Speaker 1: Wait, justin you were saying you watched sprint. Did you
Speaker 1: watch that netflish?
Speaker 2: I haven't seen it. I was just aware of it.
Speaker 1: I'm just I saw receiver, I saw sprint. I saw
Speaker 1: like golf, hot dog man, every single part of sports.
Speaker 3: I know it good? Is it worth it?
Speaker 2: It's sprint like enthralling because I find it. I think
Speaker 2: the egos that are in F one, I find it
Speaker 2: hard to have that like mapped on into other spaces.
Speaker 1: Well, it's a little bit different because at the end
Speaker 1: of the day, there is no car except your legs, right,
Speaker 1: you know what I mean. And it's like the purest
Speaker 1: form of like competition is like, all right, dude, who's
Speaker 1: got better reflexes and stronger legs? And that is what
Speaker 1: the Track and Field Association of America's tagline. There is
Speaker 1: no car except your legs.
Speaker 2: There is no car except your legs the US Olympic
Speaker 2: and that is how I need them to make sense
Speaker 2: of it too. There is no car, only your feet. Wait,
Speaker 2: where's the car? That's what That's what I say as
Speaker 2: I'm watching a two hundred meter yeah, getting away the blocks?
Speaker 2: Yeah all right, yeah, runners on your marks? Oh, where's
Speaker 2: my car?
Speaker 1: Sorry, sorry, guys, I think you forgot where the car dude.
Speaker 1: I'm telling you right now I'm gonna get smoked by
Speaker 1: this dude unless I'm in a car.
Speaker 3: So what are we doing? This isn't even fair. This
Speaker 3: isn't even fair.
Speaker 2: Hello the Internet, and welcome to season three, forty eight,
Speaker 2: Episode two of day production of iHeartRadio. This is a
Speaker 2: podcast where we take a deep dive into america share consciousness.
Speaker 2: And it is Tuesday, July twenty third, twenty twenty four.
Speaker 2: Oh of course.
Speaker 1: There's some weird shit happening on July twenty third. It's
Speaker 1: National Vanilla ice Cream Day. That's fine, National Lemon Day,
Speaker 1: and also Gorgeous Grandma Day, so shout out.
Speaker 2: I think it was written by somebody who was horny.
Speaker 1: Unfortunately, all the gorgeous greats.
Speaker 3: Look.
Speaker 1: It's a day where we recognize all the women who
Speaker 1: embrace the age of a grandma, whether they are grandmothers
Speaker 1: or not. Gorgeous Grandma Day embraces and kourges to fund
Speaker 1: their granny attitudes with a purpose and.
Speaker 2: Stylet you gorgeous health out. You're like thiss bear with
Speaker 2: these big fucking claws. Baby. I think swinger, I guess so, yeah,
Speaker 2: all right. My name is Jack O'Brien aka Kama Kama
Speaker 2: Kama Kamma Kamala is now in no longer Joe, no
Speaker 2: longer Joe. Winning would be easy if your platform was
Speaker 2: like my dreams, healthcare be free, healthcare be free. That
Speaker 2: is courtesy of the Blake Rogers the Ohio State University. Also,
Speaker 2: Halseion Salad took crack at a Kamala Karma came leon aka,
Speaker 2: but I couldn't get the phrasing right on yours, even
Speaker 2: though it was first. I'm so sorry, Helseion Salad. Shout
Speaker 2: out to both of you, though, and shout out to
Speaker 2: Kamala Kalala I donated to her.
Speaker 4: Don't like you see this.
Speaker 2: I'm thrilled to be joined as always by my co host,
Speaker 2: mister Miles Gras Oh Man.
Speaker 1: It's Miles Great aka one two threes, It's Miles Gray
Speaker 1: jacko b ee. We look at hummingbirds and cast pod
Speaker 1: music explodes when Jack takes off. Wido, I said one
Speaker 1: two threes.
Speaker 5: Likeitgeist legs are plumperly ee, our pants rip at just
Speaker 5: the side of our quads. Boost it up to dunk
Speaker 5: sick lobs ale that's also a House.
Speaker 1: On Salad Carter, shout out to you, House Sion got
Speaker 1: on the board to split the Blake Rogers stealing on
Speaker 1: on mind.
Speaker 3: Doing your thing. Love to see it?
Speaker 2: You do love to see it, Miles, And you know
Speaker 2: what else you love to see? Tell me is when
Speaker 2: we can have this guest on. A best selling author
Speaker 2: of books like John Dies at the End, Zoe Punches
Speaker 2: the Future, and the Dick and the new standalone novel
Speaker 2: which you can pre order now. I guess can I
Speaker 2: say it's a standalone? I mean, it's not part of
Speaker 2: a previous franchise, but it's one that I wouldn't mind
Speaker 2: seeing a sequel to or more from. These characters. Also
Speaker 2: one of the hosts of the podcast Big Feats, which,
Speaker 2: if I'm reading this New Yorker review correctly, is quote
Speaker 2: the only Mountain Monsters podcast officially endorsed by Big Feet.
Speaker 2: He's my former coworker at Crack dot com, a co
Speaker 2: creator of the Cracked podcast. Welcome back to the show,
Speaker 2: Jason Parja.
Speaker 4: First of all, I'm not dying. Don't tell the papers
Speaker 4: that I'm dying. If I start coughing in the middle
Speaker 4: of the show, I realize it in a movie or
Speaker 4: TV show drama, if a character starts coffing that means
Speaker 4: are going to die.
Speaker 2: You did just pull back the napkin that you coughed into.
Speaker 4: It and then just then quietly, quietly hid it from you.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you looked around, your eyes darted back and forth,
Speaker 2: and then you tucked it into your waistband for some reason.
Speaker 4: But no, I'm just recovering from a cold. If I
Speaker 4: start clearing my throat, I am not trying to get
Speaker 4: their attention and demand that they let me talk. I
Speaker 4: am trying to clear because from my throat, just.
Speaker 2: The way that you do it tends to be at hem. Uh. Yeah,
Speaker 2: but that's all right. We'll just power through like we
Speaker 2: do all the time.
Speaker 1: Yeah, if we see if we hear that horn take
Speaker 1: at the top, we know you're not doing a DJ cool.
Speaker 3: Let me clear my throat either.
Speaker 2: How are you doing. We're excited to have you back.
Speaker 2: I'm excited about this new novel, which I blew through
Speaker 2: in a single weekend. It's it's a good one for
Speaker 2: fans of Jason Parging novels. I think they're really going
Speaker 2: to enjoy it. But it's probably a distant like writing
Speaker 2: it was probably a distant memory to you at this point.
Speaker 2: How long ago is that writing it?
Speaker 4: Yeah, but the dozens of interviews I'll have to give
Speaker 4: about it means I have to keep in mind what
Speaker 4: I wrote in it. But uh, for listeners who are
Speaker 4: in the middle of the total world chaos, we're doing
Speaker 4: a book review here. The book is relevant to what's yea,
Speaker 4: to what's going on. I promise you you'll you'll see why.
Speaker 4: And in fact, there's going to be at least one
Speaker 4: very annoying review. I predicted a couple months it says, wow,
Speaker 4: this is so precient. How if you predict that there
Speaker 4: would be an event and it triggers all sorts of
Speaker 4: misinformation and chaos?
Speaker 3: Yeah, that was not hard.
Speaker 2: Did you know that? That was my first question? Actually,
Speaker 2: we can just.
Speaker 4: I love seeing the people with the little screenshots of
Speaker 4: the Simpsons from twenty years ago. It's like, Wow, they
Speaker 4: predicted that elections would become stupid in the future.
Speaker 3: Well, that's.
Speaker 6: Not take nostrodamis the one recite briss Hill though, did
Speaker 6: actually perform with the London Symphony. Oh really, you remember
Speaker 6: the homer Fest thing. He's like someone ordered the London Symphony.
Speaker 6: Did someone do it when they were high and forgotten
Speaker 6: like Cypress Hills, Like, oh shit, did we do that?
Speaker 1: And they're like, yeah, yeah, they're actually performing with them now,
Speaker 1: and they're like, we kind of had an opportunity and
Speaker 1: decided to make the Simpsons prediction.
Speaker 2: Right, So, I mean you hear those violins on some
Speaker 2: of the early Cypress Hill stuff, you can't, man, Yeah,
Speaker 2: it was. It was inevitable, all right, Jason, Well, we
Speaker 2: are going to talk about some of the ideas in
Speaker 2: your book. I'm starting to worry about this black box
Speaker 2: of doom?
Speaker 3: Is that?
Speaker 2: What did I say that?
Speaker 3: Right? Yes?
Speaker 2: Did I not say the title?
Speaker 3: And the Well?
Speaker 2: First, yeah, I'm a pro folks. But first we do
Speaker 2: like to get to know our guests a little bit
Speaker 2: better by asking you, what is something from your search
Speaker 2: history that is revealing about who you are.
Speaker 4: I have a whole series of searchers over the last
Speaker 4: few days trying to figure out what CrowdStrike is, because
Speaker 4: it turned out all of modern civilization ran on it
Speaker 4: and I'd never heard of that company. It's an eighty
Speaker 4: billion dollar company. Yeah apparently, yeah, and I still don't
Speaker 4: know what it does. And this before the show I
Speaker 4: tried to Google is the CrowdStrike thing over? Is that
Speaker 4: old news or flight still grounded around the world. I
Speaker 4: can't tell because Google Search is broken, so I don't
Speaker 4: know any does anybody at home? No, email me let
Speaker 4: me know.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think like that. It seems like there's still
Speaker 2: reports of flights being fucked up, mainly like you have
Speaker 2: to go to the like the markets to see you know,
Speaker 2: like it's like people reporting on the financials and they'll
Speaker 2: be like, yeah, our our reporting indicates because they have
Speaker 2: to get that right because money is at stake. But
Speaker 2: it does seem like it's taken a while to untangle
Speaker 2: CrowdStrike and there it was just like an update eight
Speaker 2: that was ill advised, and somehow that took became one
Speaker 2: of the biggest technology fuck ups yet to this point
Speaker 2: in human history. A company that sounds like just a
Speaker 2: board game from the nineteen eighties.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that would have been fun to play.
Speaker 1: Yeah, from the makers of crossfires crowdstrikes. But CrowdStrike there's
Speaker 1: I mean, like they're the stat that I saw that.
Speaker 1: I was like, oh right, because everything's just consolidating. Is
Speaker 1: like they handle like these it services for like five
Speaker 1: hundred and thirty eight of the top one thousand companies. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so like, yeah, that chunk of like that kind of
Speaker 1: critical software going down, Yeah, will cause a lot of
Speaker 1: chaos unless you unless you're like a Linux person, and
Speaker 1: then which case you were fucking laughing because you're like, well,
Speaker 1: I'm on Linux.
Speaker 3: Fuck that.
Speaker 4: I think it's the range of things that went down
Speaker 4: to shocks people because it's like, okay, flights got grounded. Also,
Speaker 4: when we tried to buy coffee at Starbucks, their point
Speaker 4: of sale software was dead because of CrowdStrike, and then
Speaker 4: all so it's like a whole range of things across
Speaker 4: all society. Nine to one one service went down for
Speaker 4: some people.
Speaker 2: For a while.
Speaker 4: Yeah, hospital, it's like, oh so this all runs. It's like, hey,
Speaker 4: it all runs on a computer somewhere, and if those
Speaker 4: computers are running Windows, and if they're using CrowdStrike to
Speaker 4: do whatever CrowdStrike does, I apologize, audience, I still don't know. Then, Yeah,
Speaker 4: they pushed out that updated brick the computer. They could
Speaker 4: not simply push out another update because the only way
Speaker 4: to fix it was to like manually install and delete
Speaker 4: a file because your the computers were stuck in a
Speaker 4: boot loop. Yea yeah, so they couldn't just push out
Speaker 4: so yeah, but one I don't know, one string of
Speaker 4: code crippled much of the world's economy instantly.
Speaker 2: The solution was ultimately the solution to all type problems,
Speaker 2: which is just like restart, throw another ground, yeah, throw
Speaker 2: it the ground.
Speaker 1: Well no, because like the one version was like you'd
Speaker 1: have to go into every individual computer and like take
Speaker 1: this file out, which is like.
Speaker 3: We do oh yeah, like that's this.
Speaker 1: You can't just do this over the waves, or at
Speaker 1: least at the time I had last I was like
Speaker 1: looking for videos. I'm like, please explain to me, like
Speaker 1: I don't know what a computer is, what the fuck.
Speaker 3: Is going on? And I still I came away with
Speaker 3: a very vague understanding.
Speaker 2: Yeah, but it does feel like this becomes more and
Speaker 2: more possible the more we turn everything over to the
Speaker 2: machines and we're just like, they got it. We don't
Speaker 2: need humans on the ground doing you know, local deployments.
Speaker 2: That then if those work get deployed two more places,
Speaker 2: it's yeah or yeah, yeah, or shout out to the
Speaker 2: I don't want to update my software crowd, because they
Speaker 2: also may have like just inadvertently gotten around things too yeah,
Speaker 2: some of the like anecdotal stuff I heard in the
Speaker 2: early days was or in the early hours I guess
Speaker 2: was that the airlines that were actually functioning were the
Speaker 2: non major carriers, and so it could be a situation
Speaker 2: where like CrowdStrike is the expensive, higher end option that
Speaker 2: like sells for millions and millions of dollars that only
Speaker 2: a major corporation can eat. And so they got fucked.
Speaker 1: But oh yeah, our services we go through cloud clown.
Speaker 3: I it's it's affordable.
Speaker 1: But yeah, we don't have any problems.
Speaker 4: It's the open source.
Speaker 3: Cloud clown.
Speaker 2: What's Jason, something you think is underrated?
Speaker 4: How many world changing like mass shooters, terrorists, assassins just
Speaker 4: want to be famous as opposed to having some kind
Speaker 4: of ideology. Because we're now enough days past which I
Speaker 4: don't know if you guys remember, but somebody almost killed
Speaker 4: Donald Trump several days ago. I know this has been
Speaker 4: long forgotten from the headlines, but that guy, Thomas Matthew Crooks.
Speaker 4: By Now we're far enough along that the FBI, like
Speaker 4: they you know, they cracked open his devices that day.
Speaker 4: We're not far enough along by now we should have
Speaker 4: his manifesto, we should have his social media, we should
Speaker 4: have everything he had ever posted. I have no indication
Speaker 4: that he cared much about politics at all. He had
Speaker 4: on his phone, I guess photos and Internet searches for
Speaker 4: various politicians, and that maybe that Trump was the one
Speaker 4: that came closest to his house. Yeah, Like he literally
Speaker 4: picked the one that was in driving distance because he
Speaker 4: just wanted to go out with wanted the world to
Speaker 4: know who he was, right, And I don't know if
Speaker 4: that is a distinctly modern phenomenon, like you don't think
Speaker 4: of like John Wilkes Booth trying to boost taking sales
Speaker 4: to his next play. Like that was about Lincoln and
Speaker 4: slavery and ideology. It wasn't just like, yeah, they'll know
Speaker 4: my name after this. But these days, I don't know,
Speaker 4: it seems like you see more of them where it's
Speaker 4: just no, I want everybody to know my name. This
Speaker 4: is this will be the mark I leave on the world.
Speaker 2: Yeah right, Lee Harvey Oswald was also like this, like
Speaker 2: to the degree that people still aren't sure that he
Speaker 2: was trying to shoot Kennedy. He may have been trying
Speaker 2: to shoot the governor. He had already like tried to
Speaker 2: shoot a different Texas politician like weeks before or I
Speaker 2: guess it was probably months before. And yeah, he didn't
Speaker 2: appear to have any big ideological ideas other than that
Speaker 2: like he should be famous and he was going to
Speaker 2: do something big. So yeah, but it's it's hard to
Speaker 2: get your mind around that. I mean, we have an
Speaker 2: entire over you know, sixty years at this point of
Speaker 2: Kennedy conspiracy theories that and I'm not like here to
Speaker 2: say none of those are true or there's nothing suspicious
Speaker 2: about that, but it is uniquely unsatisfying for people to hear.
Speaker 2: Now it's just like some incompetence on the side of
Speaker 2: security and something somebody who wanted to be really famous,
Speaker 2: like school shooter when his search history is literally stuff
Speaker 2: like Donald Trump's near me and like that seems to
Speaker 2: be kind of like yeah, like he was looking at
Speaker 2: it and into Google man and search Donald Trump Trump's
Speaker 2: and then you looked at where all the flags were.
Speaker 1: All right, Joe Biden's near me, Okay, on my way.
Speaker 4: But I feel like we've had a number of mass
Speaker 4: shooters in a row where when they tried to figure out, like, well,
Speaker 4: why did he pick this as his target? What grievance
Speaker 4: did he have and unless they were shooting up their workplaces,
Speaker 4: just this is where they thought they could get the
Speaker 4: high score. This was a place they that was easy
Speaker 4: to get into and a lot of victims all packed,
Speaker 4: you know, packed together in one spot, and that was it.
Speaker 4: Just this is what we'll get my name. And ironically
Speaker 4: I can't remember any of their names at this point.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I had to look up Steven Paddock, the Vegas one,
Speaker 1: because I remember that was another one where everyone was like,
Speaker 1: what's what, What's what's going on? What was he trying
Speaker 1: to say?
Speaker 4: To this day, we don't know. He left nothing behind.
Speaker 4: It's all we know is that he planned it for
Speaker 4: like a year in advance. He looked at different targets.
Speaker 4: And there's some that think he was mistreated by casino
Speaker 4: staff or disrespected by the casino, like they weren't treating
Speaker 4: him like the high Roll where he was decided to
Speaker 4: try to kill hundreds of people.
Speaker 3: I don't.
Speaker 4: I'm not trying to make light of it. But every
Speaker 4: time you look for some mission or it's like no,
Speaker 4: because you want to be like a Batman villain, like
Speaker 4: they've got an ideology. My job is to tear asunder
Speaker 4: the fabric of society and the name of some you know,
Speaker 4: stupid movement or whatever. So often it's just just rage
Speaker 4: or frustration, or more likely just I'm not gonna get
Speaker 4: famous doing anything else. I have no other skills. I've
Speaker 4: tried going viral multiple times on when my wacky YouTube pranks.
Speaker 4: Nobody cares. So this is the only thing left to me.
Speaker 4: It's one thing that guarantees I'll get on the news.
Speaker 4: But if they believe they'll be remembered by history, I mean,
Speaker 4: I guess crooks would have been if that if that
Speaker 4: shot had been a few inches the other direction. But uh, yeah, man,
Speaker 4: that's nuts. That seems like a uniquely modern American sickness.
Speaker 2: Yeah, what is something, Jason you think is overrated?
Speaker 4: Apparently the resilience of the Internet, because those of you
Speaker 4: who are not around. Back when they first invented the
Speaker 4: Internet in the nineteen sixties in the Cold War era,
Speaker 4: the entire concept was that you could it was supposed
Speaker 4: to survive a nuclear war because all of the computers
Speaker 4: are networked to each other. If you take out this half,
Speaker 4: the other half continues working. So it was originally about
Speaker 4: like how you can continue communicating after the system we've
Speaker 4: built can go down. There are so many single points
Speaker 4: of failure because people have largely forgotten. Like there was
Speaker 4: the Nashville bombing in twenty twenty Christmas Day twenty twenty,
Speaker 4: the guy blew up an RV that took out an
Speaker 4: AT and T office. Yeah, and that's largely been forgotten.
Speaker 4: That knocked out internet across parts of seven states. It
Speaker 4: knocked out nine to one one and knocked out air
Speaker 4: traffic control at one airport. It was that same thing
Speaker 4: because it turned out it wasn't It was an AT
Speaker 4: and T switching station missions that the other ISPs like
Speaker 4: rented out to. So we had Verizon, our Verizon Internet
Speaker 4: went down because they just So there's all these single
Speaker 4: points of failure because you look at the map and
Speaker 4: it's like, well now hold on. That kind of makes
Speaker 4: it look like, with I don't know seven or eight bombs,
Speaker 4: you could make the whole country go dark, right, Because
Speaker 4: it took them a while to get it back up.
Speaker 4: It was not as easy as just re routing the
Speaker 4: traffic elsewhere. They had to like get generators and bring
Speaker 4: them into the building and try to fire up the
Speaker 4: servers from within the rubble to try to get people
Speaker 4: connected again. It just seems like such a fragile system,
Speaker 4: and this CrowdStrike thing is like far more widespread than that.
Speaker 4: But they're all of these single points of failure, and
Speaker 4: I'm surprised that's not a bigger complaint or priority or
Speaker 4: that you don't hear more about why why are there
Speaker 4: no why are there no backups? It's I mean, how
Speaker 4: many thousands of flights got grounded by this thing? How
Speaker 4: many people missed appointments and whatever.
Speaker 3: I don't know.
Speaker 4: It feels like there should be congressional hearings, and I
Speaker 4: think if they do something like that, it would just
Speaker 4: be for show where they get like the CEO of
Speaker 4: CrowdStrike and they yell at them for a while and
Speaker 4: then it's just it's like, yeah, but we all depend
Speaker 4: on this. Everything we do depends in this. Hospitals could
Speaker 4: not do surgeries because their system went down due to CrowdStrike. Like,
Speaker 4: lives can be lost if something like this goes down
Speaker 4: for a prolonged period of time, and it does not
Speaker 4: seem like it takes much.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, it yeah.
Speaker 1: You like to your point, you'd think there should be
Speaker 1: some kind of like you know, inquest into understanding it's
Speaker 1: like this is critical infrastructure, and is it just because
Speaker 1: every company is like, well, I'm a Fortune one thousand company,
Speaker 1: and all the other Fortune one thousand companies use this,
Speaker 1: so I'm mindlessly just given by what do you do?
Speaker 3: Yeah, we're doing that too.
Speaker 1: I could you know, like some people pointed out, like
Speaker 1: you could hire consultants to actually help sort of replace
Speaker 1: what CrowdStrike would do. Again, this is from my very
Speaker 1: cursory understanding, but there's just a momentum where like this
Speaker 1: is just sort of seen as like the default company
Speaker 1: to use and here we are, Yeah, people writing paper
Speaker 1: tickets now for airlines. I saw that like in India
Speaker 1: where they're just like writing it down to be like.
Speaker 3: I don't know, man, we just have to go back
Speaker 3: to full on analog.
Speaker 2: It's like a bar fight where like the in the
Speaker 2: in an eighteen hundreds movie where they have the tickets
Speaker 2: and people are just running up and be like, oh.
Speaker 3: Yes, exactly like a bar fight.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's troubling. It does seem like the sort of
Speaker 2: thing that this version of capitalism is just uniquely bad
Speaker 2: at a dressing right, Like it just feel feels like
Speaker 2: when a problem happens, it's so quick to be onto
Speaker 2: the next thing that there's not it's not a ton
Speaker 2: of people, you know, including like the global financial meltdown
Speaker 2: of like two thousand and eight, like that we still
Speaker 2: haven't really solved or like that like addressed to any
Speaker 2: real degree, like a lot of the problems that caused that, Yeah, we.
Speaker 1: Just I guess it's well that people got bailouts that
Speaker 1: needed them, you know, it's that financial mass, except for
Speaker 1: like the people that you know, really like people that
Speaker 1: needed them.
Speaker 3: The companies did.
Speaker 1: And I wonder if because of the actual amount of
Speaker 1: losses that the airlines experience, they're like, Okay, we're not
Speaker 1: doing this and like that was terrible, And I think
Speaker 1: that would be the only way it is, like how
Speaker 1: much of an effect it had on capital for there
Speaker 1: to really be the kind of things you're like, well,
Speaker 1: you fucked my money up, guys, So what's going on?
Speaker 1: That's really the only question.
Speaker 2: I think that It feels like we're like addicted to
Speaker 2: the velocity of the emotion, you know, like the how
Speaker 2: much it's causing, like how big the feelings are, how
Speaker 2: big the story is more than anything that's like just
Speaker 2: coherently thinking through it and being like, how do we
Speaker 2: make this thing work the best? It's like people get
Speaker 2: their charge out of the intensity of the story.
Speaker 4: There were viral Twitter posts within hours talking about how
Speaker 4: this had to be a DEI situation, how it had
Speaker 4: to have been an employee who was not white who
Speaker 4: was hired for DEI reasons because only that kind of mistake,
Speaker 4: because you don't see white people making dumb mistakes like that.
Speaker 2: Seen, yeah, name one. Yeah, all right, let's uh yeah.
Speaker 2: So I mean that also makes sense that like people
Speaker 2: are so loud attributing it to the exact wrong, wrong
Speaker 2: things that it gets drowned out. So there's there's no
Speaker 2: reason or no no real urge driver to get the
Speaker 2: thing actually addressed in any real way. All right, well,
Speaker 2: I think all of this ties into some of the
Speaker 2: ideas in your books. So let's take a quick break
Speaker 2: and we'll come back and get into it. We'll be
Speaker 2: right back and we're back, and I mean just to
Speaker 2: continue talking about the crowd strike outage, because that I
Speaker 2: think is the most recent example that I've had of
Speaker 2: this thinking. But I mean, first of all, I should say, you're,
Speaker 2: like I said up top, the novel's very entertaining. It's
Speaker 2: called I'm beginning to worry about this black box of doom.
Speaker 2: It's packed with very interesting ideas, and among other things,
Speaker 2: it's about how information stories evolve on the Internet, like
Speaker 2: in real time, with people kind of focus grouping the
Speaker 2: story and not really focusing on what is the truest
Speaker 2: thing so much as what is the most entertaining thing
Speaker 2: or the thing that most kind of rhymes with their
Speaker 2: preconceived notions, and that whatever that is seems to gain
Speaker 2: the most momentum as opposed to whatever the truest thing is.
Speaker 2: I had an experience on Friday where I called a
Speaker 2: friend whose work was being affected by the crowd strikeoutage,
Speaker 2: and they were too busy to do the googling that
Speaker 2: I had done because they were dealing with the crowd
Speaker 2: strike outage. And they were like, I don't know, everyone
Speaker 2: around here thinks it's probably some sort of cyber attack.
Speaker 2: And I was like, well, so crowd strike themselves are
Speaker 2: saying that it's not that it would be especially in
Speaker 2: their interest, you know, to have it even seem like
Speaker 2: it might not be their fault, and you know, just
Speaker 2: went through the thinking of why it seems like it's
Speaker 2: definitively just a fuck up on crowdstrikes part, and they
Speaker 2: were like, I don't know, it's suspicious. I don't know.
Speaker 2: I guess. I guess there's a reason the plot of
Speaker 2: most Hollywood movies don't hinge on someone accidentally fucking up
Speaker 2: or like vague incompetence or when that is the explanation,
Speaker 2: like in Titanic, we need to like make up a
Speaker 2: sneering rich guy who is like, I would rather kill
Speaker 2: you than let you hang out with a poor person.
Speaker 2: But yeah, so I don't know, is that, like, was
Speaker 2: that explicitly an idea you had heading into the novel
Speaker 2: or did it kind of come out and am I
Speaker 2: getting any of that rate?
Speaker 4: Yeah, so just for context, the setup of the book
Speaker 4: I'm starting to worry about this black Box of Doom
Speaker 4: is that there's on the first page there's a mysterious
Speaker 4: woman who hires a driver who she's never met before. Says,
Speaker 4: I want you to take me across the country, me
Speaker 4: and this box. It's like a footlocker sized black box.
Speaker 4: She says, I will pay you two hundred thousand dollars
Speaker 4: in cash, but it has to be kept quiet and
Speaker 4: you absolutely cannot look inside the box. So she needs
Speaker 4: to be driven from southern California to Washington, d C.
Speaker 4: She tells the guy, you can't tell anyone you're leaving.
Speaker 4: You have to leave behind any devices that can be tracked.
Speaker 4: No phone, no laptop, no GPS navigation. So why this
Speaker 4: is relevant is that as soon as they start on
Speaker 4: this trip, a rumor starts online among like true crime
Speaker 4: types and just board people that this is a terrorist
Speaker 4: attack because she's heading toward the capitol and that this
Speaker 4: box is part of it. So specifically, there's a theory
Speaker 4: that quickly goes around that this attack is carefully calculated
Speaker 4: to plunge the country into a civil war by striking
Speaker 4: it just the right way that will inflame people in
Speaker 4: just the wrong way. So there's this ticking clock where
Speaker 4: these strangers online have to try to coordinate to somehow
Speaker 4: stop this thing before the vehicle reaches Washington, d C.
Speaker 4: As it goes across the country. So as the story
Speaker 4: unfolds and as this information kind of spreads across social
Speaker 4: media and this horrible information ecosystem we've created in which
Speaker 4: no facts can survive, that becomes the challenge because all
Speaker 4: of the incentives pull people in directions other than the truth.
Speaker 4: So the book is this is me having tried to
Speaker 4: follow because I'm the most terminally online person you have
Speaker 4: ever met. I've you know, going even before my crack days,
Speaker 4: I was just on social media. I basically never close Twitter.
Speaker 4: I've tried to track many, many, many news stories online
Speaker 4: and I've watched this happen in front of me. So
Speaker 4: if I can be said to be an expert in
Speaker 4: any subject, it's this because it's always fascinating to see
Speaker 4: how the human brain gravitates toward the most entertaining story
Speaker 4: and not just what the what the facts seem to
Speaker 4: be in front of them.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it reminds me of when we've covered like fan
Speaker 2: theories in the past, like how fan theory he's come
Speaker 2: up with ideas of like what the plot should be
Speaker 2: of the movie or with the plot like for the
Speaker 2: sequel could be. It feels like exactly the same thing,
Speaker 2: like where it's they're pretty good at like spinning a
Speaker 2: pretty entertaining narrative, you know, like fan theories about movies
Speaker 2: like why is Bella able to you know, be in
Speaker 2: love with this vampire when she's allergic to them?
Speaker 3: I don't know, and.
Speaker 2: You know, like Twilight fan theories like get made up
Speaker 2: this way and they're the internet is good at like
Speaker 2: telling spinning a yarn, but unfortunately they do it with
Speaker 2: the news and fun I.
Speaker 1: Mean like yeah, you know Jason saying like watching story
Speaker 1: after story like evolved on one way on the Internet
Speaker 1: and then ultimately finding out the truth and being like, guys,
Speaker 1: it wasn't it was not as you know, spectacular or
Speaker 1: salacious as you thought it would be. Is that just
Speaker 1: like do you see that as just like a factor
Speaker 1: of like our boredom that would to make sense of
Speaker 1: our world?
Speaker 3: Like at times.
Speaker 1: We were like we're yearning for something to like mimic
Speaker 1: like the like drama or the narratives that we see
Speaker 1: on TV. Or it's something to do with our powerlessness
Speaker 1: or what is it that's so intoxicating about.
Speaker 3: Doing the Yeah, I don't know.
Speaker 1: I mean like like the Okham's razor explanation is this thing,
Speaker 1: but I'm gonna go with alien conspiracy theory, hit job.
Speaker 4: I just feel like the and this is not scientific.
Speaker 4: I'm not a scientist. I feel like the part of
Speaker 4: the brain that wants to be entertained and the part
Speaker 4: of the brain that observes the world around you to
Speaker 4: make decisions are two distinctly different things, because the part
Speaker 4: of you that wants to be entertained is just we
Speaker 4: have evolution, right. Due to evolution, we have a need
Speaker 4: for novelty. We enjoy seeing new things, things we've never
Speaker 4: seen before. It's hearing new things, so you know, we
Speaker 4: have we like narratives, but those are things we seek
Speaker 4: out to distract us from, like our miserable, mundane everyday lives. Ideally,
Speaker 4: you you would not be using that part of your
Speaker 4: brain to browse the news because the news should just
Speaker 4: be Okay, I have to make decisions from my household.
Speaker 4: Here's what I'm seeing on the news that's going to
Speaker 4: tell me what decisions I need to make. But those
Speaker 4: things have completely merged, and as there is more and
Speaker 4: more media, the difference between is this person talking to me,
Speaker 4: are they trying to entertain me? Or are they trying
Speaker 4: to inform me? Gets bored and I realize I'm saying
Speaker 4: that on a show where your guys' job is to
Speaker 4: try to make the news entertaining, because that's a way
Speaker 4: to engage people like this. This is good. We want people.
Speaker 4: What John Oliver does is good because these people otherwise
Speaker 4: maybe wouldn't care about politics, but he packages it in
Speaker 4: a way that makes it fun to listen to and
Speaker 4: kind of takes you through it.
Speaker 3: Bitch.
Speaker 4: The people doing that have to be very ethical about
Speaker 4: how they do it, because otherwise, if you're Alex Jones,
Speaker 4: if you're Alex Jones, it's very easy to just make
Speaker 4: up a fix that is more fun than the truth.
Speaker 4: For the same reason a candy bar tastes better than
Speaker 4: an ear of corn, Like one of them was made
Speaker 4: to be It's full of sugar and fat. It was
Speaker 4: made to be addictive. The other one is something that
Speaker 4: happens relatively naturally. So if you can make up stuff,
Speaker 4: it's always going to win in terms of engagement because
Speaker 4: you're not restrained by reality, and we do not. I
Speaker 4: don't think our brains are very good at filtering the
Speaker 4: fact from the more entertaining fiction, and the economic incentives
Speaker 4: definitely are not set up to punish people who fail
Speaker 4: to do it right.
Speaker 2: Do you feel like there are trends that I think
Speaker 2: this is something we tried to do at Cracked. Sometimes
Speaker 2: is just in addition to debunking like myths that gets
Speaker 2: spread around is like here are the types of lies
Speaker 2: that our brain or the Internet tends to gravitate towards,
Speaker 2: and it's you know, like one that I would say that,
Speaker 2: you know, I feel like we're seeing this process of
Speaker 2: like you know, internet focus grouping and writers rooming a
Speaker 2: real event in real time with the attempted assassination of Trump,
Speaker 2: as we've referred to. And I think one of the
Speaker 2: themes that we're seeing there and also in the crowd
Speaker 2: Strike story, is like people have a real aversion to
Speaker 2: incompetence as being the explanation or you know, accident, somebody
Speaker 2: fucking up. It's just not a satisfying plot point in
Speaker 2: your movie, like if Diehard Hedge, just like the story
Speaker 2: had resolved itself because the hacker had accidentally like detonated
Speaker 2: of bunch of the bombs, well, the Hans Gruber was
Speaker 2: on top of the you know, like something like that,
Speaker 2: and then it's it's just a fuck up along the
Speaker 2: way that doesn't happen. That doesn't happen in movies really
Speaker 2: because it's not satisfying. The part of our brain that
Speaker 2: craves novelty and like good storytelling resists that sort of thing.
Speaker 2: And so I believe like that it's a bigger part
Speaker 2: of the story of the JFK assassination then we tend
Speaker 2: to think, and I think it's probably a bigger part
Speaker 2: of the story of the Trump attempted assassination than some
Speaker 2: people are willing to it. Like, I think it seems
Speaker 2: to be pretty surface level that there is a fuck
Speaker 2: up there, But are there other do you? First of all,
Speaker 2: do you agree that that's a trend, And then are
Speaker 2: there other kind of trends that you've noticed you as
Speaker 2: you've kind of been studying the sort of the.
Speaker 4: Well, yeah, that's misinformation, Like I get that part of
Speaker 4: it is you just want to simplify the world. So,
Speaker 4: for example, I have one extremely unpopular political opinion, which
Speaker 4: is this is the perfect time to get it out
Speaker 4: when you're trying to sell a book and you've got it,
Speaker 4: which is that I think most of the world's problems,
Speaker 4: most of the things that frustrate straight you in your life,
Speaker 4: are not anybody's fault. I think the world's an imperfect place,
Speaker 4: and I think it's hard to run a society in
Speaker 4: a way that's perfectly fair to every single person. I think,
Speaker 4: you know, it's lots of times when prices would go
Speaker 4: up or whatever. It's not necessarily that some evil person
Speaker 4: has a scheme. It's just it's market forces, and it's
Speaker 4: a company that's trying to maximize the revenue because the
Speaker 4: shareholders demanded, and like the blame for things spreads in
Speaker 4: so many directions that it just kind of disappears because
Speaker 4: it's just a system that we're all trying to survive
Speaker 4: in and that is incredibly unsatisfied. We would love to
Speaker 4: hear that there's a villain because in a movie, if
Speaker 4: there's a problem like this, I don't know if you've
Speaker 4: seen the Jason Statham film The Beekeeper.
Speaker 2: A lot about it.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it's a it's it's a great boomer fantasy of
Speaker 4: like everything that is terrible about the world. Although he
Speaker 4: going up to the president, there's like a cabal of
Speaker 4: just cartoonishly evil people that if you could kill them,
Speaker 4: the world would finally be at peace. And that's that's
Speaker 4: very satisfying to think, because, yeah, every movie's got to
Speaker 4: have a villain, a human villain that is causing the problems.
Speaker 4: Like even a film like The Martian, which is supposed
Speaker 4: to be all about like troubleshooting and smart people and
Speaker 4: confidence porn, they still had to have like the villain character.
Speaker 4: The one guy who refused to was like being obstinate
Speaker 4: and say no to all of their plans because there's
Speaker 4: got to be a bad guy. And this is something
Speaker 4: that I think is true across the whole political spectrum.
Speaker 4: Everybody wants there to be a bad guy, and not
Speaker 4: just sometimes like but the pandemic, sometimes pandemics happened. We
Speaker 4: exist in nature and we actually, I don't know, it's
Speaker 4: I think most people did their best, and most people
Speaker 4: didn't freak out, and most people did what they thought
Speaker 4: was most reasonable. And I don't think we like that.
Speaker 4: I think we like the thought of there being somebody
Speaker 4: we can yell at and hate, and then if we
Speaker 4: could get rid of them, everything would be fixed. That
Speaker 4: seems to be to me the most common bias, which
Speaker 4: is I want to believe that somewhere there is a person,
Speaker 4: a bad person, who has caused this, because then I've
Speaker 4: got an opponent, and then if we could defeat them,
Speaker 4: everything would be fine. And most things in life are
Speaker 4: not like.
Speaker 3: That, I believe.
Speaker 1: But in that version, does that sort of like absolve
Speaker 1: people of any responsibility for what the actions of like
Speaker 1: an organization that they come like, you know, are the
Speaker 1: figurehead of or how do you look at like that
Speaker 1: sort of piece of it, Like I get the sort
Speaker 1: of our eur to be able to like say, this
Speaker 1: is where it's all focused and that's like it's in
Speaker 1: these four or five people kind of thing. But how like,
Speaker 1: at what point is there Obviously there are systems that
Speaker 1: have the lives of their own, but are you saying
Speaker 1: that everyone is just completely powerless to those things or
Speaker 1: nothing can be done or how do you square that part?
Speaker 4: I think, for example, I could go on Reddit right
Speaker 4: now and I could find memes talking about how the
Speaker 4: boomers ruined the world, how the boomers when they were alive,
Speaker 4: jobs were easy, lifetime employment, houses were cheap, they had everything,
Speaker 4: and then they intentionally screwed over the next employee or
Speaker 4: the next generation after them because they were so greedy
Speaker 4: and so you know, sociopathic and narcissistic. If you could
Speaker 4: actually grab a random.
Speaker 2: When I keep hearing recently, if.
Speaker 4: You could go grab a random boomer off the street
Speaker 4: somebody in their seventies say hey, why do you ruin
Speaker 4: the world. He's going to say, I worked out a
Speaker 4: muffler shop for forty years. What are you talking about.
Speaker 4: I don't even I rented for most of my life.
Speaker 4: I got to take a vacation like once every five years.
Speaker 4: What are you you're talking about? Like the CEOs and
Speaker 4: the politicians, And it's like, no, we've now distilled all
Speaker 4: of the boomers into like one evil person. And guess
Speaker 4: what gang whatever generation you are, Like, let's say there's
Speaker 4: some Gen Z kids listening to this a couple of
Speaker 4: generations from now, they're going to blame you for what
Speaker 4: happens with AI. And you're going to say, I didn't
Speaker 4: do anything with AI. I thought it was stupid. I
Speaker 4: barely used it. And the kids in the future can say, well,
Speaker 4: why didn't you stop it? And you say, I don't
Speaker 4: even know who who did it. I don't even know
Speaker 4: who was in charge of it. Every company just started
Speaker 4: doing AI and it suddenly there was AI and all
Speaker 4: my devices, and they're gonna be like, well, why didn't you,
Speaker 4: Why didn't you vote to stop it? Why didn't you
Speaker 4: boycott those companies? Why didn't you? And you're gonna say,
Speaker 4: I was just trying to live my freaking life. I
Speaker 4: was trying to survive. No, I did not have time
Speaker 4: to go firebomb a server farm where they were, where
Speaker 4: they were operating chat GPT five. I was just trying
Speaker 4: to And so what you find is you get that
Speaker 4: same answer all the way up to the President saying, look,
Speaker 4: I was voted. People voted for me to carry out
Speaker 4: an agenda. They could have voted for somebody else. This
Speaker 4: was the agenda. This is what I did. I did
Speaker 4: what I thought was right. And this is the most
Speaker 4: terrible truth that nobody likes to face, which is that
Speaker 4: most people are doing their best, and the flaws that
Speaker 4: happen are because you have different factions in society with
Speaker 4: different interests. For example, like housing prices. Every time somebody
Speaker 4: talks about why housing is so expensive, they want to
Speaker 4: come up with this theory that like, there's like one
Speaker 4: corporation is secretly buying up all the houses. It's like,
Speaker 4: no that they may be doing that. The issue is
Speaker 4: that half the country are already homeowners and they like
Speaker 4: the fact that their house costs twice as much because
Speaker 4: that's their retirement. It's not a secret cabal of guys
Speaker 4: in a shadowy room. It's an entire section of the country,
Speaker 4: and their interests are separate from yours, and they're not billionaires.
Speaker 4: They're just retired dentists or whatever. It's like, well, no,
Speaker 4: my entire retirement is based I'm going to sell this
Speaker 4: house when I turn seventy. I'm gonna move to Florida
Speaker 4: and rent a condo. But yes, the fact that my
Speaker 4: house costs four hundred percent more than what it did
Speaker 4: when I bought in nineteen ninety five, Like, no, I'm
Speaker 4: I don't want housing prices to go down. This is
Speaker 4: you know, this is my retirement right here. So there's
Speaker 4: times when some people just want different things from you.
Speaker 4: And if you're always trying to look for a specific
Speaker 4: villain or a cabal or a conspiracy, you're going to
Speaker 4: be disappointed more often than not. A lot of times
Speaker 4: it's just people acting out of short term interests or
Speaker 4: out of ignorance, or you know, they're just being oblivious.
Speaker 1: Yeah, but is there I mean, yeah, I guess in
Speaker 1: that's like that feels like sort of like a bleak war,
Speaker 1: Like how in that instance, what how would we solve
Speaker 1: things if we're willing to always say like, well, this
Speaker 1: person is just trying to do the best, not that
Speaker 1: I think, like I get the point about like trying
Speaker 1: to find like this cabal or like darker angle to
Speaker 1: explaining certain things like that, but does like at a
Speaker 1: certain point, like if how would that world view, how
Speaker 1: do we try to change things like from that perspective.
Speaker 4: But things have changed. None of us would prefer to
Speaker 4: go back and live in the year nineteen twenty four.
Speaker 4: Think about what you lose if you go back. Think
Speaker 4: about how many civil rights get rolled back. Think about
Speaker 4: how much shorter people lived, how many more babies died
Speaker 4: in childbirth, Think about how can much more contaminated the
Speaker 4: food was back then, and how nobody had air conditioning,
Speaker 4: Like we have improved the world immeasurably because while everybody
Speaker 4: was yelling at each other, the normal people were just
Speaker 4: out doing their jobs and building houses and building safer cars.
Speaker 4: And there's bureaucrats that are just quietly passing, you know,
Speaker 4: ordinances that make things slightly safer, and yeah, the you know,
Speaker 4: none of us would go back and live one hundred
Speaker 4: years ago. Things were worse by I think in every
Speaker 4: possible measure.
Speaker 2: I think some of the yelling at each other is
Speaker 2: part of that thing's getting better, right, Like not necessarily
Speaker 2: yelling at each other in the public square, like on
Speaker 2: the internet, as it tends to happen now. But I
Speaker 2: mean that like the disagreeing and pushing for better at
Speaker 2: a systemic level and criticizing the way the system currently
Speaker 2: works is at least partially what drives some of that progress, right,
Speaker 2: So it does, I get your meaning. But I think
Speaker 2: taking that anger, that energy and focusing it on criticizing
Speaker 2: how the system is actually working or failing to work,
Speaker 2: feels like it's still pretty crucial given that model of
Speaker 2: humanity where people are just doing their best, but they're
Speaker 2: you know, their best is actually inefvertently harming other people, right.
Speaker 4: And that's something that comes up in the book because
Speaker 4: the idea is and again you can disagree with this
Speaker 4: or not, but in this particular era, in the social
Speaker 4: media era, all of the incentives are toward keeping you
Speaker 4: glued to a screen. So if you are arguing, the
Speaker 4: system makes less money if the argument progresses toward a
Speaker 4: resolution and a consensus. What the system needs is for
Speaker 4: you to always be arguing, forever and ever and ever.
Speaker 4: And that's why so much of what you're arguing about
Speaker 4: is not something that's based in reality at all. Like, ideally,
Speaker 4: if the systems working correctly, when COVID happened, and then
Speaker 4: they got a sense of what exactly worked. What you know,
Speaker 4: what cures worked, you know what treatments worked, how the
Speaker 4: vaccines work. Once you arrive at that truth, it's like, Okay,
Speaker 4: we have worked through it. We've been arguing the whole time,
Speaker 4: but we eventually figured out we have the data. Here's
Speaker 4: what we know. Vaccines worked for most people. You know
Speaker 4: a lot of the other you know systems did not necessarily,
Speaker 4: but this is this is what works. That's not what
Speaker 4: you get now. You get people still to this day
Speaker 4: yelling about like that what was the name of that
Speaker 4: horse paced drug that the conservatives.
Speaker 2: Fucking I took a bath on that thing.
Speaker 3: Man.
Speaker 4: To this day you'll get people in claiming that all
Speaker 4: of the deaths were actually from the vaccine, none of
Speaker 4: the death real like they've got grass showing that actually
Speaker 4: there was no there was no pandemic. It was completely
Speaker 4: That's the malfunction the system, because that is money, that
Speaker 4: is traffic, that is engagement, and if your company that
Speaker 4: only cares that people are glued to the screen, you
Speaker 4: by definition are pushing people in the wrong direction because
Speaker 4: you're not pushing people toward a consensus. You're always trying
Speaker 4: to invent new things for people to argue about. For example,
Speaker 4: I can I'm looking at my Twitter right now and
Speaker 4: there is a meme that somebody posted where it's a
Speaker 4: it's a guy, it's a picture of guy with a
Speaker 4: beard and said, hey, ladies, if your boyfriend doesn't have
Speaker 4: a beard, you have a girlfriend. And people yelling over
Speaker 4: whether or not a man without a beard is scientifically
Speaker 4: a male, Like, that's that's not leading anybody toward anything
Speaker 4: that is purely invented to get people to yell at
Speaker 4: each other and stare at their screen for just a
Speaker 4: few minutes more and nothing else.
Speaker 1: Sure, so yeah, right, So what you're saying is you're
Speaker 1: as it's set up that, no, there's no incentive to
Speaker 1: actually arrive at a conclusion because the discord, the disharmony
Speaker 1: in the controversy is what's is what sort of being
Speaker 1: brought to us. And we're increasingly motivated to this because yeah,
Speaker 1: there's just so many like engagement type tweets that just
Speaker 1: come out saying the wrong thing and being like, watch this,
Speaker 1: I think I'm going to win the next presidential election
Speaker 1: for the Democrats. In the comments section of that tweet
Speaker 1: by printing out the JD vance actually sucks, right sure.
Speaker 4: And this is I don't even need to talk about
Speaker 4: this in nebulous terms. The way x has run, the
Speaker 4: way Twitter has run Sinceilon Musk took it over. There
Speaker 4: are measurable changes he made. He unbanned specific counts, all
Speaker 4: of the policies against spreading intentional misinformation, all of that
Speaker 4: stuff he lifted that I can watch this change happen
Speaker 4: in front of me, because he thinks the only way
Speaker 4: to make it profitable is to bring back the bs
Speaker 4: that gets people yelling. Whereas before this they at least
Speaker 4: felt some responsibility, like they banned Donald Trump for a reason,
Speaker 4: like they felt some responsibility that this is the public square,
Speaker 4: this is where news breaks. I mean, freaking Joe Biden
Speaker 4: announced he was dropping out on Twitter, Like that's it
Speaker 4: still holds that position. The former owners took that responsibility
Speaker 4: seriously to some degree, but not so seriously that they
Speaker 4: would not sell to Elon Musk, who openly promised I'm
Speaker 4: going to trash all of that, like Google's whole thing
Speaker 4: like that don't be evil slogan that they're like, hey,
Speaker 4: we understand, we have tremendous power here, and we're going
Speaker 4: to try to wield that responsibility, even if we technically
Speaker 4: could make more money, but with nonsense and with whatever,
Speaker 4: with the entertain lie rather than getting people accurate information. Well,
Speaker 4: it seems like corporations there is a eventually the shareholders
Speaker 4: are like, hey, you're leaving money on the table. There's
Speaker 4: a lot of money in the evil stuff.
Speaker 3: Why are you?
Speaker 4: And no one feels like it's their fault because like, well,
Speaker 4: I'm just a shareholder. You know, they could do what
Speaker 4: they want. But it's like, yeah, but you're saying you're
Speaker 4: not making as much money as you could be because
Speaker 4: you know, if you allow the BS is profitable, of
Speaker 4: course it is. It doesn't cost anything to research. You're
Speaker 4: just making it up.
Speaker 2: Yeah, all right, let's let's take a quick break and
Speaker 2: we'll be right back. And we're back. And one version
Speaker 2: of this that was kind of interesting that I noticed
Speaker 2: following you on social media, Jason, is people were angrily,
Speaker 2: very very seriously criticizing that. So somebody posted a clip
Speaker 2: from Jason and the Argonauts and was like, Luma, the
Speaker 2: AI like video thing basically is a game changer. Look
Speaker 2: at how much better it made Jason and the Argonauts
Speaker 2: and the like special effects, and then.
Speaker 4: The scene was the classic stop motion skeleton rattle, which
Speaker 4: is one of the most famous effect sequences of all
Speaker 4: time because of the era it came out and how amazing.
Speaker 2: It looks, and then it just the video is just
Speaker 2: looks like complete shit. It's a very like I am
Speaker 2: such a sucker for this very it's extremely funny. But
Speaker 2: you had to come in and retweet it and say
Speaker 2: this is a joke. Like the person who's posting this
Speaker 2: is doing a bit like look at their profile, just
Speaker 2: look at the at the video. Yeah, this is not
Speaker 2: a game changer. And people's response to you was like, Matt,
Speaker 2: they were I think more mad at like they're like
Speaker 2: one person was like, if you need to explain to
Speaker 2: people that you were making a joke, then you did
Speaker 2: it badly. And it's like, no, this is.
Speaker 3: They did it good.
Speaker 2: They did a good job, Like this is actually a
Speaker 2: very funny joke. Another person was like, it still sucks.
Speaker 2: That's all it is doing is wasting resources, generating at
Speaker 2: all for a simple joke, which yeah, now I get
Speaker 2: the like AI is wasting resources thing, but like it's
Speaker 2: I don't know they they definitely didn't get the joke
Speaker 2: at first, And then I guess you were doing the
Speaker 2: online rage equivalent of like yucking a youm in that
Speaker 2: you're like calming a rage buzz and like that really
Speaker 2: seemed to anger people. But yeah, that I guess that's
Speaker 2: a new kind of thing where they're like ang instead
Speaker 2: of happy, like instead of laughing.
Speaker 4: Anger is addictive, even if you're not if you've not
Speaker 4: been diagnosed as a rage aholic, which is a term
Speaker 4: I don't think I've heard in a long time, but
Speaker 4: anger is addictive. It's more addictive than cocaine. It's all
Speaker 4: the chemicals are released in your brain because that's your
Speaker 4: fight or flight response, right, Like that's your your body
Speaker 4: trying to charge you up to go to go take
Speaker 4: on somebody. And it's felt as pleasure, of course it is.
Speaker 4: You can see how badly people want to stay mad online.
Speaker 4: If they're mad about something and it turns out it
Speaker 4: was a misunderstanding, they don't stop being mad, they just
Speaker 4: find they just find something else to put their anger.
Speaker 4: And this is the one thing that I like, I
Speaker 4: hate that, like the cancel culture, discourse has been seized
Speaker 4: by the right and now you hear somebody complaining about
Speaker 4: cancel culture, it's always a sex pervert who's got charges
Speaker 4: in their pastor trying to why should I be blamed
Speaker 4: for that? But the one thing that I've observed with
Speaker 4: this that if you explain that they misunderstood, or they
Speaker 4: took something out of context, or you showed them that
Speaker 4: the screenshot was faked, that doesn't calm their anger. It
Speaker 4: is once in a blue mood, you would hear somebody say, oh,
Speaker 4: thank god, I thought you were yeah. Okay, you're right,
Speaker 4: I misunderstood. I thought you were no. Because it's all
Speaker 4: the people that already wanted to hate you, or the
Speaker 4: people that liked you a while ago, and that they've
Speaker 4: reached a curve where they've decided it would now be
Speaker 4: more fun to hate you. And it's so you can
Speaker 4: see that this is addictive behavior. You can see that
Speaker 4: this is compulsive behavior because it's like you sought out
Speaker 4: something to be mad at just because you wanted to
Speaker 4: feel something. And highly unscientific. I'm not a scientist, I'm
Speaker 4: not a doctor. I think this is a form of
Speaker 4: self harm that people do. I think compulsively reach like
Speaker 4: refreshing outrage headlines and making yourself feel miserable or doom
Speaker 4: or scared or angry over and over again. I think
Speaker 4: it's a self harm behavior where you're just trying to
Speaker 4: hurt yourself so you feel alive somehow.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean that there's that I definitely got easily
Speaker 1: swept up like many years ago, like in that kind
Speaker 1: of like that sort of social media rage bait kind
Speaker 1: of stuff, and I could stay even when people are like, dude,
Speaker 1: this isn't even real. I would still pivot to like,
Speaker 1: but I actually just need to be mad is where
Speaker 1: I'm at, and it's really I'm realizing it might not
Speaker 1: be this thing. And having that realization helped me definitely
Speaker 1: to be like, Okay, what am I? Is it because
Speaker 1: I'm observing something and I'm trying to be objective or
Speaker 1: is it it's again it's that sensation.
Speaker 3: To be like they're fucking wrong.
Speaker 1: I'm with these other people that are right, and like,
Speaker 1: you know, I don't care like how much it raises
Speaker 1: my blood pressure or my heart rate or whatever. It's
Speaker 1: just like that sensation in some way just I needed
Speaker 1: it for whatever reason.
Speaker 4: And you'll hear people say things like, well, the fact
Speaker 4: that this could could have been true. Is just evidence
Speaker 4: of how evil these people are. There's just proof of
Speaker 4: how bad they are that we thought this was all true.
Speaker 4: Like okay, because even like Donald Trump, you know, who
Speaker 4: produces three or four outrage headlines a minute, that people
Speaker 4: will still invent stuff. There's there's anti Trump conspiracy. There's
Speaker 4: that went around that if you try to debunk them,
Speaker 4: it's like, well, oh, here we go. You know, there's
Speaker 4: just another maga idiot try It's like, no, I'm I'm
Speaker 4: trying to clean up our own information ecosystem so people
Speaker 4: will trust us, because if we don't, if we don't
Speaker 4: clean up that stuff from our own house, then people
Speaker 4: will think everything we say is just a lie. So
Speaker 4: it's like, no, you've got to reject that. You got
Speaker 4: to say now, actually this is not what he said.
Speaker 4: That is a thankless task and nobody wants you to
Speaker 4: do it because no one is like happy that you
Speaker 4: took away their anchors and they're like, oh, thank you,
Speaker 4: I'm in a better mood. This is I was mad
Speaker 4: all morning, but you have lifted this burden from me.
Speaker 4: It is very rare to hear that.
Speaker 1: I mean, like, as you talk about cleaning up like
Speaker 1: the information systems is your hope, Like I mean not
Speaker 1: that this is like the you're like Reslin debt or
Speaker 1: something like that. I have to make sure our echos
Speaker 1: our information ecosystems cleaned up. But do you also is
Speaker 1: there like a sense of nihilism that based on like
Speaker 1: the way our engagements are structured and controlled by these
Speaker 1: computers and the people that are able to sort of
Speaker 1: like emphasize certain things, that it's like a futile effort,
Speaker 1: or it's just something that maybe with increased awareness, we
Speaker 1: slowly are able to sort of take some semblance of
Speaker 1: like parody back.
Speaker 4: I would like to think so, but I think it's
Speaker 4: a case where the technology has moved faster than the culture.
Speaker 4: You know, our rules in our culture around things like
Speaker 4: screen time, and you know, there was a time where
Speaker 4: the culture didn't change for like a thousand straight years.
Speaker 4: All the rules you had about do the chores before dinner,
Speaker 4: do this, wash your hands, like these things were they
Speaker 4: were established based on their lifestyle, based on the world,
Speaker 4: based on what we keep everybody healthy, keep you from
Speaker 4: getting sick, what would keep you safe well. Now the
Speaker 4: world changes so quick. If I suddenly had a child,
Speaker 4: I would have no idea what age I would let
Speaker 4: them have a smartphone, whether what age I would let
Speaker 4: them on social media. I can't give any advice on
Speaker 4: that because I have no clue. I don't even know
Speaker 4: what the science is in terms of brain development, because
Speaker 4: I don't think we have the data you would. You
Speaker 4: would need to be able to study someone through their
Speaker 4: formative years on and offline and see what like are
Speaker 4: they Are they seeing greater you know, levels of stress
Speaker 4: and lower levels of like like self image, that kind
Speaker 4: of thing. In the time it takes you to study it,
Speaker 4: the world has moved on from Facebook to Instagram, then
Speaker 4: from Instagram to tech talk, and then from TikTok to
Speaker 4: whatever it is now, and you can't like, we just
Speaker 4: don't know. But I'm not. I'm not a pessimist or
Speaker 4: a centic. My my whole thing. I have this weird
Speaker 4: sort of like optimism where I just think that very
Speaker 4: few people in the world are truly evil. I think
Speaker 4: most people in the world are not very smart about
Speaker 4: things or don't have time to think about these things.
Speaker 4: They're busy, they're raising kids, are working two shifts. No,
Speaker 4: they've not sat down and pondered the role of freaking
Speaker 4: TikTok in their child's life. They've got they're worried about
Speaker 4: trying to pay the bills, or we're not trying to
Speaker 4: get them to a soccer practice on time. I think
Speaker 4: most people are doing their best. I don't think there
Speaker 4: are that many. There are some true villains in the world.
Speaker 4: I've read history books, but I think that number of
Speaker 4: people is very small. I think most people, including like
Speaker 4: most Trump voters, I think they've just been exposed to
Speaker 4: an information ecosystem. I think if you watched Fox News
Speaker 4: all day, if you if you only followed like these
Speaker 4: right wing pundits over time, voting for him seems like
Speaker 4: the only sensible choice. I think all of us are
Speaker 4: more susceptible to that kind of thing than we like
Speaker 4: to think. But I think mostly it's just people not
Speaker 4: having the right information, or not having great critical thinking skills,
Speaker 4: or just not having the time that I think the
Speaker 4: culture eventually evolves. But for example, one unexpected thing that's
Speaker 4: happened is people have stopped having sex and stopped having kids.
Speaker 4: Nobody predicted that as much as much, but yeah, but
Speaker 4: you can see you can see the rates like dropping radically,
Speaker 4: like the culture was definitely not ready for that to happen.
Speaker 4: We didn't have the data showing us that. Oh yeah,
Speaker 4: if the teenagers, if you train them to just stay
Speaker 4: home and interact over a screen, then they're not going
Speaker 4: to be in proximity with each other. And one side
Speaker 4: effect is you get much less crime because if you're
Speaker 4: not if you don't leave the house, you can't do
Speaker 4: a crime unless it's like some lame cyber crime. That
Speaker 4: same thing. But they're also not dating as much, or
Speaker 4: they're not you know, they're not getting married. We will
Speaker 4: have to figure out how to deal with that. But
Speaker 4: the technology just moves so fast that the culture has
Speaker 4: to catch up, and you can see people struggling with us.
Speaker 4: You can you can see like right wing media personalities
Speaker 4: talking about wanting to go back to like the nineteen
Speaker 4: fifties because that's the only way they can think to
Speaker 4: turn back the conc is to turn it back all
Speaker 4: the way yeah, before the Civil rights movement, right, Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean I spent my adult life writing for
Speaker 2: and interacting with the Internet, and but yeah, when it
Speaker 2: comes to my children, like my plan currently is basically
Speaker 2: just like no Internet as much as possible, really, like
Speaker 2: I yeah, I mean no, like social media, no phones,
Speaker 2: like I mean, it just seems like there's too many
Speaker 2: little shortcuts built into the system that are specifically designed
Speaker 2: to like hijack our brain's risk reward center. But you
Speaker 2: know it's I think it's it's much harder. And also, yeah,
Speaker 2: it's based on just like a sense that the net
Speaker 2: result on mental health is bad. And the anecdotes about
Speaker 2: like the people who designed all this ship being like, well,
Speaker 2: my kids are never allowed to do that sort of thing,
Speaker 2: like go use the products that I designed.
Speaker 3: What do you know about it that we don't?
Speaker 2: Nothing, just nothing, just yeah, you just shut up. But
Speaker 2: I don't know. It's definitely strange times, and I don't
Speaker 2: want to make people think like the whole book is
Speaker 2: just like dark. You know, there's a lot of it's
Speaker 2: very funny, very entertaining, very edge of your seat. There's
Speaker 2: great observations about packing underwear before a road trip that
Speaker 2: really resonated with me.
Speaker 4: Everybody packs packs way too much, so much under Yeah,
Speaker 4: but if I poop myself four times.
Speaker 2: I'm gonna be closed with myself constantly on this road trip. Yeah,
Speaker 2: And like how we feel about pop culture references in
Speaker 2: air pop culture like seems to be changing, and you
Speaker 2: have some good interesting thoughts on that, but you can
Speaker 2: find them in the book. Any anything else before we
Speaker 2: say goodbye?
Speaker 4: No, just that I'm on TikTok as Jason K. Pargin,
Speaker 4: where I have five hundred and twenty thousand forwards.
Speaker 7: Yeah, I hope I don't come across as a very
Speaker 7: elderly and geriatric gen x being mad about technology.
Speaker 4: I'm on here all day, every day.
Speaker 3: I need it.
Speaker 2: Amazing. Where else can people find you? Follow you? Where
Speaker 2: can they pre order the book? All that good stuff?
Speaker 4: The book is called I'm starting to worry about this
Speaker 4: Black Box of Doom. It is up for pre order
Speaker 4: in all formats including audio. I do not read the audiobook.
Speaker 4: They hired a professional to do that. But yeah, you
Speaker 4: can just search that title wherever you like pre order books.
Speaker 4: If you want a pre order from an actual physical
Speaker 4: indie bookstore in your city, they will kiss you right
Speaker 4: on the lips if you do that, they will. That
Speaker 4: would make them extremely happy. But I know that eighty
Speaker 4: five percent of you are going to order it through Amazon,
Speaker 4: so it's there too.
Speaker 2: There you go, And is there a tweet or some
Speaker 2: other work of media that you've been enjoying.
Speaker 4: Uh, yeah, I had a couple. One is from the
Speaker 4: Twitter user Peachy black Girl says, we're really living in
Speaker 4: the most difficult section of somebody's ap government exam in
Speaker 4: twenty fifty three.
Speaker 1: Yeah, what explained the omni crisis of twenty twenty four
Speaker 1: in America?
Speaker 2: Like, there's so many they're so close together.
Speaker 4: Yeah, there's so many things that require so much explaining
Speaker 4: of context. I try to compare to if somebody, like
Speaker 4: six hundred years from now listen to that Kendrick Lamar
Speaker 4: song about Drake, Yeah, and then how difficult it would
Speaker 4: be to explain because it's so full of references to
Speaker 4: scandals and pop culture and stuff that you would have
Speaker 4: to write an entire book. It would be like that,
Speaker 4: every every little thing that has happened, there's so much
Speaker 4: context that's going to be impossible to explain.
Speaker 2: It's gonna be like entire.
Speaker 3: Academics.
Speaker 2: Academic career is built on explaining it. Amazing. Well, thanks
Speaker 2: again for joining us, great work on the book, and yeah,
Speaker 2: looking forward to having you back on again soon. Miles.
Speaker 2: Where can people find you is their working media you've
Speaker 2: been enjoying?
Speaker 1: Yeah, you find me at Miles of Gray, Twitter, Instagram threads,
Speaker 1: wherever they got at symbols, I'm their PlayStation network.
Speaker 3: You know, it's called consistency. Baby.
Speaker 1: You can also find Jack and on the basketball Podcastle
Speaker 1: the Jack. I MAT's He's gonna find me talking about
Speaker 1: ninety day Fiance on four to twenty Day Fiance. A
Speaker 1: couple of tweets I like, let's see first. One is
Speaker 1: at Cuckoo Kado tweeted it feel like a lot of
Speaker 1: women in their thirties are torn between sticking with their BF,
Speaker 1: who's honestly not a great candidate, but he's the nominee,
Speaker 1: or risking the chaos of.
Speaker 3: An open convention.
Speaker 1: Oh that was like, yeah, no, it's feels similar calculus.
Speaker 1: Another one is like this picture of jd Vance. It's
Speaker 1: from a pod app pod Leasia great account and its
Speaker 1: just said I can't explain it, but he looks like
Speaker 1: the guy at the bachelor party that doesn't know any
Speaker 1: of the other cruisemen. Feels like big Jdvance energy and
Speaker 1: also very dear friend of the show, Jamie Loftus, her
Speaker 1: father passed away over the weekend and I just wanted
Speaker 1: to send all of our condolences collectively to Jamie. She
Speaker 1: tweeted on the twenty first first, we lost my amazing
Speaker 1: dad this morning. The funniest person alive, endlessly supportive, a
Speaker 1: massively talented and hardworking writer, A true friend. I don't
Speaker 1: know what life looks like without him. Mike Loftis nineteen
Speaker 1: fifty nine to twenty twenty four. So Jamie, our thoughts,
Speaker 1: our love, all of that is with you and your family.
Speaker 3: But I just thought, if you guys.
Speaker 1: Hadn't heard, you know, maybe you know, just send some
Speaker 1: support from life.
Speaker 2: Yeah, all right, tweets have been enjoying. Taffy Brodesser Ackner tweeted,
Speaker 2: hurt people. Hurt people is what I think as I
Speaker 2: reclined my plane seat because the person in front of
Speaker 2: me did.
Speaker 4: That's a perfect metaphor.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and at E R r AI, I don't know,
Speaker 2: I don't know how we're pronouncing that, tweeted dude, don't
Speaker 2: be a dick. It's just a straw. Come on, your
Speaker 2: camel won't even notice it.
Speaker 3: You can find.
Speaker 2: Us on Twitter at Daily Zeitgeist. We're at the Daily
Speaker 2: Zeitgeist on Instagram. We have a Facebook fan page on
Speaker 2: website Daily Zeiguist dot com where we post our episodes
Speaker 2: and our footnotes, where we link off to the information
Speaker 2: that we talked about in today's episode, as well as
Speaker 2: a song that we think you might enjoy. Miles, what
Speaker 2: song do you think people might endore?
Speaker 1: Oh man, I mean the title. I don't know if
Speaker 1: it was a good day, but that's the name of
Speaker 1: this song. It was a good Day. Parenthetical Footsteps in
Speaker 1: the Dark obviously a reference to the ice Cube track,
Speaker 1: but they're rotten the Isisley Brothers sample and it's by
Speaker 1: that band Oma again. Oh ma, they're just like those
Speaker 1: Brits playing live sort of hip hop instrumentals and you
Speaker 1: love to hear it. It was a good day Footsteps
Speaker 1: in the Dark by Oma.
Speaker 2: Oh my God. All right, so well, we will link
Speaker 2: off to that in the footnotes. The Daily's Eyegeas is
Speaker 2: a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit
Speaker 2: the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to
Speaker 2: your favorite shows. That is going to do it for
Speaker 2: us this morning. We are back this afternoon to tell
Speaker 2: you what is trending, and we will talk to you
Speaker 2: all then. Bye bye.