phenomenon. Most other countries suicide
Speaker 8: rates have been steadily following. This is an American thing,
Speaker 8: but there's a large number they call deaths of despair
Speaker 8: where they want together suicide, alcohol debts, drug related deaths,
Speaker 8: and all of that has skewed up since two thousand
Speaker 8: and then since around twenty ten has started to like
Speaker 8: most of them have kind of started to spike. Now
Speaker 8: part of you you mentioned like the deaths of the
Speaker 8: drug overdose deaths. Some of that is separately just the
Speaker 8: opioid epidemic and fentanyl, but also some of those overdoses
Speaker 8: are intentional, but if there's no note left behind, they
Speaker 8: just put it down as overdose because of course, how
Speaker 8: do you know, so that's and so. And then anxiety
Speaker 8: and depression both have been rising up specifically among the
Speaker 8: youth again going back to around two thousand and nine
Speaker 8: twenty ten. Now there's two ways people interpret this that
Speaker 8: are controversial. You can either say that these things have
Speaker 8: been going up in the internet era and then have
Speaker 8: accelerated in the smartphone era. Or you can say, well,
Speaker 8: these things have gone up since nine to eleven and
Speaker 8: accelerated since the financial crisis of two thousand and eight.
Speaker 8: When we start talking about how the media and smartphones,
Speaker 8: all those things make people more anxious, this obsess people
Speaker 8: because the response is always, well, we're not anxious because
Speaker 8: of phones. We're anxious because the world is on fire.
Speaker 8: Our assertion is not that there are no problems in
Speaker 8: the world. Our assertion, or at least mine, is that
Speaker 8: the way media, the media environment is one of those problems.
Speaker 8: It's one 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 to Al Jazeera story
Speaker 1: about like outrage headlines increasing well because.
Speaker 5: I mean, yeah again, like we're there's so many facets
Speaker 5: of how we end up with bad vibes. The bad
Speaker 5: vibes decades uh trademarked, but yeah, like I think one
Speaker 5: of them is, you know, like this is some version
Speaker 5: of like mean world syndrome where a lot of your
Speaker 5: media diet are just giving you sort of an over
Speaker 5: emphasis on the terrible things that are happening, which can
Speaker 5: just lead to like being more cynical or just being
Speaker 5: like what the fuck is going on? And yeah, like
Speaker 5: with Al Jazeera, they analyze like headlines like well, like
Speaker 5: tens of thousands of headlines from twenty to twenty nineteen
Speaker 5: just to see what the emotional charge of was of
Speaker 5: some of these headlines, and they've noticed that things have
Speaker 5: just gotten more and more increasingly negative since the year
Speaker 5: two thousand, like you know, headlines that say like quote,
Speaker 5: Brazil prison riot leaves nine dead rather than things like
Speaker 5: a new lens restores vision and brings relief.
Speaker 3: And we're seeing just that sort of that.
Speaker 5: Rise in those kinds of headlines be equally sort of
Speaker 5: distributed between the right and left, but there is there
Speaker 5: is an edge on the right, like with conservative media
Speaker 5: definitely having those you know, a bigger emphasis on the
Speaker 5: fear based kind of headline. And I feel the same
Speaker 5: way too, like because reading as much news as I do,
Speaker 5: or we have to making this show like that absolutely
Speaker 5: has an effect on me.
Speaker 3: But then you kind of have to.
Speaker 5: Take a step back and like, what are the statistics
Speaker 5: saying you're actually getting something completely different?
Speaker 1: Yeah?
Speaker 8: Yeah, what the headlines? And again note that there's the
Speaker 8: year two thousand again when going back to the origin
Speaker 8: of that, what was driven by that was the death
Speaker 8: of news being a print medium versus news being an
Speaker 8: online medium because again with newspaper headlines, like of course
Speaker 8: once pon a time they had to sell papers that
Speaker 8: now individual stories have to get clicked on. Yeah, and
Speaker 8: very very quickly, just through ab testing. Again there's no
Speaker 8: conspiracy here. Just through trancking user behavior, they figured out
Speaker 8: that the more emotionally charge i mean, we saw this cracked,
Speaker 8: the more emotionally charged headline gets clicked. So now every
Speaker 8: individual headline because you know, once upon a time you'd
Speaker 8: have a newspaper with a big headline across the top.
Speaker 8: You know, Nixon goes to jail whatever. I don't think
Speaker 8: Nixon never actually went to the other Yeah, yeah, it
Speaker 8: doesn't matter.
Speaker 1: Would have sold papers and it would have been a
Speaker 1: headline in the modern.
Speaker 8: Are and then a lot of the other headlines would
Speaker 8: be very boring and straightforward city council votes to do whatever. Well, now,
Speaker 8: if you want people to click on that boring city
Speaker 8: council story, if it's your job as a journalist get
Speaker 8: people to click, there's got to be an angle on
Speaker 8: there that's going to get people mad. And so beyond
Speaker 8: the examples you gave here, you have the news, you know,
Speaker 8: the actual news organization's gathering news. But then you have
Speaker 8: the aggregators of the content like Coffington Post, BuzzFeed, Vox,
Speaker 8: all of these sites that basically would take the headline
Speaker 8: and then do a little blog post about it, and
Speaker 8: those titles would be things like, you know, if you're
Speaker 8: not paying attention to this, you're not angry enough, or
Speaker 8: this clip is going to leave you outraged when you
Speaker 8: see how they treated this disabled man at McDonald's, you're
Speaker 8: going to be furious, Like literally putting the emotion in
Speaker 8: the headline. If you're not mad, You're not a good person, right,
Speaker 8: and making that part of the ethos of the time
Speaker 8: that it's like, if you want to be a good
Speaker 8: person who cares about the world, you must be angry
Speaker 8: all the time because there's so much there's so much
Speaker 8: injustice or whatever. Never Mind that that doesn't help that
Speaker 8: person in the video. Never Mind that you're watching a
Speaker 8: clip from three years ago and everyone has forgotten about it.
Speaker 8: It doesn't matter. It has bubbled up on the Reddit
Speaker 8: and now everybody's mad again to no effect, Like it's
Speaker 8: not motivating you to help this person.
Speaker 1: Yeah. What one old, outdated technology I think we're underrating
Speaker 1: is newsies. These headlines are doing. You know, newsies just
Speaker 1: used to yell at you to read the newspaper and
Speaker 1: people would just listen because they're scared of the newsies.
Speaker 1: But now they have to scare us with the actual
Speaker 1: content of the headline, and then I think, you know,
Speaker 1: we We've also talked recently about how the number of
Speaker 1: people who identify with a religion or involved in a religion,
Speaker 1: and the number of people who have access to or
Speaker 1: regular contact with a community like both are just on
Speaker 1: an all time low and going lower. And so I
Speaker 1: think that there's a broad kind of you can call
Speaker 1: it spiritual or like broadly psychological level more than ever
Speaker 1: before where we don't have access to answering some of
Speaker 1: the big questions. And so, like we speculated in past
Speaker 1: one of these like kind of broad episodes about the
Speaker 1: idea that like maybe stand culture is coming from that
Speaker 1: this need to sublimate ourselves to something higher and like
Speaker 1: some mythical like godhead figure or like leader person like
Speaker 1: because we're not getting that anywhere else, and so like
Speaker 1: we get stand culture or the stories of the movies
Speaker 1: that make an imprint on us when we're very young,
Speaker 1: like Star Wars or you know, Harry Potter, the Matrix,
Speaker 1: Like these are our mythical stories that we have chosen
Speaker 1: to kind of put ourselves like derive our meaning from.
Speaker 1: And that actually made a lot of sense of how
Speaker 1: people react, like how Star Wars fans or like fandoms
Speaker 1: react like there is a religious war when something happens
Speaker 1: that doesn't cohere to the dogma that they were raised on.
Speaker 1: But I think there's a lot of like kind of
Speaker 1: grasping for meaning as technology has isolated us from one
Speaker 1: another and from the communities that used to allow people
Speaker 1: to sort of dissolve their sense of self into like
Speaker 1: a broader, less kind of self centered way of viewing
Speaker 1: the world. And I mean, yeah, we were talking about
Speaker 1: like consumer culture as like kind of another example of
Speaker 1: where we see this. I mean with with I guess
Speaker 1: stand culture is one example of that, but consumerism people
Speaker 1: have become like very serious consumers, like to like on
Speaker 1: a deep, deeply personal level.
Speaker 5: I feel like yeah, because I mean, like to your point,
Speaker 5: I mean, I don't you know, the lack of religion
Speaker 5: or I think the sense of community more than like finding.
Speaker 5: I mean, people are finding meaning in other things, but
Speaker 5: I don't know how many people are explicitly like I
Speaker 5: just at least something that kind of explains everything. And
Speaker 5: I think the way we pivot to that is just
Speaker 5: to find, like you say, like, because we feel so
Speaker 5: isolated where we want to find community in these other
Speaker 5: ways that like are interesting to us because I'm not
Speaker 5: interested in religion, Yeah, but I'm interested in Arsenal Football club,
Speaker 5: and that is the closest I begin to devote myself
Speaker 5: to something that's like part like there's a group, there's
Speaker 5: like a in group where I'm trying to be like
Speaker 5: identify with these other supporters. I go through the religious
Speaker 5: ceremonies of like watching the matches and getting very emotional
Speaker 5: as I watch them, and be very like emotionally moved
Speaker 5: when things go up or down, and so like, I
Speaker 5: find that like most people have like a topic where
Speaker 5: they will bring that sort of level of like devotion to,
Speaker 5: you know, like what they're paying attention to and what
Speaker 5: they're willing to debate people on, et cetera. Because yeah,
Speaker 5: like we're all we're all just trying to find something
Speaker 5: that like feels good and helps us feel connected at
Speaker 5: the end of the day at least certainly that I
Speaker 5: can speak for myself in that very narrow example.
Speaker 8: Yes, this is something else where you can tract and
Speaker 8: statistics like the average number of friends and close friends
Speaker 8: a person has again has been dropping since the nineties,
Speaker 8: and it is just the people used to meet their
Speaker 8: friends at church, They used to meet their friends at
Speaker 8: the office, and now a lot of people work at home,
Speaker 8: you know. And that's the thing where we can sit
Speaker 8: here and talk about as like a mystical thing like
Speaker 8: there's no sense of unity or community or whatever, but
Speaker 8: from just a practical point of view, having a friend
Speaker 8: who will give you a ride to the airport, or
Speaker 8: who will help you move or you know, like just
Speaker 8: as in a practical manner. We that's part of what
Speaker 8: people don't get this. It's part of what a church provided.
Speaker 8: Like the church when one person got sick and couldn't work,
Speaker 8: the other members of the church would bring food to
Speaker 8: their house. They would come help them clean like that
Speaker 8: was and you did it because it's like, hey, we
Speaker 8: all are Baptists or whatever, and we are all on
Speaker 8: the same team. And it was That's something that is
Speaker 8: humans do everywhere that you find humans as we organize
Speaker 8: and get together, but we usually have to have something
Speaker 8: to rally around, a symbol or something a tree, this
Speaker 8: tree si, we all yeah, whatever it is, you know.
Speaker 8: And unfortunately that also makes us go to war with
Speaker 8: one another. If you see somebody in a Red Sox
Speaker 8: Jersey Yankee fan and then it's like, all right, let
Speaker 8: let's go punch that guy. But when you talk about
Speaker 8: and there's a term that is for the modern situation,
Speaker 8: which is atomization, where you've adomized people to where now
Speaker 8: if you need a ride to the airport, you're going
Speaker 8: to you know, pay for an uber and so many
Speaker 8: of these things that used to be stuff that friends
Speaker 8: would do. It's like, well, now it's a corporation doing
Speaker 8: it for you. And I'm not saying that the friends
Speaker 8: you know purely online aren't your real friends, but it's
Speaker 8: a different type of friendship. If it's somebody who you
Speaker 8: can't call when you've broken your leg you need somebody
Speaker 8: to go get groceries for you, or vice versa. If
Speaker 8: you're not the person that like, you feel obligator to
Speaker 8: do that because they're my friend, like like they depend
Speaker 8: on me. It means something to be needed, to be
Speaker 8: dependent on, Like to get in a situation where nobody
Speaker 8: depends on you, and like I don't have children or whatever,
Speaker 8: but like I don't have friends where that friend's gonna
Speaker 8: call me in the middle of I said, hey, I
Speaker 8: need you to come bail me in it. Like that
Speaker 8: sucks in the moment, but knowing that somebody needs you
Speaker 8: is what keeps you going When you're that isolated from
Speaker 8: real life connections. It's too easy to just drift away.
Speaker 8: Humans need to be needed. Do we need that actual
Speaker 8: in real life connection?
Speaker 5: Which is interesting too because I see this like on
Speaker 5: TikTok more and more of people posting like these strategies
Speaker 5: that come off as like the most manipulative, sort of
Speaker 5: like sadistic things where they talk about it's like you
Speaker 5: got to be needed, and that's how you do It's
Speaker 5: how you develop even deeper relationships. I do this thing
Speaker 5: with my wife where I unhook the chain from the
Speaker 5: toilet handle so she'll need and when the toilet isn't working,
Speaker 5: she will then associate me with someone who can come
Speaker 5: and solve a problem, and then that helps create a
Speaker 5: deeper love.
Speaker 3: And you're like, oh my god, and people are like really.
Speaker 5: Like I mean, that's a kind of fringe element of TikTok,
Speaker 5: But more and more people are taking these sort of
Speaker 5: things and sort of finding to like manufacture these kinds
Speaker 5: of connections because they aren't happening like normally either, and
Speaker 5: you're kind of like this sounds like sociopathic. But on
Speaker 5: the other side of it, you can see people sort
Speaker 5: of like yearning for like, yeah, how do I cultivate
Speaker 5: a deeper connection?
Speaker 3: Do I need to sort of gaslight this person?
Speaker 5: And then thinking that the toilet never works and I'm
Speaker 5: the like magical fixer of that. But again, like you
Speaker 5: see it expressed in so many ways of that there
Speaker 5: is this deeper human thing lacking.
Speaker 8: Yeah work, I mean then a system from it's always
Speaker 8: sunny in Philadelphia, right right if you don't know that
Speaker 8: reference right.
Speaker 1: About 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 when you're having a conversation with them.
Speaker 1: Then it makes sense to me that that sort of
Speaker 1: manipulation and viewing other people as a means to an
Speaker 1: end 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 8: Miles The next time you go on TikTok, like there's
Speaker 8: a meta narrative in that video you saw, because that
Speaker 8: algorithm floated up to you a video where the actual
Speaker 8: message was people are crazy out there and relationships are
Speaker 8: weird and toxic these days. You would be shocked at
Speaker 8: what percentage of the feed is some subtle message, some
Speaker 8: subtle version of out there is dangerous.
Speaker 6: Right.
Speaker 8: Guys are sexist, women are crazy, their standards are super high.
Speaker 8: You'll be accused of sexual harassment if you ever try
Speaker 8: to talk to a woman in any setting. And there's
Speaker 8: this meta message of the only safe place is at
Speaker 8: home looking at a screen.
Speaker 1: Yeah, women out there and sees people who aren't there,
Speaker 1: just as you mentioned as a video like it's a
Speaker 1: person having a mental health episode. That was everywhere for
Speaker 1: like a week, and I never would have seen thirty
Speaker 1: you know, twenty maybe like ten years ago.
Speaker 8: You know, there was a time when that wouldn't have
Speaker 8: even shown up in like the police boughter and your
Speaker 8: local paper. It was a non event. Somebody threw a
Speaker 8: fit on it, but because it was captured on camera.
Speaker 8: But the message is it's scary to find there's crazy
Speaker 8: people out of there, and any conservative news like you
Speaker 8: if you look at the comments on any conservative news outlet.
Speaker 8: It's like, well, I won't even drive through this city,
Speaker 8: like it's just mac It's like, no, it's not. I've
Speaker 8: been there. It's people walking around and shopping and eating
Speaker 8: in the restaurants. Bit It's like no, from from their
Speaker 8: point of view, it's just cars on fire, smashed windows.
Speaker 8: Like if you are a white person, the minorities will
Speaker 8: just drag you off the street because they all it's
Speaker 8: Antifa and the Black Lives Matter. It's like, you've got
Speaker 8: such a weird view of the world, but it's all
Speaker 8: you're only safe at home. Like you have people living
Speaker 8: in the middle of whatever, Oklahoma or Montana, someplace where
Speaker 8: they haven't had a violent crime, and you know, like
Speaker 8: in six months, where they've got cameras all over the
Speaker 8: outside of their house and they've got a shotgun under
Speaker 8: their bed because they're sure that at any moment a
Speaker 8: gang of twenty five guys is going to come try
Speaker 8: to take over their house because it's something they saw
Speaker 8: on the news. It's like, well, you know, in like
Speaker 8: in Portland and the Walgreens, they'll just have like twenty
Speaker 8: five looters show up and steal everything that could happen
Speaker 8: to me at any time here in North Dakota. Right,
Speaker 8: It's like, and you see when you see their fear
Speaker 8: and how irrational it is from the outside, your fear
Speaker 8: also looks like that to someone else, Like we all
Speaker 8: have been put into kind of a little a little box,
Speaker 8: a little fear box.
Speaker 5: Well, I think, like to your point, like especially about
Speaker 5: like I think of things like reddit, right, and the
Speaker 5: subreddit public freak Out. There's like a subreddit called public
Speaker 5: freakout that's really popular and it's mostly a lot of
Speaker 5: people just having some kind of like mental health crisis
Speaker 5: or something like that, or just some wild thing that's
Speaker 5: going on. But when you think about like when you're
Speaker 5: like a kid, I remember being like, oh, what's the
Speaker 5: ocean like? Or I'm trying to like, you know, draw
Speaker 5: on experiences I have. Most of them are like media
Speaker 5: reference to memories I have, like of a movie or
Speaker 5: something I saw on TV that was forming even my
Speaker 5: own concept of what something was. And now that we
Speaker 5: have like video that's like IROL type sort of video
Speaker 5: from cameras that sort of that ups the stakes even
Speaker 5: more where people begin to associate Well, I did see
Speaker 5: this one clip of this thing happening in this place
Speaker 5: now that is exactly what is going to happen to me,
Speaker 5: and has this effect of just ramping up these fears
Speaker 5: and like a good like you know, an example of
Speaker 5: this is, like you're saying, Jason, like, especially on conservative news,
Speaker 5: the way they portray certain cities and what quote unquote
Speaker 5: crime waves are happening. That has this effect on us
Speaker 5: just as human beings, where the more we're put into
Speaker 5: a fear state, the more malleable we become. And also
Speaker 5: it we inch closer and closer to being in a
Speaker 5: mindset or a mind state where solving things violently is
Speaker 5: acceptable because we see just how fucked up and like
Speaker 5: agro and violent the world is, and just looking at
Speaker 5: all of those things feeding on each other, it's like,
Speaker 5: at some point for me, like I realized that the
Speaker 5: way to even break that kind of cycle was first
Speaker 5: just to have awareness because a lot of the time,
Speaker 5: if I am getting caught up on what I read
Speaker 5: in the headlines, it it feeds on like, you know,
Speaker 5: I start ruminating on things that aren't actually necessarily helpful
Speaker 5: to me because it's also not the reality. Because we
Speaker 5: talk about the quote unquote crime waves that were that
Speaker 5: everyone wanted to talk about in the last year that
Speaker 5: just didn't exist, and it's it's much easier to be like, Okay,
Speaker 5: I know I'm seeing a lot of like over emphasis
Speaker 5: on these like visually really like you know, uh, provocative
Speaker 5: images and videos. But that's not actually, that's not that's
Speaker 5: not the most accurate depiction on what on what is happening.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And it's specifically like designed that way, specifically based
Speaker 1: on like it's nothing is based on reality as much
Speaker 1: as it's based on what is going to feed. Like
Speaker 1: nobody was sitting back and being like, what we're going
Speaker 1: to make up a crime wave? It was that people's
Speaker 1: like that that was the story that made people have
Speaker 1: 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 7: No?
Speaker 1: Then nothing and we're back. And so the latest Mission
Speaker 1: Impossible dropped last night or two nights ago. It's getting
Speaker 1: great reviews. It does indeed seem to be about Ethan
Speaker 1: Hunt battling a self aware AI program known as the Entity,
Speaker 1: which I don't know this like he might as well
Speaker 1: from my perspective, like that is as dramatically impactful as
Speaker 1: like he's battling a wizard this time. It's just like, Okay,
Speaker 1: well that doesn't really make sense to me or like
Speaker 1: does It's not like really a thing, and that does.
Speaker 1: When people are critical of the movie, they seem to say,
Speaker 1: like all the stuff about AI kind of drags a
Speaker 1: little bit, but and visually it is depicted as basically
Speaker 1: an evil screensaver from nineteen ninety nine, like it's just
Speaker 1: the black circle with with like white dots of light.
Speaker 1: Three hundred million dollar movie, by the way, but it can. So.
Speaker 1: The main claim that the movie makes about this AI,
Speaker 1: and I guess AI in general, is that the program
Speaker 1: can also see the future, like very specifically through its
Speaker 1: predictive technology. And that's like based on what we're seeing
Speaker 1: in news headlines like the you know, deep learning teaching
Speaker 1: computers to predict the future is like a headline I
Speaker 1: feel like I've seen a hundred times spooky Artificial intelligence
Speaker 1: can accurately predict the future, and it's about to be
Speaker 1: asked more questions. AI can now predict crime before it
Speaker 1: happens as well, we'll get into in a moment.
Speaker 6: And you mean like that movie Minority Report. Also, yeah,
Speaker 6: Tom Cruise Cruise, Yeah, he's he. I feel like his
Speaker 6: sense of reality is probably more blurred by the movies
Speaker 6: he's in than any other movie star.
Speaker 4: Well, yeah, because he has.
Speaker 7: An entire organization blurring his reality. Yeah, before he hits
Speaker 7: set and then you're in that magical landscape where he's
Speaker 7: made himself king. Yeah. I mean that that guy's not
Speaker 7: living on planet Earth.
Speaker 3: He doesn't need too.
Speaker 1: Yeah. The this movie actually was like written, it was
Speaker 1: supposed to come out like years ago, but the production
Speaker 1: famously shut down due to the coronavirus outbreak, which, according
Speaker 1: to reports in February twenty two, when he was putting
Speaker 1: a real damper on offshore location shoots. Wow, gave us
Speaker 1: the Tom Cruise thing where it was clear that he
Speaker 1: thought he was the last barrier between like the end
Speaker 1: of the world and you know, coronavirus just like killing
Speaker 1: everyone where he was like shouting at everyone. But first
Speaker 1: of all, I just want to say too, Ai, speaking
Speaker 1: of I'd like to issue a big where were you
Speaker 1: on that one? Dipshit to the AI on predicting the
Speaker 1: global pandemic, Like you couldn't We couldn't see that one coming.
Speaker 1: A lot of people saw it coming, people mere people
Speaker 1: saw it coming. But yeah, the whole predicting the future
Speaker 1: thing seems to be vastly overstated. Like there's a so
Speaker 1: the MI T researchers who had created a computer that
Speaker 1: could supposedly lose.
Speaker 6: Mission Impossible Technology Mission Impossible Technology am I technology.
Speaker 1: Yes, yeah, they are loosely associated. But it was basically
Speaker 1: like they were predicting. They would show the computer a
Speaker 1: picture and then the computer would predict, like what would
Speaker 1: happen for the next one point five seconds in that picture?
Speaker 1: And like that it was like someone walking across the
Speaker 1: golf course and they were like, that thing's about to
Speaker 1: keep walking across that golf course. They were like, holy shit,
Speaker 1: you guys. Or like one was a wave crashing, they
Speaker 1: were like, I think it's gonna keep crashing. Call me crazy,
Speaker 1: and they were like, fucking a, do you think it's brilliant?
Speaker 1: Thing's magical and yeah, and then like MIT Mission Possible
Speaker 1: Technology also developed an algorithm that could predict how people
Speaker 1: will greet each other and got a lot of cool
Speaker 1: headlines for that. It was trained on YouTube videos and
Speaker 1: reruns of the Office and Desperate Housewives. Amazing, and it
Speaker 1: was only right just over forty three percent of the time.
Speaker 7: We never greet each other like we do ones for Housewives.
Speaker 7: I wish we did, but like, I can't just walk
Speaker 7: up to my enemy and slap them across the face.
Speaker 1: It's not reality, I know, and that sucks. And hopefully
Speaker 1: we'll get to that world soon. That's my future that
Speaker 1: I'm hopeful for. But so one second away from the greeting,
Speaker 1: they could only predict it forty three percent at a time.
Speaker 1: So this is what I'm always wondering, Like, what how
Speaker 1: does that compare to humans? Humans making the same prediction
Speaker 1: were right seventy one percent of the time. Oh so
Speaker 1: much better than this AI that everyone did. You guys
Speaker 1: ever see the sixty minutes where they like this sixty
Speaker 1: minutes about AI. I think it came out like back
Speaker 1: in March or April, and like Scott, I think it's
Speaker 1: Scott Pelly, like one of the old journalists on sixty minutes,
Speaker 1: is just like okay, like write a speech for me
Speaker 1: about this, and then he seems to be blown away,
Speaker 1: like the amount of text it produces, like he's like
Speaker 1: that just rolled a whole speech in four seconds, Like
Speaker 1: he's it's like he's never seen a computer before. But
Speaker 1: I do think we're at a weird place where people
Speaker 1: will you can just be like magic AI is bad
Speaker 1: guy in movie, and everyone's like, yep, that makes sense,
Speaker 1: because like we we should be afraid of AI, but
Speaker 1: people don't really know why necessarily we should be, and
Speaker 1: so we just you know, like it's the same thing
Speaker 1: that happens with all our conspiracy theories, and you know,
Speaker 1: we should be scared about the pandemic, we should be
Speaker 1: scared about the government's response to the pandemic, but people
Speaker 1: create like vast conspiracy theories just to make sure they're
Speaker 1: like scared about it for nonsensical reasons. It's like we
Speaker 1: need that like cognitive dissonance transference happening, and I feel
Speaker 1: like we're starting to see that with AI, Like AI
Speaker 1: is going to be magic and tell us everything that
Speaker 1: could happen to us for the rest of our lives.
Speaker 1: And that's that's not the scary thing about AI.
Speaker 6: Right, The scary thing is like Skynet. And that's the thing.
Speaker 6: Like movies have been having AI as the villain for
Speaker 6: like decades now, and I feel like I don't know
Speaker 6: what my point is gonna be. But remember Terminator one.
Speaker 6: I remember the Matrix from nineteen ninety nine, over twenty
Speaker 6: years ago. Like, I just think it's funny that AI,
Speaker 6: I guess, hasn't evolved very much in movies. Yeah, I
Speaker 6: don't know, No, I mean for real, like we've been
Speaker 6: knowing tho is what I'm saying.
Speaker 7: Yeah, And I think it's interesting. You know, movies, by
Speaker 7: their very nature have to heighten and dramatize in order
Speaker 7: to effectively bring home their messages, particularly if we're looking
Speaker 7: at genre films, and the AI has always been like,
Speaker 7: you know, turns into a cop and now it's hunting you,
Speaker 7: or you know, it takes away your freedom of choice.
Speaker 7: You know, if we look at the matrix, Yes, what's
Speaker 7: the other one that report a minority report, Like they're
Speaker 7: saying that crime.
Speaker 1: And it's said in the future. It's like a sci
Speaker 1: fi movie where sorry, mission impossible is supposed to be.
Speaker 1: Like even though they can take masks off that make
Speaker 1: them look exactly like the other person like you wouldn't
Speaker 1: see Tom Cruise fighting robots necessarily, or like, no, you
Speaker 1: know that that feels like it's a step into this
Speaker 1: is ship that can actually happen.
Speaker 7: Yeah, yeah, and I appreciate the grounding. I think we
Speaker 7: got there because it's so much more tactile in this moment.
Speaker 7: I think between if you think about your grocery store
Speaker 7: workers who have been concerned about self checkout for like
Speaker 7: over a decade, a lot of those stories are unionized
Speaker 7: and have actively been like, hey, you're taking jobs from
Speaker 7: like checkout counter people, some of whom are elderly, and
Speaker 7: this is like the last place they can work and
Speaker 7: make money consistently. To the writers and actors who may
Speaker 7: be on strike by the time this comes out, and
Speaker 7: there feared that not only could AIBS to take their job,
Speaker 7: but I mean for performers, can my face be doing
Speaker 7: things long, long, long after I'm dead and what will
Speaker 7: that look like? I think, as we're sort of confronting
Speaker 7: these things, AI is a really freaking dope tool. I'm
Speaker 7: so much more concerned about these executives who are like,
Speaker 7: oh great, now I don't have to pay people. Did
Speaker 7: you guys see the on nine article that was written
Speaker 7: by AI. They came out a couple days ago. They
Speaker 7: have Internet in a tangle.
Speaker 1: Yeah, this is like I've ever since I've been you know,
Speaker 1: working on the Internet, creating trying to create like unique
Speaker 1: interesting content. There's also been this push to just flood
Speaker 1: the zone with shit. To quote Steve Bannon, like we
Speaker 1: we used to like crack cracked zoned by a company
Speaker 1: that was like also just destroying Google's search results with
Speaker 1: just like fake articles like answers to questions and stuff.
Speaker 1: And they were like trying to get us to like
Speaker 1: do that. Just like there was like scale, how do
Speaker 1: we scale? And like that's been you know that that
Speaker 1: intersection of tech and media has always been scary because
Speaker 1: it's very easy for them to just create ninety nine
Speaker 1: million articles using technology now that like yeah, pass like
Speaker 1: a little bit like you have to like read a
Speaker 1: paragraph to be like wait this this wasn't written by
Speaker 1: a human, wasn't. Yeah.
Speaker 7: So article was like ranking the Star Wars movies in
Speaker 7: like chronological order, I think, yeah, And they got the
Speaker 7: dates wrong on many of them. Sometimes they weren't even
Speaker 7: listed in chronological order. The way they were dated. The
Speaker 7: information in individual movies was in corect. It was just
Speaker 7: error filled, like no logical saying editor would have been
Speaker 7: like and publish. And what's crazy is I don't know
Speaker 7: his entire union that's actively been like, hey, we do
Speaker 7: not want this. It does not make sense to ask
Speaker 7: an AI program that cannot consistently write fact checked articles
Speaker 7: to be publishing these and then asking somebody an editor
Speaker 7: to like go through and essentially rewrite this incorrect work
Speaker 7: that isn't benefiting anyone, because who needs this list? We
Speaker 7: have twenty seven thousand of this very specific Well, this
Speaker 7: is dumb uh and it's wild that, you know. I'm
Speaker 7: glad the Internet roasted the editor in chief pretty intently.
Speaker 7: I'm really hoping that brings them back to the table
Speaker 7: and there can be working discussions about how this company
Speaker 7: decides to use AI and the future. But it's that
Speaker 7: kind of stupid shit that's like really draining, I think
Speaker 7: on workers across job titles.
Speaker 4: It's just like, what are.
Speaker 7: We what are you trying? You just want to force
Speaker 7: people out of work and that's not a logical thing
Speaker 7: for you to do to yourself.
Speaker 4: You mean the product money.
Speaker 1: Yeah, to your point, the product sucks, like the product
Speaker 1: like the AI as bad as it's bad at its
Speaker 1: fucking job, like with regards to like the self checkout thing,
Speaker 1: that the AI like can't stop people from stealing stuff,
Speaker 1: and so the companies are like losing massive amounts of
Speaker 1: money on theft, and then in order to combat that,
Speaker 1: they're just like making claims that like everyone's shoplifting when
Speaker 1: it's just like no, like you just put a like
Speaker 1: inadequate program like as the thing in charge of like
Speaker 1: making sure people can't steal stuff or like that they
Speaker 1: don't want to steal stuff, and it's just not going
Speaker 1: to it's not going to work.
Speaker 7: But they made it way too easy because when I
Speaker 7: was in college, we would for sure bring up like
Speaker 7: a full roast chicken as like some griefs man, we're
Speaker 7: good stop no uh, And there's personators is the possible
Speaker 7: way you could get like that used to be somebody's
Speaker 7: job to scan and bag your stuff. There's no possible
Speaker 7: way to get around. So that's what I'm saying though,
Speaker 7: like none of these things are thought out. They just
Speaker 7: see a way to potentially preserve money without looking at
Speaker 7: the long term.
Speaker 6: Costs, and then they still have to hire someone to
Speaker 6: monitor the self checkout area, so it's like, well, how
Speaker 6: much money are you actually saving, mister grocery.
Speaker 1: Yeah, big Grocery, which are now owned by just like
Speaker 1: two companies in all of America. But yeah, like so
Speaker 1: they've also been using it in like predictive crime fighting technology.
Speaker 1: But of course, first of all, the data that it's
Speaker 1: being fed is from police data, so it's you know,
Speaker 1: using the it's not predicting. It's predicting like where police
Speaker 1: are spending their time is essentially which is in low
Speaker 1: income and you know, non white neighborhoods, And it's just
Speaker 1: complete bullshit. There's one great anecdote where Chicago's predictive policing software,
Speaker 1: created by the Illinois Institute of Technology, compiled a list
Speaker 1: of people most likely to be involved in a violent
Speaker 1: crime and they're, oh, no, a AI, baby, check out
Speaker 1: this because it was generated by AI, you can trust this.
Speaker 1: And then an investigation later found that the software is
Speaker 1: list of future criminals included every single person arrested or
Speaker 1: fingerprinted in Chicago since twenty thirteen. WHOA, So it was
Speaker 1: just like copying off of another like data size A
Speaker 1: I can do.
Speaker 7: Is it can gather and redistribute information using keywords that
Speaker 7: the person using it inputs, which means it's logically going
Speaker 7: to be flawed because it's not understanding the words, it's
Speaker 7: just organizing them in a way that it thinks make
Speaker 7: sense to you. It's on a thinking machine. Yeah, the
Speaker 7: technology is not there yet, and people are way too
Speaker 7: eager to jump into it and in a way that
Speaker 7: would almost assuredly collapse society, which is why it's insane
Speaker 7: to me that we're still having to like explain this
Speaker 7: to people to be like they're like, did you see
Speaker 7: the article from was it the Hollywood Reporter that came
Speaker 7: out about the executives and how they're choosing to fight
Speaker 7: the unions.
Speaker 1: Yeah, by just waiting them out.
Speaker 7: Yeah, essentially, And the key part that's resonated with me
Speaker 7: was like, this is a necessary evil.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 7: It was the verbatim words from this quote story. So
Speaker 7: we're pretty sure this is a scare tactic to get
Speaker 7: sagged to not strike and them saying, hey, we'll wade out.
Speaker 7: The writers will wait out the actors as well. But
Speaker 7: I think what's really happened is they fired up the
Speaker 7: base of unions to be like, excuse me, a necessary
Speaker 7: evil is not destroying the beautiful industry can be that
Speaker 7: people have tried to create here for literally over a century.
Speaker 7: It's nonsensical. I just I can't understand the end game
Speaker 7: other than I guess forty people will be a little
Speaker 7: bit wealthier.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's all it is. Yeah, I don't think it's
Speaker 1: going to cause society to collapse. It'll just accelerate the
Speaker 1: thing that's already happening, which is just like grotesque inequality
Speaker 1: like gets worse and like they're able to hire fewer
Speaker 1: people to do jobs. And also the other thing that
Speaker 1: that seems to be happening is like the quality of
Speaker 1: everything is getting worse, and like that's going to keep happening,
Speaker 1: you know, like TV shows, movies.
Speaker 7: Or But to my point, isn't that like if we
Speaker 7: can track revolutions based off the price of bread, right, Like,
Speaker 7: so when people can no longer afford bread, that's when
Speaker 7: they riot in the streets and take out leaders and
Speaker 7: get very serious about their actions because everybody's base staple
Speaker 7: for survival. Then we have a fairly largely the entertainment
Speaker 7: community is huge, which I know some people think this
Speaker 7: is like a very small or elite space, but it's ginormous,
Speaker 7: and most of the people working in it are like
Speaker 7: working class people.
Speaker 1: And so if you.
Speaker 7: Eliminate everyone who I mean, because essentially, what when AI
Speaker 7: gets good enough, when it's actually usable, it will eliminate
Speaker 7: everybody who is of average talent. Right. What you do
Speaker 7: is you write pretty cute Hallmark stories and you're pretty
Speaker 7: good at that, and they're successful enough to get commercials
Speaker 7: into air frequently. Think you can probably buy a house,
Speaker 7: and you can fut your kids and send them to college,
Speaker 7: and you can have a very comfortable life. If AI
Speaker 7: can do that job, then you're wiping out hundreds of
Speaker 7: thousands of jobs, and that is really really bad news
Speaker 7: for like Los Angeles, the county. I just to me,
Speaker 7: I know, it's like a small first step, but to me,
Speaker 7: like the dominoes seem large and looming absolutely like probable,
Speaker 7: like if things are not stopped immediately. And I really
Speaker 7: think that that's the takeaway from the WGA strike in
Speaker 7: and I really do hope SAG joints because it's not
Speaker 7: just going to stop at the entertainment industry. It's going
Speaker 7: to continue to all out to it, like we are
Speaker 7: one American workforce and we're all about to be impacted
Speaker 7: by this ship.
Speaker 1: It's great, all right, that's gonna do it. For this
Speaker 1: week's weekly Zeitgeist, Please like and review the show if
Speaker 1: you like, the show means the world to Miles. He
Speaker 1: needs your validation, folks. I hope you're having a great
Speaker 1: weekend and I will talk to him Monday. By spe