March 26, 2024 • 66 mins
In episode 1647, Jack and Miles are joined by co-host of You Are Good and You're Wrong About, Sarah Marshall, to discuss… Some of Our Favorite Episodes of You're Wrong About including; The Pro-Life Movement, Survival in the Andes, Human Trafficking and more!
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hello the Internet, and welcome to season three thirty one,
Episode two of dir Daily's Like Guy Say production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:09):
This is a.
Speaker 1 (00:10):
Podcast where we take a deep down and do America
share consciousness. And it is Tuesday, March twenty sixth, twenty
twenty four.
Speaker 3 (00:17):
That's right, March twenty six It's National Nugat Day. We
don't understand what nugat is. Technically Epilepsi Awareness Day, National
Spinish Day, shoutout Popeye, an American Diabetes Association Alert Day.
But nugat, what is it? And how do we continue
to live without knowing what it is? I just know
it as white chewy stuff in the middle.
Speaker 1 (00:39):
I thought it was the stuff in the middle of
three Musketeer bar and in Milky Way with carmel. But yeah,
when I look at the Google image surge of nugat
would indicate that it's like a white budge thing. It
looks terrible. Look at this nugat right here. Yeah, yeah,
Like all the nugat that Google image search returns is
(01:02):
not what I had in mind.
Speaker 3 (01:04):
It says made by whipping egg whites together and adding
honey or sugar, roasted nuts, and sometimes candy fruit. No
thank you on the cant Oh. It dates back to
the Roman Empire. See that's why I think about Rome
so much, because I love nugat.
Speaker 1 (01:17):
I feel like they also it's from so long ago
that just anything that was sugar was like called nugat.
You know, they just like it was from a time
of like when the only candy was like necho wafers
and nugat. Yeah, what's that. I don't know.
Speaker 3 (01:33):
I dropped some eggs and some sugar and I just
whipped it up furiously, and I don't know my kids
then it fell.
Speaker 1 (01:39):
On the ground and they're like nuts and sticks stuck
in it. So we're gonna call that on purpose.
Speaker 3 (01:46):
Yeah, I mean I needed to like the etymology of
fucking nugat Nugat.
Speaker 1 (01:52):
My name is Jack O'Brien aka.
Speaker 4 (01:55):
Welcome to my golf course, Palmersaurus. That's Jeff Explore the
Titanic but before it got wrecked. All these medals I've sold,
I'm the smartest god because of cold.
Speaker 1 (02:14):
That is courtesy of Rezik on the Discord in honor
of the Australian billionaire Clive Palmer, who first of all
came to our attention most recently because he's rebuilding the
Titanic and like doing the trip again, making the making
the captain get drunk again and just like kind of
(02:35):
sloalow them through those icebergs. But already had turned the
best golf course in Australia, like I don't I don't
know from golf courses, but like the golf course where
the PGA like would hold their big tournaments. He bought
that and started putting animatronic dinosaurs all over it. Called
(02:56):
it Palmersaurus. It's called it's called you gave it a
put a giant plastic t rex on the ninth hole
and named it Jeff. So anyways, shout out to that man.
I'm thrilled to be joined as always by my co host,
mister Miles Gras.
Speaker 3 (03:15):
That's right, it's Miles Gray driving in a busted Honda
Prelude down lankershim because he's a lord of Lankersham. It's
the black and the showgun with no gun. Miles, Great,
thank you so much for having me back, Jack again.
Always appreciate it.
Speaker 1 (03:28):
Hey man, let's you know you're you're one of the
faces on Mount site more. Yeah, thank you. I love
one of our favorites.
Speaker 3 (03:34):
I love getting that email from you on a Monday
morning and being like, hey, man, would love to have
you back another season.
Speaker 1 (03:40):
I'm like, I do email. You've been on every episode
so far. I do email you every time and invite
you back to the next season to keep you in
your place, so you know, yeah, I mean at a
certain point, I'm like, well, this is kind of contractual.
At this point, Hey man, I don't know if you're
doing anything. I always open it. Yeah, man, no, every
(04:01):
time at the same time. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know. Sure,
I'm already here. I'm sending you the zoom. I'm actually
into the zoom. Thanks, thanks, thanks, thanks for that man. Anyways, Miles,
we are thrilled to be joined in our third seat
by a writer, media critic, host of a couple podcasts.
You Are Good, a feelings podcast about movies, and the
(04:24):
classic the Mount Rushmore Podcast. It's not a podcast about
Mount Rushmore. It is like on the Mount Rushmore of
great podcasts, exactly You're wrong about Her writing has appeared
in The Believer on BuzzFeed. Truly one of the best
people in the world at interrogating the myths and narratives
we use to define ourselves. In the world around us.
(04:46):
Please welcome the brilliant and talented Sarah Marshall.
Speaker 2 (04:52):
And what a crazy intro. I feel so pumped up.
I feel like I want to be one of those
kids running onto the stage of Marian. Yeah. I don't
care much.
Speaker 1 (05:04):
Yeah yet, did you ever do an episode about that?
Speaker 2 (05:11):
He really should? I was just thinking this morning. One
of the things I find most fascinating is the question of,
like the inner workings of a nineties daytime talk show.
Speaker 3 (05:20):
Yeah, like, my god, right, because I mean, like, I
feel like we got the like the darkest glimpse after
the Jenny Jones thing. Yeah, that's when we started to
be like, oh no, no, no, was.
Speaker 2 (05:31):
The what if our actings have consequences?
Speaker 3 (05:34):
Jenny Jones one was where they outed one of their
guests for being in love with this other man, right,
and then the guy was murdered.
Speaker 1 (05:41):
Oh Jesus.
Speaker 2 (05:42):
Yeah, I'm gonna be iffy on the details, but yeah,
they and I don't think they aired the episode, but
right they they did facilitate a murder there.
Speaker 1 (05:51):
Yeah yeah, wow.
Speaker 2 (05:54):
Yeah, And you know you're wrong about as big on
the satanic panic and they were such a big part
of the wonderful things. Yeah, a real accelerant to the
like the wet cardboard and the mushroom growing experience, my
colleague metaphor, that's where we are.
Speaker 1 (06:15):
Which we are? Yeah, I was going to ask for
the best micology metaphors. You could call it what. Yeah,
We've talked about You're wrong about a lot on this podcast,
especially around human trafficking, and uh, it's just I think
the foremost debunker of bullshit myths and our show pedals bullshit.
I mean, it's what we do. We love to know.
(06:36):
We also like to bust bullshit myths when we're heads
up enough to catch them. But so we wanted to
just have you back on the show and go through
some of the stories you've covered, some of your favorites,
some of our favorites that we just want to make
sure our listeners are aware of because it's a great
show and.
Speaker 2 (06:57):
I'm so happy to be here. This is so love
and I'm so happy that we're in your zeitgeist. And
it's a really it's like a lovely and bleak and
lovely distinction to hold when it's like, you know, myth
busting is one of the most important roles in society today.
Speaker 1 (07:15):
Unfortunately. Yeah, it truly is all right. Before we get
into all that stuff, though, we do like to get
to know you a little bit better by asking you,
what is something either from your search history that's revealing
about who you are, or you could tell us something
that you've recently screencapped that is about who you are.
Speaker 2 (07:34):
Oh, I like the screencap question. Screencaps were such a
big part of my life in the Twitter era. Okay,
something I screen captured from a New York Times article
that I'll have to look up, but it was from
a couple of years ago is about the history of
food writing. And it was I was screencapping a quote
(07:56):
from Benjamin Disraeli from a letter he wrote and ate
in thirty one while he was in Cairo, and he wrote,
the most delicious thing in the world is a banana.
And I was like, I gotta save that. Wow, Now,
why did I think that was interesting? It's hard to articulate,
but I guess I guess need I need to have.
(08:18):
I can't remember that kind of thing anymore, so this
is the kind of thing I save.
Speaker 1 (08:22):
I am sometimes struck by the deliciousness of bananas, don't
I don't think I've ever made that claim, like to
that degree, but as an ingredient, and like it is
kind of a miraculous ingredient. There's a whole trunk.
Speaker 2 (08:37):
Fruit is kind of miraculous.
Speaker 1 (08:38):
Really, fruit really is an amazing invention invented by people
whose names we don't know, but like corticulturists years ago
made these things through just ingenious skills that we have
completely lost track of. Yeah, the banana being as creamy
as it is, Like the difference for me between a
(09:01):
smoothie with banana and without is like I don't think
you should be allowed.
Speaker 2 (09:06):
To where would smoothie be without? We will be nowhere?
Speaker 1 (09:09):
Thank you.
Speaker 3 (09:10):
You think it's the high potastic I feel like it's
like those high potassium foods like avocados and bananas, they
got that butteriness, that creaminess to them.
Speaker 2 (09:18):
Yeah, Nature's custard. And it's also like do you ever
get too high and think about like what if the
plants are in charge? You know, because they make the fruit,
and you know, we human ingenuity, like you said, has
done so much to make this fruit delicious, like we've
carried it forward, but like they make the fruit so
(09:39):
that we spread it around and we've like you know,
sward high and now we're crashing, and who's going.
Speaker 1 (09:46):
To take We've got these dipshits do for us? Yeah? Yeah, no,
take me over one game. Yeah, bring me to France,
that one big square mile of their finest land and
just like do everything to make us as comfortable as
possible on that land. Yeah, I uh, don't get too
high anymore. But when I did, that is the sort
(10:08):
of thought that would occur to me, I think, didn't
was it Michael Polland who wrote about plants like from that.
Speaker 2 (10:16):
The yeah read that book? But yeah, he did the
botanist dilemma, the Botany of Desire. He did a ton
of plant books.
Speaker 1 (10:25):
Not a type, but is isn't He also like the
drug the mind expansion, like yeah, rugs.
Speaker 2 (10:31):
He wrote a book that I can't remember what the
title is because my friends and I decided to call
it Michael Polland does drugs.
Speaker 1 (10:40):
But it is funny that that is such a high
thought that has like dominated the New York Times for
like a decade now.
Speaker 2 (10:47):
Right, the New York Times seems to frequently get high though,
based on the.
Speaker 1 (10:51):
Oh now this is your mind on plants? The mind
on plants, yeah. Then I think he was a guy
behind the Netflix Mind on Plants documentary as well, like
that that was an adaptation of this is your Mind
on Plants. But yeah, and then you've all know a
Harari and Sapiens kind of had a chunk where he
was basically like, we got trapped by wheat. We're in
(11:14):
the wheat trap and we got outsmarted by wheat.
Speaker 2 (11:18):
It's the lowest horror movie. That horror movie Millennium the making.
Oh my god, it's beautiful.
Speaker 1 (11:26):
The happening, Yeah, it is. The spoiler alert, but that
is the plot of the happening is essentially the plants
are killing us much quicker than wheat does, and much
more directly the corn too.
Speaker 2 (11:40):
Corn.
Speaker 1 (11:41):
Think what is something that you think is underrated?
Speaker 2 (11:46):
Sarah, hmmm, God, I love this question. And I think
here's a little vend that I have, which is that
we've really seen sort of the technologization if that's a word,
probably not of bread in the past twenty years, right,
(12:08):
bread has become this thing people make spreadsheets about, and like,
God bless them. If you're making bread spreadsheets, then you're
probably doing things that mere mortals aren't even capable of.
With bread bats, Yeah, exactly. Yeah, And there's so many
you know, there's so many ways to approach something, but
I think that it's made people feel like bread is
(12:29):
overly technical and something they can't just kind of like
fake their way through. Yeah, and really, and to me
there's a whole other I think both ways and other
ways are equally valid, and to me, there's a lot
of joy and just kind of muddling your way through.
I was just watching a video about how to agedly
(12:51):
create your own yeast using dandelion fermentation, like dandelions and sugar,
and you kind of create a wild yeast that way,
and that's not you could approach that technically, but you
could also just be like I am a witch and
I'm gathering weeds and getting them in a little right.
And I think something underrated is just like messing around
(13:13):
in a way that isn't meant to be successful the
first time, but that gives you a feel for something,
whether that's bread or whatever else, right, as long as
you're not like a surgeon, you know, don't do that.
Speaker 1 (13:24):
Right, right. Yeah. It feels like if like a jazz
musician was like recording all the notes they played in
like a solo and Okay, that was good.
Speaker 3 (13:33):
See right there, I probably should have gone to the
deflat not nice time though. It's like, no, just just
let it flow out of you, because I mean, I'm
not a baker myself, but based on what you're saying,
i'd imagine it's not that hard to completely fuck up
a loaf of bread if you have the ingredients in
the semi correct proportions, right right.
Speaker 2 (13:52):
It's like, you know, you'll end up with something that's
like basically bread. It might not be exactly the kind
that you want, but like it's bread, you'll be pretty
happy with it. Put butter on it, who cares? Do
another love learning it?
Speaker 1 (14:07):
Make a soup out of it, just soak it or something.
Speaker 2 (14:09):
Yeah, yeah, this is one of the krutons. This is
one of the things I am most strident about is
that I hate it when people sort of create the
illusion that something requires book learning.
Speaker 1 (14:24):
Right and like analysis and spreadsheets and.
Speaker 2 (14:29):
Yeah, I feel like it is a way into it,
but it's not obligatory.
Speaker 1 (14:33):
Yeah. I feel like a lot of like I'm very
bad at cooking, or at least it takes me a
really long time to cook because I am like very
precision and do not trust my instincts at all, Like
I believe I have very bad instincts and in that
in particular. But then you will see people who like
(14:58):
who think that you need to like over explain and
be like how did you make that exact cut in
that movie or like how did they choose that precise word?
And yeah, like like you were saying miles about jazz,
it feels like it's really the distinction between like people
who are good at an art and like not good
at an art, Like I suck at cooking, and so
(15:19):
I want to overanalyze it and just be like no,
but like if if I step here when I'm stirring
the dough, then like it could totally fuck everything up.
And it's like, yeah, because you don't have any instincts
in that regard, what's the.
Speaker 3 (15:36):
Yeah, there's you have to you have to find the
joy in it, because like even there are dishes that
I make a lot, and I don't I don't really
write down what the difference was every time. I just
kind of like intuiting that or just like realizing like,
oh right, I did this last time, Oh don't do
this next time, And I think I'm engaging with it
in a way that's more playful rather than.
Speaker 5 (15:56):
Like I'm cooking for the fucking head of state, don't
there's some kind of energy, And I think that's where
the spreadsheetism kind of creeps in, because we're not allowing
ourselves to be more playful about it.
Speaker 1 (16:07):
It's like so results based to maybe an overly rigid degree.
Speaker 2 (16:11):
Yeah, yeah, and it's you know, and it's about whatever's
fun for you. But like, something I also love that
I read once in a Jillia Child cookbook is that
she's like, I will always tell you why I'm asking
you to do something, because I never do something if
a cookbook tells me to do it and doesn't tell
me why, you know, because there's there's so many things,
(16:32):
you know that it's kind of like trying to learn
how to speak English perfectly by studying grammar, where like
you get to a point where experts agree or where
you sound so correct that people can understand you. And
like a lot of the joy of it is colloquial colloquialism.
Speaker 1 (16:49):
At a certain point, you just have to watch the soap operas.
You have to watch Jenny Jones and learn English from
those exactly.
Speaker 2 (16:56):
And you got such good vocabulary.
Speaker 1 (16:58):
Yes, oh yeah. What is something you think is overrated? H?
Speaker 2 (17:03):
I think texting is overrated. I think we're all texting
too much. We got to stop all the texting. Like,
I think it's a great tool, but I feel like
there are relationships I have where like we only text
with each other for years, and I realize that phone
calls are terrifying, but I don't know, maybe bring back
postcards or something which is like a text, but there
(17:25):
isn't a pressure to return one immediately. You can let
it simmer for a minute, right, I feel like we
should be talking to each other more, Like I am
feeling genuinely disturbed by how we are drifting farther and
farther apart technologically. And I also like, I love not
just TikTok, but any form of addictive scully short form
(17:47):
video the same way I loved Tumbler ten years ago.
But I was thinking about how we've come to the
point where, in a way, it feels like if you
don't make a montage about something, did it even happen?
And like it's so cool that people have the ability
to like take cinematic approaches to their own lives. But again,
it's like, it's your life, you know. We don't have
(18:09):
to we don't. I'm just a big ludite who wants
everyone to make bread without a recipe. That's my dream.
Speaker 3 (18:17):
Yeah, and just dump your whole SD card of digital
photos into a Facebook album like the ways of the
ancients did ago.
Speaker 1 (18:27):
I don't know, maybe there's something in there. I don't know,
you have some weird stuff and then checked that out.
But yeah, let's go.
Speaker 2 (18:33):
We'll sit for a Daghera type once a year when
the dagheratype man comes to town on his pony ryes.
Speaker 1 (18:39):
Stay very still, very very still.
Speaker 3 (18:43):
I mean, yeah, I know that feeling of like having
these like pure like feels like text exclusive friendships, and
they're like the way I've like cause again sometimes they're
not people like you would always talk to on the phone,
but somehow you just have good banter over text more
than you do over like on a phone call. But
then I did the thing of the bro version of
(19:04):
of escalating the socializing by being like, hey, man, are
you on PlayStation?
Speaker 1 (19:08):
Do you play this game?
Speaker 3 (19:10):
Then I can Then I'll then I talk to them
while playing a video game, and that becomes like sort
of the basis for like a phone call or substitute.
But it's interesting how sometimes they're like you have this
feeling of like, I don't know, man, like it's just
kind of cool just texting somebody. But to your point,
there's something much more like I don't know, Like I
think being an older millennial, like I grew up talking
(19:31):
on the phone endlessly, right, so I do miss that
to a certain extent. But I think with adult responsibilities,
it's not possible to be on the phone for three
hours watching cops.
Speaker 2 (19:42):
Oh my god, what a dream. Yeah, I or a
Lifetime the Lifetime Movie Network. Maybe I feel like, yeah,
there's something some inevitable process of aging at least today.
When you know time is marked by technology, is that
details of your early life begin to sound made up.
And one of them is that we could only send
a certain number of texts per month.
Speaker 1 (20:04):
Yeah, exactly right, right right?
Speaker 3 (20:06):
Yeah, or be like, dude, don't call me like fucking
before eight fool, I don't have I only have free nights.
Speaker 2 (20:11):
Yeah, we had minutes, we had character limits. We were
very we had to be kind of economical.
Speaker 1 (20:19):
Yeah, yeah, I'm not. I'm bad at texting in a
lot of cases. But yeah, there are some friendships where
it's like easier to just text, and then I have
like text exclusive friendships about where we're constantly talking about
how we should hang more, we should hang out in yeah, yeah,
content of the text.
Speaker 2 (20:41):
And it's like this plant that's like barely alive in
your past room and you give it like a teaspoon
of water every two months, and it's like I avenge me.
Speaker 1 (20:52):
Yeah, or you're just like, oh, good thing I did
to turn the exhaust fan on while I was showering
because the humidity actually nourished that plant in as still
just mean alive a little bit, right.
Speaker 2 (21:03):
So yeah, it feels like we have all these relationships
that are like scraggly and attenuated, and then we're like,
why do I feel lonely? I talk to people all day?
And it's like, well not really.
Speaker 1 (21:15):
Yeah, did people used to have those types of friendships
where they were like I've got a got a drawer
full of letters that I'm supposed to get back to.
Speaker 2 (21:25):
Like you know, I don't know, because even then you
would be like, dear Elisha, the sheep are lamming early
this spring.
Speaker 1 (21:34):
Right, It's like, yeah, I had to ground more wheat
at the water mill than I had expected this spring.
I hope you are well and yeahs.
Speaker 2 (21:46):
You know, dear Jack, let's go fishing yours.
Speaker 1 (21:50):
Yeah, exactly, Jack, twist fish and nasty. Just one word.
Speaker 3 (21:58):
Letter, dude, my mom's favorite movie. She'll always say that, Dude,
my mom fucking loves Broke Back Mountain. She's just like
it's so powerful. Like she'll because like she's a film
critic and in Japan, you know, she's she kind of
has kind of got a bit of a reputation there,
and like sometimes when there's like Oscar coverage that they'll
bring her on for it because like.
Speaker 1 (22:19):
You've been in La for you know, forty years covering
the business blah blah blah, and they'll be talking about
like the movies that are popping right now. She's like,
but what was it? What's the best film for you?
Speaker 3 (22:26):
She'll always always, she's always about it that I respect
the hell that consistent.
Speaker 1 (22:34):
She's consistent when that's your favorite movie, that's your favorite movie.
You know I can respect that as a as a
Jaws fan, you know, who will bring that up no
matter what. Yeah, I mean, I just brought it up there,
he did. Hey, all right, let's uh take a quick
break and we'll come back and we'll dig into some
(22:57):
great stuff from the podcast you are wrong about. We'll
be right back. What are we wrong about? You are
wrong about? And we're back. And I think we already
(23:21):
mentioned that you're wrong about. Is really you're really good with,
like moral panics, the satanic panic in particular, and just
the role. Yeah, it turns out the role of evangelical
Christianity and some of our biggest social movements of the
past half century. And you recently had an episode about
(23:43):
the pro life movement that was surprising to me, Like
I think you said this right off the bat that
I was not expecting you point out the pro life
movement is younger than Jeff Bridges the Deuce.
Speaker 2 (24:00):
This is how we mark age now, right.
Speaker 1 (24:04):
Yeah, but it's yeah, Like I guess it's specific, Like
there were people who were opposed to abortion before that,
but the kind of concerted, cohesive, evangelical driven version kind
of starts in nineteen seventy three, and it's part of
(24:25):
this movement by evangelicals to be like, hey, so our values,
people hate them. We're we've got bad values. We're we're
pro segregation. Nobody else seems to like that very much.
They're pretty uh, you know, they recognize that they're going
(24:47):
the wrong way in terms of relevancy.
Speaker 2 (24:49):
They're in need of a real makeover exactly.
Speaker 1 (24:54):
And so yeah, they settle on abortion, which the most
well known evangelical in the seventies was Jimmy Carter, which
is like, that's not who I come to associate evangelicals with.
But it was like a different time, and at that
time you didn't necessarily like being super violently against people's
(25:20):
right to have an abortion was not one of the
first things you associated with evangelicals, no.
Speaker 2 (25:26):
Or with the Republican Party. And I always love to
cite the fact that Betty Ford famously was pro choice
Republican and that that was a coherent political position for
the first lady to have at the time.
Speaker 1 (25:40):
Wow. Yeah, and Jimmy Carter being an evangelical again, I
a social justice warrior. Some would say he.
Speaker 2 (25:49):
Loves building houses for people. Yeah, I feel like there's
something that it is. Really it's interesting to reflect on
maybe arguably what has been lost because this is not
exactly my field, but many of my fields brush up
against it. And the history of evangelicism in America really
connects to the idea that God really is of and
(26:11):
for the people, and that prayer is about direct communication
with the divine and that you deserve to have a
connection to the Holy Spirit without there needing to be
some kind of conduit. So it really is, in a way,
another wave of you know, the various religious reformations that
(26:32):
we've seen throughout history that have made Christianity more and
more egalitarian. And there's historically been a lot of potential
for good in that and still is. But it's just that,
you know, evangelical Christianity in twenty twenty four, I think
is absolutely synonymous with the unbelievably sinister, the acratic, kleptocratic,
(26:55):
fascist dictatorship that we're now basically living in. So that's
really fun. It's nice.
Speaker 1 (27:01):
They really did not see it going that way, like
I guess I did, because we.
Speaker 2 (27:06):
Get it's the compliment sandwich. You gotta start with the
good and then you're like, now we have some news
we have we do have.
Speaker 1 (27:15):
About how things have gone since then. Yeah, I mean
you point out that one point. I forget if it
was that episode or not, but just if you look
at what the evangelical movement has done over the past
forty years in our lifetime, it's kind of what paranoid
eras of the US, you like, accused communists of doing.
(27:39):
You know, that there's going to be this secret takeover
that they were going to secretly infiltrate our Supreme Court,
and like.
Speaker 2 (27:47):
They have failed to infiltrate the media, which is nice.
You know, Interestingly, there's nothing conservatives are worse at than
making media.
Speaker 1 (27:57):
Yeah, they tried turning their hat around backwards, turning the
chair around backwards, they try everything. You still can't Yeah,
but yeah, and then it's kind of what they accuse
Satanists of doing in the eighties, like secrets.
Speaker 2 (28:14):
Absolutely, yeah, and what they're accusing you know, all these
drag queen groomers of doing. Now, there's a very in
any kind of abusive relationship where you think that your
user has more complicated motives than you ultimately realize that
they do. It's I think largely a projection game.
Speaker 3 (28:37):
Yeah, right, And it seems like so many of the
moral panics too, like they're like, you know, like all
the ones you've mentioned, even human trafficking, they're just sort
of like built on people's inability or like unwillingness to
examine actual systemic forces, and it's just much easier to
chalk it up to like, yeah, it's this other thing, man,
it's these Satanists that are going that are freaking out.
It's like, it's not that there's inequality, is that there
(28:58):
are these flash rob where they just go through and
steal everything and it's a crime wave, and it just allows,
i don't know, for people to sort of neatly put
some kind of larger issue into a problem that doesn't
quite actually get to the root of the cause.
Speaker 2 (29:12):
Yeah, I've been fascinated by slasher movies for a long time,
and I think that they do a weirdly great job
of illustrating this very i think kind of core piece
of American folklore where you know, if he was Friday
the thirteenth, as the er example, like some kind of
like the traditional slasher template is that somebody is wronged
(29:33):
in the past, Jason drowns because the counselors weren't paying
attention to making Doodle that boy drown and then some
kind of force avenging the wronged party shows up in
the present and innocent teens who are simply you know,
smoking a joint or making out suffer. And the sort
(29:57):
of arc of it is that you can sort of
momentarily acknowledge that injustice has occurred in the past, but
as long as you turn a representative of that injustice
into a force so dangerous that there's no proportionate response
except killing them, then you can justify any action in
(30:18):
the present and kind of even out the lecture. And
that feels like a really I don't know some way
that we were we were thinking through with these summer
camp movies, the kind of dominant political ideology we were
all living under.
Speaker 1 (30:34):
Yeah, well it is a kind of frontier wilderness setting
that everybody's familiar with, right that is where you know
colonial like these.
Speaker 2 (30:47):
Summer campser I can never populated my camp.
Speaker 1 (30:52):
They're always way out there in the woods. And then yeah,
they are being punished. Like I just think that at
a certain level, there's like an unspoken knowledge amongst Americans
that like, oh, yeah, we we've got it coming, like
this is this has been bad, Like what every everything
(31:15):
we've everything you see around you is built on top
of just ashes and atrocities, and we've got something horrible coming.
And so yeah, it makes sense when slasher films like
it does feel like if an alien came down and
(31:36):
just like looked at our films. Slasher films would be
pretty difficult to explain if you if they didn't have
like a psychological read all right, like we get no, no, no,
it would never happen. It's just a thing we like
to imagine happened to us. Why what is wrong? I
(31:56):
think we got to come in or something. I don't know, I.
Speaker 2 (31:59):
Just kind of active masochism. Yeah, we know we are
not what was intended.
Speaker 1 (32:07):
People, Right, So we put the Poulter guy's house on
top of a Native American burial ground and yeah, yeah,
that gets it out, That gets it.
Speaker 3 (32:17):
It's just funny how like that that sort of that
angst manifest in different ways, sometimes in films other times,
and people screaming at school board meetings, and like.
Speaker 1 (32:25):
I don't want my kids to know what a civil
war is or was about.
Speaker 2 (32:31):
People should be watching more horror movies, I think, yeah.
Speaker 1 (32:35):
Right, I wonder if that's my aversion? Why am I
so horror averse? I wonder what am I? You don't
feel guilty about anything? Yeah, I've got to clean consciousness.
Speaker 3 (32:43):
Yeah, I guess it's like a black and Japanese American.
I'm like, I don't know, bro.
Speaker 1 (32:46):
Yeah, yeah, y'all got that shit coming. Yeah, you shouldn't
feel weird about not liking the horror movies. That's us
man before liking them.
Speaker 2 (32:55):
Yeah, it's just yeah, white people four hours a week
go to the horror movie clinic a movie because I.
Speaker 1 (33:03):
Mean, like there's also like bad.
Speaker 3 (33:04):
I mean there's Japanese horror films, and there's clearly there's
a laundry list of atrocities that Japan has committed to.
And I wonder does there are there like what's German horror?
Like does this is there?
Speaker 1 (33:14):
Is there like a universal language of like sort of
expressing this like through what we consider horror, because I know, cultural.
Speaker 2 (33:19):
Difference is really interesting because I feel like Japanese horror
movies there are often ghosts.
Speaker 1 (33:25):
Yeah, no, precisely, and we have so.
Speaker 2 (33:27):
Few ghosts nowadays in American horror. We love demons. We
won't shut up about demons. Yeah, my chagrin.
Speaker 1 (33:34):
Germany just has Werner Herzog, who's just everything is an.
Speaker 2 (33:42):
Her SOG's new TV? Why crayons?
Speaker 1 (33:48):
Why do you need horror movies when nature is trying
to kill you.
Speaker 2 (33:52):
Always gardening with verner herd song.
Speaker 1 (33:58):
It's just a it's just a documentory about hummingbirds.
Speaker 2 (34:01):
In the abundance of these queens pushings that way out
through the soil. I see none of the divinity of
springtime or the pagan gods. I see only pointless tea.
But I can also use them to make a nice pesto.
Speaker 1 (34:21):
The While we're on the subject of movies, you kind
of stumbled on I don't like the Andes. You did
an episode on the Andes rescue the Alive story, as
I think it's mostly known in America, the rugby team
crashes in the Andes is living there for months.
Speaker 2 (34:40):
On a fricking glacier on a.
Speaker 1 (34:42):
Glacier, freezing to death, starving to death. Eventually turned to
cannibalism to avoid starving to death a couple. So this
past year, one of the best movies I saw was
Society the Snow, which does a really good job of updating.
You know, there was the version in the nineties Alive
(35:04):
with like Ethan Hawk, I think, and you know it
was like the hollywood ized version Society the Snow like
updates it and like adds a lot of the humanity
back to it, which was something that your episode really did.
But both movies really missed something that I loved that
you brought up, which is that people like they were
(35:25):
doing bits the whole time, right, Like the number of
bits that they did was like, at one point, they're
waiting to be rescued, and then they look off and
they see an avalanche like a white wall coming towards them, right,
and then they realized that somebody is actually using a
(35:46):
fire extinguisher to like make it look like there's an
avalanche coming with them as a bit, and then they're
like pretend they were like talking like planning bits for
what to do when the helicopter arrives at the scene
of their plane crash, like talking about like the funniest
thing to say while they were in it. But it's
just it's, I don't know, generally, just movies about true
(36:11):
stories and history feel like they have to be as
humorless as like a Christopher Nolan film, you know, right,
and totally it's just not how reality is. Like I
would have loved the bits in both of those movies.
Speaker 3 (36:25):
Oh yeah, well, because even you think about like the
like the like the wild stuff, like engineering students pull
like while they're in college, you know what I mean,
the fun they have like like JPL is nearby in
LA and like they do like wild just pumpkin carving contests,
just weird things are like now we're using our like power,
like brain power to get stuff to other like the moon,
(36:47):
to have fucking fun. And yet to think that like
they were just I don't know, at the in where
were those alamos. They were just like hanging out counting
marbles or something. They're like, all right, I'm gonna go
to bed, Yeah, see you later, like the horse and
around come on.
Speaker 1 (37:01):
Though, Yeah no, yeah, those they were doing goods constantly,
like all throughout history. And I think it, I really
do think it's the same reason that comedies almost never
win at the Academy Awards, is the reason that they
feel like they need to launder movies of any like
fun when they're about history. Yeah, no, this has to
(37:23):
be serious. We can't. We have to like remove the fun.
But I feel like it would just feel more lived
in and yeah, I don't know, it would be be
a blast if we actually saw how the people were
funny at the time.
Speaker 2 (37:37):
Well, and you know, and I think about when you
think about the movies that endure and that are a
part of your life and that you watch a lot,
like and you know, it's different. People have different requirements.
Some people have comfort movies that have no funny parts
in them at all, God bless her, But like, aren't
most of the things that you watch more than a
couple times funny?
Speaker 1 (37:58):
Yeah, they have fun the characters are having fun or
they're funny.
Speaker 2 (38:02):
Or yeah, there's the you know, because it's like a
full spectrum of humanity. It's kind of like eating an
entire meal with nothing, no sweetness in it at all,
Like you can do it, but it's it feels there's
something missing.
Speaker 1 (38:17):
Yeah, right. Yeah. The other thing that gout left out
of both movies that your episode kind of restores is
like it's kind of an important detail. Like you go
from the story of them like surviving getting rescued to
that that's kind of it. And then like today we
know them as like the cannibal people and the media
(38:41):
discovering the cannibalism, like the doctor checking them out and
being like, wait a second, these guys like had to
have been eating something. And then like a big like
moral judgment ensues and like everybody's like their family is
like upset buy it and they're like, wait, would our
(39:02):
parents have rather us starved to death than like the
Catholic church weighs in and is like, no, it's good
that they were eating people, which was very Yeah, every
once in a while they nail it. And then the
other detail was that they were like a few days
walk from a hotel full of food. Was like, I
(39:27):
don't know, I can see why you left it out,
but Jesus Christ, that's I mean, it's like triangle of
sadness like that. It's I don't know if you guys
saw that movie. I did.
Speaker 2 (39:39):
I really liked that movie and I saw that the
night that midterm results were coming in, so it was
like perfect for that very distracting.
Speaker 1 (39:47):
Yes, oh that's a good idea. Just watch a really
good like, save a really good movie for when for
election night. Yeah, gets sucked.
Speaker 2 (39:57):
You need to be transported for real?
Speaker 1 (39:59):
Yeah. Is.
Speaker 2 (40:00):
I think that the kind of texture of tragedy is
what makes it feel real. And I think that to
some extent, when we tell stories that are so grim
and feel so distant from us, that that's a way
of us feeling like it's not going to happen to us,
when you know, really, so many of these things are
the result of being in a boat, being in a skyscraper,
(40:21):
being in the path of a forest fire. Like, we're
going to have more and more epidemics and disasters and
they're just going to become part of everyday life. For
those of us who don't feel that way yet.
Speaker 1 (40:32):
Yeah, I hope we can remember to be funny, and
we're going to.
Speaker 2 (40:36):
Be so funny. We're going to be the funniest generation
that has ever lived.
Speaker 1 (40:40):
The has ever lived through an apocalypse? Yeah right, you
know the aliens will come and they're like Wow. As
their civilization was dying, they put out some of the
best comedies.
Speaker 2 (40:50):
Best content came right near me.
Speaker 3 (40:53):
The guy need a Drum set out of billionaire skulls
and they're scouring doing solos. It was really quite artistic.
Speaker 1 (41:01):
I have to say, oh, yeah, great, I think you
should leave quotes. As their city was burning.
Speaker 2 (41:09):
Down, well then once the grid went down, they had
to make those meme museums, right, those were a real tree.
Speaker 1 (41:17):
Yeah, that would be fun though, to like figure out
which memes go in the museum, Like, I might as
well just do that now. I feel like it would
be a good public works project. Biden, Come on, yeah,
come on, but these Yeah, because we're gonna have somebody
out of work TikTokers when you ban the app. Uh
you know the new Civil Conservation Corps of Meme Collection
(41:38):
and Remembrance. Yeah, all right, let's uh, let's take a
quick break and we'll come back. We'll keep talking and
we're back. We're and just generally not to like put
(41:59):
you on the spot, but I am curious that, like,
do you have some common flags that like pop up
where like just at this point, you've seen so many
stories that are full of shit, like where you're just like, oh,
like I think one that you mentioned during the I
think it was the human Trafficking episode. Yeah, it was
(42:21):
the human trafficking episode, because right, yeah, the Bob Craft
thing where it's it's a tactic you see used by
these low rent journalistic outlets like the New York Times
where they will just use a like the only source
in the article will be a cop or multiple like laws.
Speaker 2 (42:44):
That was the first thing I was thinking of.
Speaker 1 (42:46):
Yeah, yes, oh, they love to do it, don't they.
Speaker 2 (42:49):
Yeah, And It's so interesting because it is you know,
not just within moral panics, but you know, really any
story that we get wrong or report in a biased fashion.
It is just journalistic tradition in this country to write
a story where the police are your only source and
where you say, you know, police say this and that,
(43:12):
and treat it with utter credulity, because that's how the
profession has worked historically, and so it is. It's an
interesting area too, where you know, something that has gotten
grandfathered in as a convention that we've only recently begun
chipping away at, has allowed for worse reporting because you know,
(43:34):
we've inherited it from I don't know what I would say,
basically the sense that reporters have to work with and
to an extent for the police in order to get access.
Speaker 1 (43:46):
Yeah, that's what they've told themselves the least, right, like
we need to do this and you know, talk to
the people who skulls they're cracking. They're a good source,
right right. And then the sense that you're you're on
the same side or on the side of the establishment,
which is also you know, hopefully that's changing. Yeah, the
Robert Craft story, in particular Robert Craft is the billionaire
(44:08):
owner of the New England Patriots who got caught in
a massage parlor in Florida paying for sex, And the
New York Times just extensively quotes this one share of
talking about how the women were brought in like China,
from China, from China. They were smuggled in from China,
presumably in shipping containers. I don't know if that's specifically mentioned,
(44:29):
but God, the trafficking people love that.
Speaker 2 (44:32):
It's just like the shipping container thing. Just get this
woman a coach, a seatan coach. It'll be just as uncomfortable,
and her break her spirit just as well.
Speaker 1 (44:43):
But he's the cops and the forced sex with thousands
of men and you know, new women, right, new shipments
of women every couple of days or you know, every week.
Speaker 2 (44:55):
Like and again, the overhead of this kind of an
outs think about how hard it is to manic inventory
if you're selling.
Speaker 1 (45:01):
Beads just like an evil massage parlor corporation with the
budget of Amazon.
Speaker 2 (45:09):
You know, right, yeah, And I hate to sound insensitive,
but it is like it's stuff like that where you're like,
what are the physical realities of even the building that
we're talking about this happening in because that's such a
big part of the Satanic panic, where the direness of
the crimes people are being accused of means that people
are less likely to be like, excuse me, I was
(45:29):
just wondering, how are this many infants going missing from
hospitals every year? None of them are reporting these crimes
or you know, because we know that, like people actually
study real crimes that occur, and so we learn sort of,
you know, it's imperfect, but we learn certainly that there
are trends, and one of them is that people who
(45:50):
kidnap babies from hospital nurseries tend to be a woman
who's lost a child who's trying to replace that child. Yes,
that's kind of the typical profile. And that doesn't mean
it covers everything, but it means it's you know, that
kind of accounts for the cases that people have noticed.
And if there were thousands of babies needed for Satanic
sacrifice going missing all the time in the eighties, then
(46:13):
why weren't hospitals noticing that? And that's just a question
about are we advancing by degrees into a worldview where
none of these questions matter? And you know that has
happened for some people clearly, but it's I don't know.
I hope it can still have a cooling effect to
bring these things up.
Speaker 1 (46:31):
Yeah. So, I mean when the human trafficking episode, when
I first heard it, it was at the time when
TikTok and social media was full of videos where people
would be like, you see the zip tie on my
car door handle?
Speaker 2 (46:47):
Oh, the one that you could have put there?
Speaker 1 (46:50):
Yes, impossible, actually impossible when that matches the stuff that's
in your trunk. Now that means I've been marked for
trafficking and there's probably a man under my car right
now waiting, and it's.
Speaker 2 (47:02):
Like, cool, why did he put the zip tie on
there then?
Speaker 1 (47:06):
To remind himself obviously? Is it like parking enforcement when
they chalk your tires, when they're like, oh, this person's
been here for these two hours. Yeah, they're still there
in that chalk's there, I'll know. But yeah, it's a
very like it just it obscures like the real dangers.
Speaker 3 (47:23):
Because I think that was the really eye opening part
of the episode, is even understanding how we're defining trafficked
people and who they are, because most of the time
it doesn't conform to the very like Liam Niesen based
version taken version of like trafficking that people think of
like you were snatched up violently in broad daylight and
(47:44):
then sent off to some you name whatever.
Speaker 1 (47:48):
Specific horror appeals to the audience right to be.
Speaker 2 (47:51):
One of the thousands of women servicing thousands of clients
at a massage parlor next to you palm stry place
with three parking spots in front of it. And also
it's like, you know, there's this great inflation of tragedy
where it's like, do we care about people who've been
victimized in like less extreme ways, like what about people?
(48:14):
Because it And again this ties to the satanic panic
where it feels like it becomes a way of obscuring
the importance of trauma that happens on a more modest scale.
Not that extreme cases don't exist, but they're more rare.
Speaker 1 (48:28):
Yes, we take real world tragedies that are mundane or
are the things that people just don't want to think about,
and we put movie tropes over them, like we put
the movie tropes that like the warning the zip TI
thing is a perfect example because it's like movie villains
(48:50):
love to warn you before they do a thing. They
like to be.
Speaker 6 (48:53):
Coming for you and then like disappeared just a lot
a Danny Gonzalez video I was reminded of through a
YouTube comment that force of literature I'm most familiar.
Speaker 2 (49:04):
With these days about I think about flat earthers, but
some nature of conspiracy theories, where so many conspiracy theories
hange on the idea that like there are these clues,
there's this puzzle you're in, like a Michael Douglas in
the game game and he's like, if the government was
hiding something from you, then why would they leave clues
(49:27):
to help you figure it out? Like why wouldn't they
just not do that?
Speaker 1 (49:33):
Right? Because they're the snowman. They wanted to give you
all the clues, mister policeman.
Speaker 4 (49:37):
You know.
Speaker 1 (49:38):
That's that's how they get their sick kicks, is right.
Speaker 2 (49:42):
I guess. And these stories where it's like where you
get to imagine yourself as the hero of a complicated
game or Harry Potter and your letter is coming and
it's just like you're just a person. Like there are
a lot of conspiracies going on, but the thing is
that the people who conspire tend to be doing it
internal memos or out loud or in books that they publish.
Speaker 1 (50:04):
Yes, right, and just they have all the money and
a big enough legal team that you can't point out
and it's.
Speaker 2 (50:14):
Not a puzzle. They just say it because they don't
really think there's anything wrong with what they're doing, or
if they think that what they're doing is illegal, then
they'll you know, still say it like Rudy Juliani.
Speaker 3 (50:25):
Right right, and it's be like, so what though, like.
Speaker 1 (50:30):
Everybody does that actually do think? Yeah.
Speaker 3 (50:35):
The other thing that really struck me too is just
like the the way that especially things like human trafficking
it's talked about, is like they talk about it is
if it's this this gigantic thing that's happening, like hundreds
of hundreds of thousands of people perhaps are being taken
and trafficked.
Speaker 1 (50:53):
Or it happened to anyone, could have happened to anyone.
Speaker 2 (50:56):
But then it's the way to white women in their
thirties who are beginning to feel less valued by society
now that they're aging visibly. I personally think.
Speaker 1 (51:06):
The Stepford Wives episode, right.
Speaker 3 (51:08):
Or even like or even just like the idea of
you know, like that they were like you know, certain teachers,
there was information circulating around about be like how to
identify if one of your students are being trafficked and
it's like depressed?
Speaker 2 (51:20):
What if they're being abused by their very own parents?
Speaker 1 (51:23):
Right right, Yeah, we don't care about that. No, no, no trap.
Speaker 3 (51:26):
But that's what I mean, Like, that's it's always interesting
to see because even that description was so bad. It
was merely like even you brought up on the show.
It's like you're describing a teenager.
Speaker 1 (51:34):
Like someone who's like becoming maybe a little more confrontational,
maybe tired because they don't sleep, maybe like they do
they have a bar code tattoo, Yeah, a bar code perhaps,
Like come on, now, like there's not skew numbers like this,
Now what movie is?
Speaker 2 (51:51):
You would just chip them? At this point That's what
I do at my child trafficking concern. Of course, what
everybody does now.
Speaker 3 (51:59):
Right, and so much of that is born out of
just the way even these numbers are gathered. But then people,
depending on what your perspective is, like, well, I don't
want to go off what law enforcement said that there's
maybe around five hundred cases. I'd rather go with the
number that is by the thousands, where the reporting on
that is not it's not accurate, and it's quite flawed.
(52:19):
But again, for people who want to sort of pedal
this sort of myth around it, it's very convenient to
be like, well, look a look at this reporting. I mean, now,
don't look too deep into how that is, because it
can be a child that runs away multiple times and
if a parent says I think they're being trafficked, that
we can count that as like ten times. Yeah, that's
ten traffickings. Yeah, that's ten takens.
Speaker 1 (52:41):
Right.
Speaker 2 (52:42):
I guess watched my own Private Idaho for the first
time in a really long time, and it's, you know,
such a kind of artifact of thirty years ago, but
it's also you know, it's about young like teenage hustlers
working in the Northwest, and there's a scene where some
of them are telling, you know, these really horrifying stories
of assaults that they've expect sperienced and what they've gone
through at the hands of clients. But also you know
(53:07):
that this is a picture of you know, this pretty
you know, as far as I can tell, pretty realistic
view of what it's like to be kind of on
your own trying to make it in a world that's dangerous,
but maybe is the only world that there can exist
for you because you have no home to go back
to or you were kicked out of it, or at
(53:29):
home is still less safe than being out here, you know.
And that's I think, so much more present of a
danger and so much more real danger, yeah, than what
we've been talking about as a conservative fantasy. But then
it's like, again, that's a problem that directs our attention inwards,
(53:50):
and so we love to make up a bigger problem
outside to distract ourselves with.
Speaker 1 (53:55):
Right, right, trafficking is like that. The crimes of trafficking,
the section abuse, the you know, being under the influence
of somebody who is you know, exploiting you. Those things
actually do happen. The numbers are not on par with
like what the guy who made Sound Freedom might lead
you to believe, but they do happen, and it's usually
(54:18):
too like you mentioned, like queer youth who are kicked
out of their homes, just people who are living in
poverty and like need a place to sleep and are
therefore like forced to do things that they don't want
to to just like avoid being on the street and
like having their lives put in danger. And but yeah,
(54:38):
those are things that are endemic, systemic problems that people
would rather not pay attention to. And so you get this,
like it's really wild how there's not like the original
like that the US, the world is such a big place,
(55:00):
like you could you should be able to find an
example of the thing that you want to happen, Like you.
Speaker 2 (55:05):
Can find examples of really weird versions. You can have
anything you can think of. Someone is put in their
rectum somewhere in this country.
Speaker 1 (55:14):
They have not come up with, like all they have
is taken and now the sound of like they have
Liam Neeson movies and the sound of freedom, like that's
what they've got. They don't even have their like one
news story that they've like just exploited to be like
this happens all the time, because yeah, it's just there's
so little there there.
Speaker 2 (55:35):
Right, there needs to be a ranking system, and this
is like a level lower than like you know, crime
like stranger danger kidnappings, which do occur, but just not
on the scale that we ever said they did, and
so therefore can be blown out of proportion and used
to pass laws that chip away at the rights of defendants.
(55:56):
But but yeah, we're we're now on on a lower tier,
the tier if you will, where nothing is real.
Speaker 1 (56:05):
Yes, just the guys from w Liam Neeson.
Speaker 3 (56:07):
Like, from your perspective, do you think a lot of
you know, pushing these kinds of like moral panics because
like the are to do with trying to criminalize things
that they don't want. But it's also because like in
built with all of these moral panics, like we've just said,
is like this just lack of desire to actually confront
(56:28):
what these systemic forces are. And I guess by trying
to solve it, then they just enact all kinds of
like you know, criminal like just to try and criminalize
as much shit as possible and that's the solution. What
do you think the sort of balance is between like
the agenda and just sort of the human sort of
the human nature of not wanting to actually take on
(56:48):
a problem at all, because it feels like they work
so hand in hand with so many things that it
feels like maybe they do start with something but being like, no,
this is an issue, and then it turns and actually
no immigrants are bad, and you're like whoa, whoa, Okay,
well which one was it? And I know that some
people are absolutely on the anti immigration thing, but a
(57:09):
lot I think people get pulled in, probably because it's
the don't want to confront the realities of what's going
on side of the coin.
Speaker 2 (57:14):
Maybe yeah, yeah, And I think that there's I think something,
you know, this kind of connects with the pro life movement,
And as you've been saying, I think that something you know,
the human trafficking panic, the satanic panic, a really strong
moral panic, feels like it endures and it returns and
it never really leaves us, partly because it comes from
so many fronts, and also because it addresses some kind
(57:37):
of real concern right because I think, you know, we
saw such a huge takeoff in the summer of twenty
twenty of you know, the claim that you can't put
your kid in a mask because that's that makes it
easier for the human traffickers. Do you remember that we
were doing that for a while.
Speaker 1 (57:57):
It was like, you can't put.
Speaker 2 (57:58):
Your kid in a mask because God knows, you can't
tell what your child looks like with their face covered.
You don't like wash their clothes and do their hair right,
and you know, and that felt to me, this at
least was what I thought at the time and still
think some kind of response to the fact that, like
we understood that what was happening was really really bad
(58:19):
for kids, you know, Like I was very very conservative,
small c conservative, careful con conservative about you know. I
didn't go into like a place of business for like
a full year. I was extremely strict with myself in
terms of COVID coutiousness, just because I knew that if
I gave myself any parameter to screw up, I probably would.
(58:44):
And I had sort of sensitive people in my orbit,
I mean, immune system wise, so you know, just being
fully on you know, that being my life at the time,
I felt I still felt, as it's very reasonable to
feel that like we were all being sort of broiled
alive psychologically and there was nothing we could do about it,
and that this was dangerous for children. And I think
(59:06):
that the kind of the way the trafficking panic about
children took root at that time, I think, and maybe
this is charitable of me, but I don't think it's
you know, it's not maybeing nice to say this. It's
just kind of thinking about what would be on people's
minds that like, if you want and also cynically, if
you want to whip up a panic. You look at
what are parents upset about. They know that something bad
(59:29):
is going on in terms of their children's welfare, so
you can invent something that they would rather be the
bad thing going.
Speaker 1 (59:34):
On, right, Yeah, and just all that everybody's under a
lot of emotional purmoil.
Speaker 2 (59:42):
We're not thinking critically right in those periods so much. Yeah, Yeah,
I certainly wasn't. But I think just ultimately the point
that you land on in that episode is to kind
of understand what is actually at stake and what is
actually the intention of this concern over human trafficking, Like
(01:00:05):
when they actually bust a quote unquote human trafficking ring,
Like there's an example of a place that was providing,
you know, services for sex workers in Seattle and it
got busted, and you know, when they're criminalizing the people,
they don't seem interested in taking care of the victim.
(01:00:28):
They basically tell the victim like, you can go to
jail for sex work, or you can like go to
this shelter where we'll take away your phone and internet,
you know, like a trafficker would like, you know, like
we'll now we'll treat you like we are cleaning about it.
Speaker 1 (01:00:47):
Yeah, but yeah, it's and a lot of it. Like
I mean, people should go listen to the episode. There's
also some really you know that you're much more likely
to be called out as a trafficker if you are
part of like an interracial thing family these days, and
that actually goes back to the what the intent of
the original trafficking laws was were was like you know,
(01:01:08):
anxiety over slavery ending and women's rights happening, and like
they needed a way to make it against the law
for interracial couples to date each other.
Speaker 2 (01:01:19):
And yeah, so and perceived advances in civil rights seem
like a really important ingredient. Yes, for moral panics too, Yeah.
Speaker 3 (01:01:29):
Yeah, absolutely, because what was that Like I think there
was something that was that was in the episode is
essentially that like around any kind of trafficking pipeline, it
always led to some kind of anti immigration sentiment.
Speaker 1 (01:01:41):
Oh yeah, Like it was just sort.
Speaker 3 (01:01:42):
Of like that was like the that was the sort
of sequence there, and I think just yet, yeah, with
like so many things, like so many of these sort
of moral panics, right, like whether it's the anti choice
movement or human trafficking, like the rhetoric is so victim focused.
Speaker 1 (01:01:54):
Yeah, and but.
Speaker 3 (01:01:55):
Really you just but it really reveals itself how much
the victims were merely just sort of the road to
the criminalization of something, because at the end of the day,
there's no one actually advocating for helping the victims in
any meaningful way for all the people like, well, then yeah,
how about adoption if that's a route without having to
have an abortion, but we have we do fuck all
(01:02:15):
in terms of creating a system that helps people, whether
that's like a foster care system or making it easier
to adopt. It just like it just falls apart. It's
just sort of like, let me just chum the water
with this first part. And then if you're really asking
me to do the work, Oh no, I'm not.
Speaker 1 (01:02:30):
I'm not. It's not more about the end.
Speaker 2 (01:02:32):
It comes back to Shaws.
Speaker 1 (01:02:33):
Yeah, Sarah, what a pleasure having you. Thank you so
much for taking the time to gosh, where can people
find you and follow you and all that good stuff?
Speaker 2 (01:02:45):
Ooh, you can find me at You are good And
you're wrong about wherever you get your podcasts. I've always
said I should start a podcast service called Wherever because
I would get free advertising everywhere into the past and
you can find me there. And also I live in
Portland and I'm always looking for fun stuff to do.
(01:03:09):
So if you have an event or a art thing
or a fun I don't know you got a neat
squash variety, let me know about it.
Speaker 1 (01:03:18):
There you go, And is there a work of media
that you've been enjoying, either a tweet, anything from a
tweet to a film.
Speaker 2 (01:03:27):
I'm so happy you asked, because I fell in love
recently with I don't know if either of you remember this,
but the web series Chris Fleming did like ten years ago, Gail.
It's like forty episodes of it. There's a whole arc.
Gail is the ultimate high strong mom from Massachusetts. I agree,
an absolute genius. The Gail series got me through the
(01:03:49):
darkest days of winter and there's an episode I think
called The Dinner Party, Part two where Gail forces her
a cappella troop to lip sync to Yannie Live at
the Acropolis and it is still one of the funniest
things I have ever seen in my whole life. And
(01:04:10):
the Holy Spirit was in Chris Flemming that day. That's
what I believed.
Speaker 1 (01:04:16):
Amazing miles. Where can people find you as their working
media you've been enjoy it.
Speaker 3 (01:04:20):
Yeah, at Miles of Gray on Twitter and Instagram. Obviously
you know about mad Boosties. You know about four to
twenty day fiance find me there also, uh working media.
Speaker 1 (01:04:30):
Man. These Korean reality shows on Netflix, they get me
all the time. There's a new season of the show
Physical one hundred that's out that's like just about like
I guess they just pick like one hundred fit people
to do just like the wildest stuff. Like the first
thing is like who can just run on it? Yeah?
Speaker 3 (01:04:49):
The first season is like who can just hang off
this till their muscles give out? Or like in the
second seed the second season, the first challenge they do
to like start sorting people's like who's just gonna run
so hard on these treadmills?
Speaker 1 (01:05:01):
Like yeah, just spread someone? Yeah Yeah. As someone who
would never do that, I'm always like, Wow, I'm just
fascinated by people who are just such physical specimens. And
it's just a very interesting way to watch a competition
reality show and learn some Korean along the way. Also,
So yeah, watching amazing tweet I've been enjoying. Jason Smiley
(01:05:24):
tweeted a picture of Lenny Kravitz looking shredded and said
Lenny Kravitz turned sixty in a couple months, what's your excuse?
And then honey, I am a guy and I shrunk.
The kids on Twitter retweeted that and wrote, I don't
understand was I supposed to kill him? What's your excuse?
(01:05:47):
You can find me on Twitter at Jack Underscore Obrian.
You can find us on Twitter at daily Zeikeeist. Read
The Daily Zeitgeist on Instagram. We have Facebook fan page
on a website, Daily zeikeist dot com. Wore you post
our episodes and our foot note where we link off
t information that we talked about in today's episode, as
well as a song that we think you might enjoy. Miles,
is there a song where you think people might.
Speaker 3 (01:06:08):
Yeah, there's a just some new Chromebin.
Speaker 1 (01:06:12):
I love Krumbin, I love the vibes. I like being
dreamy out there. They're a great, great band. They have
a new track called May ninth that's out that came out.
Speaker 3 (01:06:22):
Just this year. So check this out. This is May
ninth from Chromebin.
Speaker 1 (01:06:26):
May the ninth be with you and all right, you
will link off to that in the footnotes. The Daily's
like as a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from
My Heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio Wrap, Apple podcast, or
wherever you listen to your favorite shows. That is gonna
do it for us this morning, back this afternoon to
tell you what is trending and we will talk to
you about fight by
Hello the Internet, and welcome to season three thirty one,
Episode two of dir Daily's Like Guy Say production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:09):
This is a.
Speaker 1 (00:10):
Podcast where we take a deep down and do America
share consciousness. And it is Tuesday, March twenty sixth, twenty
twenty four.
Speaker 3 (00:17):
That's right, March twenty six It's National Nugat Day. We
don't understand what nugat is. Technically Epilepsi Awareness Day, National
Spinish Day, shoutout Popeye, an American Diabetes Association Alert Day.
But nugat, what is it? And how do we continue
to live without knowing what it is? I just know
it as white chewy stuff in the middle.
Speaker 1 (00:39):
I thought it was the stuff in the middle of
three Musketeer bar and in Milky Way with carmel. But yeah,
when I look at the Google image surge of nugat
would indicate that it's like a white budge thing. It
looks terrible. Look at this nugat right here. Yeah, yeah,
Like all the nugat that Google image search returns is
(01:02):
not what I had in mind.
Speaker 3 (01:04):
It says made by whipping egg whites together and adding
honey or sugar, roasted nuts, and sometimes candy fruit. No
thank you on the cant Oh. It dates back to
the Roman Empire. See that's why I think about Rome
so much, because I love nugat.
Speaker 1 (01:17):
I feel like they also it's from so long ago
that just anything that was sugar was like called nugat.
You know, they just like it was from a time
of like when the only candy was like necho wafers
and nugat. Yeah, what's that. I don't know.
Speaker 3 (01:33):
I dropped some eggs and some sugar and I just
whipped it up furiously, and I don't know my kids
then it fell.
Speaker 1 (01:39):
On the ground and they're like nuts and sticks stuck
in it. So we're gonna call that on purpose.
Speaker 3 (01:46):
Yeah, I mean I needed to like the etymology of
fucking nugat Nugat.
Speaker 1 (01:52):
My name is Jack O'Brien aka.
Speaker 4 (01:55):
Welcome to my golf course, Palmersaurus. That's Jeff Explore the
Titanic but before it got wrecked. All these medals I've sold,
I'm the smartest god because of cold.
Speaker 1 (02:14):
That is courtesy of Rezik on the Discord in honor
of the Australian billionaire Clive Palmer, who first of all
came to our attention most recently because he's rebuilding the
Titanic and like doing the trip again, making the making
the captain get drunk again and just like kind of
(02:35):
sloalow them through those icebergs. But already had turned the
best golf course in Australia, like I don't I don't
know from golf courses, but like the golf course where
the PGA like would hold their big tournaments. He bought
that and started putting animatronic dinosaurs all over it. Called
(02:56):
it Palmersaurus. It's called it's called you gave it a
put a giant plastic t rex on the ninth hole
and named it Jeff. So anyways, shout out to that man.
I'm thrilled to be joined as always by my co host,
mister Miles Gras.
Speaker 3 (03:15):
That's right, it's Miles Gray driving in a busted Honda
Prelude down lankershim because he's a lord of Lankersham. It's
the black and the showgun with no gun. Miles, Great,
thank you so much for having me back, Jack again.
Always appreciate it.
Speaker 1 (03:28):
Hey man, let's you know you're you're one of the
faces on Mount site more. Yeah, thank you. I love
one of our favorites.
Speaker 3 (03:34):
I love getting that email from you on a Monday
morning and being like, hey, man, would love to have
you back another season.
Speaker 1 (03:40):
I'm like, I do email. You've been on every episode
so far. I do email you every time and invite
you back to the next season to keep you in
your place, so you know, yeah, I mean at a
certain point, I'm like, well, this is kind of contractual.
At this point, Hey man, I don't know if you're
doing anything. I always open it. Yeah, man, no, every
(04:01):
time at the same time. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know. Sure,
I'm already here. I'm sending you the zoom. I'm actually
into the zoom. Thanks, thanks, thanks, thanks for that man. Anyways, Miles,
we are thrilled to be joined in our third seat
by a writer, media critic, host of a couple podcasts.
You Are Good, a feelings podcast about movies, and the
(04:24):
classic the Mount Rushmore Podcast. It's not a podcast about
Mount Rushmore. It is like on the Mount Rushmore of
great podcasts, exactly You're wrong about Her writing has appeared
in The Believer on BuzzFeed. Truly one of the best
people in the world at interrogating the myths and narratives
we use to define ourselves. In the world around us.
(04:46):
Please welcome the brilliant and talented Sarah Marshall.
Speaker 2 (04:52):
And what a crazy intro. I feel so pumped up.
I feel like I want to be one of those
kids running onto the stage of Marian. Yeah. I don't
care much.
Speaker 1 (05:04):
Yeah yet, did you ever do an episode about that?
Speaker 2 (05:11):
He really should? I was just thinking this morning. One
of the things I find most fascinating is the question of,
like the inner workings of a nineties daytime talk show.
Speaker 3 (05:20):
Yeah, like, my god, right, because I mean, like, I
feel like we got the like the darkest glimpse after
the Jenny Jones thing. Yeah, that's when we started to
be like, oh no, no, no, was.
Speaker 2 (05:31):
The what if our actings have consequences?
Speaker 3 (05:34):
Jenny Jones one was where they outed one of their
guests for being in love with this other man, right,
and then the guy was murdered.
Speaker 1 (05:41):
Oh Jesus.
Speaker 2 (05:42):
Yeah, I'm gonna be iffy on the details, but yeah,
they and I don't think they aired the episode, but
right they they did facilitate a murder there.
Speaker 1 (05:51):
Yeah yeah, wow.
Speaker 2 (05:54):
Yeah, And you know you're wrong about as big on
the satanic panic and they were such a big part
of the wonderful things. Yeah, a real accelerant to the
like the wet cardboard and the mushroom growing experience, my
colleague metaphor, that's where we are.
Speaker 1 (06:15):
Which we are? Yeah, I was going to ask for
the best micology metaphors. You could call it what. Yeah,
We've talked about You're wrong about a lot on this podcast,
especially around human trafficking, and uh, it's just I think
the foremost debunker of bullshit myths and our show pedals bullshit.
I mean, it's what we do. We love to know.
(06:36):
We also like to bust bullshit myths when we're heads
up enough to catch them. But so we wanted to
just have you back on the show and go through
some of the stories you've covered, some of your favorites,
some of our favorites that we just want to make
sure our listeners are aware of because it's a great
show and.
Speaker 2 (06:57):
I'm so happy to be here. This is so love
and I'm so happy that we're in your zeitgeist. And
it's a really it's like a lovely and bleak and
lovely distinction to hold when it's like, you know, myth
busting is one of the most important roles in society today.
Speaker 1 (07:15):
Unfortunately. Yeah, it truly is all right. Before we get
into all that stuff, though, we do like to get
to know you a little bit better by asking you,
what is something either from your search history that's revealing
about who you are, or you could tell us something
that you've recently screencapped that is about who you are.
Speaker 2 (07:34):
Oh, I like the screencap question. Screencaps were such a
big part of my life in the Twitter era. Okay,
something I screen captured from a New York Times article
that I'll have to look up, but it was from
a couple of years ago is about the history of
food writing. And it was I was screencapping a quote
(07:56):
from Benjamin Disraeli from a letter he wrote and ate
in thirty one while he was in Cairo, and he wrote,
the most delicious thing in the world is a banana.
And I was like, I gotta save that. Wow, Now,
why did I think that was interesting? It's hard to articulate,
but I guess I guess need I need to have.
(08:18):
I can't remember that kind of thing anymore, so this
is the kind of thing I save.
Speaker 1 (08:22):
I am sometimes struck by the deliciousness of bananas, don't
I don't think I've ever made that claim, like to
that degree, but as an ingredient, and like it is
kind of a miraculous ingredient. There's a whole trunk.
Speaker 2 (08:37):
Fruit is kind of miraculous.
Speaker 1 (08:38):
Really, fruit really is an amazing invention invented by people
whose names we don't know, but like corticulturists years ago
made these things through just ingenious skills that we have
completely lost track of. Yeah, the banana being as creamy
as it is, Like the difference for me between a
(09:01):
smoothie with banana and without is like I don't think
you should be allowed.
Speaker 2 (09:06):
To where would smoothie be without? We will be nowhere?
Speaker 1 (09:09):
Thank you.
Speaker 3 (09:10):
You think it's the high potastic I feel like it's
like those high potassium foods like avocados and bananas, they
got that butteriness, that creaminess to them.
Speaker 2 (09:18):
Yeah, Nature's custard. And it's also like do you ever
get too high and think about like what if the
plants are in charge? You know, because they make the fruit,
and you know, we human ingenuity, like you said, has
done so much to make this fruit delicious, like we've
carried it forward, but like they make the fruit so
(09:39):
that we spread it around and we've like you know,
sward high and now we're crashing, and who's going.
Speaker 1 (09:46):
To take We've got these dipshits do for us? Yeah? Yeah, no,
take me over one game. Yeah, bring me to France,
that one big square mile of their finest land and
just like do everything to make us as comfortable as
possible on that land. Yeah, I uh, don't get too
high anymore. But when I did, that is the sort
(10:08):
of thought that would occur to me, I think, didn't
was it Michael Polland who wrote about plants like from that.
Speaker 2 (10:16):
The yeah read that book? But yeah, he did the
botanist dilemma, the Botany of Desire. He did a ton
of plant books.
Speaker 1 (10:25):
Not a type, but is isn't He also like the
drug the mind expansion, like yeah, rugs.
Speaker 2 (10:31):
He wrote a book that I can't remember what the
title is because my friends and I decided to call
it Michael Polland does drugs.
Speaker 1 (10:40):
But it is funny that that is such a high
thought that has like dominated the New York Times for
like a decade now.
Speaker 2 (10:47):
Right, the New York Times seems to frequently get high though,
based on the.
Speaker 1 (10:51):
Oh now this is your mind on plants? The mind
on plants, yeah. Then I think he was a guy
behind the Netflix Mind on Plants documentary as well, like
that that was an adaptation of this is your Mind
on Plants. But yeah, and then you've all know a
Harari and Sapiens kind of had a chunk where he
was basically like, we got trapped by wheat. We're in
(11:14):
the wheat trap and we got outsmarted by wheat.
Speaker 2 (11:18):
It's the lowest horror movie. That horror movie Millennium the making.
Oh my god, it's beautiful.
Speaker 1 (11:26):
The happening, Yeah, it is. The spoiler alert, but that
is the plot of the happening is essentially the plants
are killing us much quicker than wheat does, and much
more directly the corn too.
Speaker 2 (11:40):
Corn.
Speaker 1 (11:41):
Think what is something that you think is underrated?
Speaker 2 (11:46):
Sarah, hmmm, God, I love this question. And I think
here's a little vend that I have, which is that
we've really seen sort of the technologization if that's a word,
probably not of bread in the past twenty years, right,
(12:08):
bread has become this thing people make spreadsheets about, and like,
God bless them. If you're making bread spreadsheets, then you're
probably doing things that mere mortals aren't even capable of.
With bread bats, Yeah, exactly. Yeah, And there's so many
you know, there's so many ways to approach something, but
I think that it's made people feel like bread is
(12:29):
overly technical and something they can't just kind of like
fake their way through. Yeah, and really, and to me
there's a whole other I think both ways and other
ways are equally valid, and to me, there's a lot
of joy and just kind of muddling your way through.
I was just watching a video about how to agedly
(12:51):
create your own yeast using dandelion fermentation, like dandelions and sugar,
and you kind of create a wild yeast that way,
and that's not you could approach that technically, but you
could also just be like I am a witch and
I'm gathering weeds and getting them in a little right.
And I think something underrated is just like messing around
(13:13):
in a way that isn't meant to be successful the
first time, but that gives you a feel for something,
whether that's bread or whatever else, right, as long as
you're not like a surgeon, you know, don't do that.
Speaker 1 (13:24):
Right, right. Yeah. It feels like if like a jazz
musician was like recording all the notes they played in
like a solo and Okay, that was good.
Speaker 3 (13:33):
See right there, I probably should have gone to the
deflat not nice time though. It's like, no, just just
let it flow out of you, because I mean, I'm
not a baker myself, but based on what you're saying,
i'd imagine it's not that hard to completely fuck up
a loaf of bread if you have the ingredients in
the semi correct proportions, right right.
Speaker 2 (13:52):
It's like, you know, you'll end up with something that's
like basically bread. It might not be exactly the kind
that you want, but like it's bread, you'll be pretty
happy with it. Put butter on it, who cares? Do
another love learning it?
Speaker 1 (14:07):
Make a soup out of it, just soak it or something.
Speaker 2 (14:09):
Yeah, yeah, this is one of the krutons. This is
one of the things I am most strident about is
that I hate it when people sort of create the
illusion that something requires book learning.
Speaker 1 (14:24):
Right and like analysis and spreadsheets and.
Speaker 2 (14:29):
Yeah, I feel like it is a way into it,
but it's not obligatory.
Speaker 1 (14:33):
Yeah. I feel like a lot of like I'm very
bad at cooking, or at least it takes me a
really long time to cook because I am like very
precision and do not trust my instincts at all, Like
I believe I have very bad instincts and in that
in particular. But then you will see people who like
(14:58):
who think that you need to like over explain and
be like how did you make that exact cut in
that movie or like how did they choose that precise word?
And yeah, like like you were saying miles about jazz,
it feels like it's really the distinction between like people
who are good at an art and like not good
at an art, Like I suck at cooking, and so
(15:19):
I want to overanalyze it and just be like no,
but like if if I step here when I'm stirring
the dough, then like it could totally fuck everything up.
And it's like, yeah, because you don't have any instincts
in that regard, what's the.
Speaker 3 (15:36):
Yeah, there's you have to you have to find the
joy in it, because like even there are dishes that
I make a lot, and I don't I don't really
write down what the difference was every time. I just
kind of like intuiting that or just like realizing like,
oh right, I did this last time, Oh don't do
this next time, And I think I'm engaging with it
in a way that's more playful rather than.
Speaker 5 (15:56):
Like I'm cooking for the fucking head of state, don't
there's some kind of energy, And I think that's where
the spreadsheetism kind of creeps in, because we're not allowing
ourselves to be more playful about it.
Speaker 1 (16:07):
It's like so results based to maybe an overly rigid degree.
Speaker 2 (16:11):
Yeah, yeah, and it's you know, and it's about whatever's
fun for you. But like, something I also love that
I read once in a Jillia Child cookbook is that
she's like, I will always tell you why I'm asking
you to do something, because I never do something if
a cookbook tells me to do it and doesn't tell
me why, you know, because there's there's so many things,
(16:32):
you know that it's kind of like trying to learn
how to speak English perfectly by studying grammar, where like
you get to a point where experts agree or where
you sound so correct that people can understand you. And
like a lot of the joy of it is colloquial colloquialism.
Speaker 1 (16:49):
At a certain point, you just have to watch the soap operas.
You have to watch Jenny Jones and learn English from
those exactly.
Speaker 2 (16:56):
And you got such good vocabulary.
Speaker 1 (16:58):
Yes, oh yeah. What is something you think is overrated? H?
Speaker 2 (17:03):
I think texting is overrated. I think we're all texting
too much. We got to stop all the texting. Like,
I think it's a great tool, but I feel like
there are relationships I have where like we only text
with each other for years, and I realize that phone
calls are terrifying, but I don't know, maybe bring back
postcards or something which is like a text, but there
(17:25):
isn't a pressure to return one immediately. You can let
it simmer for a minute, right, I feel like we
should be talking to each other more, Like I am
feeling genuinely disturbed by how we are drifting farther and
farther apart technologically. And I also like, I love not
just TikTok, but any form of addictive scully short form
(17:47):
video the same way I loved Tumbler ten years ago.
But I was thinking about how we've come to the
point where, in a way, it feels like if you
don't make a montage about something, did it even happen?
And like it's so cool that people have the ability
to like take cinematic approaches to their own lives. But again,
it's like, it's your life, you know. We don't have
(18:09):
to we don't. I'm just a big ludite who wants
everyone to make bread without a recipe. That's my dream.
Speaker 3 (18:17):
Yeah, and just dump your whole SD card of digital
photos into a Facebook album like the ways of the
ancients did ago.
Speaker 1 (18:27):
I don't know, maybe there's something in there. I don't know,
you have some weird stuff and then checked that out.
But yeah, let's go.
Speaker 2 (18:33):
We'll sit for a Daghera type once a year when
the dagheratype man comes to town on his pony ryes.
Speaker 1 (18:39):
Stay very still, very very still.
Speaker 3 (18:43):
I mean, yeah, I know that feeling of like having
these like pure like feels like text exclusive friendships, and
they're like the way I've like cause again sometimes they're
not people like you would always talk to on the phone,
but somehow you just have good banter over text more
than you do over like on a phone call. But
then I did the thing of the bro version of
(19:04):
of escalating the socializing by being like, hey, man, are
you on PlayStation?
Speaker 1 (19:08):
Do you play this game?
Speaker 3 (19:10):
Then I can Then I'll then I talk to them
while playing a video game, and that becomes like sort
of the basis for like a phone call or substitute.
But it's interesting how sometimes they're like you have this
feeling of like, I don't know, man, like it's just
kind of cool just texting somebody. But to your point,
there's something much more like I don't know, Like I
think being an older millennial, like I grew up talking
(19:31):
on the phone endlessly, right, so I do miss that
to a certain extent. But I think with adult responsibilities,
it's not possible to be on the phone for three
hours watching cops.
Speaker 2 (19:42):
Oh my god, what a dream. Yeah, I or a
Lifetime the Lifetime Movie Network. Maybe I feel like, yeah,
there's something some inevitable process of aging at least today.
When you know time is marked by technology, is that
details of your early life begin to sound made up.
And one of them is that we could only send
a certain number of texts per month.
Speaker 1 (20:04):
Yeah, exactly right, right right?
Speaker 3 (20:06):
Yeah, or be like, dude, don't call me like fucking
before eight fool, I don't have I only have free nights.
Speaker 2 (20:11):
Yeah, we had minutes, we had character limits. We were
very we had to be kind of economical.
Speaker 1 (20:19):
Yeah, yeah, I'm not. I'm bad at texting in a
lot of cases. But yeah, there are some friendships where
it's like easier to just text, and then I have
like text exclusive friendships about where we're constantly talking about
how we should hang more, we should hang out in yeah, yeah,
content of the text.
Speaker 2 (20:41):
And it's like this plant that's like barely alive in
your past room and you give it like a teaspoon
of water every two months, and it's like I avenge me.
Speaker 1 (20:52):
Yeah, or you're just like, oh, good thing I did
to turn the exhaust fan on while I was showering
because the humidity actually nourished that plant in as still
just mean alive a little bit, right.
Speaker 2 (21:03):
So yeah, it feels like we have all these relationships
that are like scraggly and attenuated, and then we're like,
why do I feel lonely? I talk to people all day?
And it's like, well not really.
Speaker 1 (21:15):
Yeah, did people used to have those types of friendships
where they were like I've got a got a drawer
full of letters that I'm supposed to get back to.
Speaker 2 (21:25):
Like you know, I don't know, because even then you
would be like, dear Elisha, the sheep are lamming early
this spring.
Speaker 1 (21:34):
Right, It's like, yeah, I had to ground more wheat
at the water mill than I had expected this spring.
I hope you are well and yeahs.
Speaker 2 (21:46):
You know, dear Jack, let's go fishing yours.
Speaker 1 (21:50):
Yeah, exactly, Jack, twist fish and nasty. Just one word.
Speaker 3 (21:58):
Letter, dude, my mom's favorite movie. She'll always say that, Dude,
my mom fucking loves Broke Back Mountain. She's just like
it's so powerful. Like she'll because like she's a film
critic and in Japan, you know, she's she kind of
has kind of got a bit of a reputation there,
and like sometimes when there's like Oscar coverage that they'll
bring her on for it because like.
Speaker 1 (22:19):
You've been in La for you know, forty years covering
the business blah blah blah, and they'll be talking about
like the movies that are popping right now. She's like,
but what was it? What's the best film for you?
Speaker 3 (22:26):
She'll always always, she's always about it that I respect
the hell that consistent.
Speaker 1 (22:34):
She's consistent when that's your favorite movie, that's your favorite movie.
You know I can respect that as a as a
Jaws fan, you know, who will bring that up no
matter what. Yeah, I mean, I just brought it up there,
he did. Hey, all right, let's uh take a quick
break and we'll come back and we'll dig into some
(22:57):
great stuff from the podcast you are wrong about. We'll
be right back. What are we wrong about? You are
wrong about? And we're back. And I think we already
(23:21):
mentioned that you're wrong about. Is really you're really good with,
like moral panics, the satanic panic in particular, and just
the role. Yeah, it turns out the role of evangelical
Christianity and some of our biggest social movements of the
past half century. And you recently had an episode about
(23:43):
the pro life movement that was surprising to me, Like
I think you said this right off the bat that
I was not expecting you point out the pro life
movement is younger than Jeff Bridges the Deuce.
Speaker 2 (24:00):
This is how we mark age now, right.
Speaker 1 (24:04):
Yeah, but it's yeah, Like I guess it's specific, Like
there were people who were opposed to abortion before that,
but the kind of concerted, cohesive, evangelical driven version kind
of starts in nineteen seventy three, and it's part of
(24:25):
this movement by evangelicals to be like, hey, so our values,
people hate them. We're we've got bad values. We're we're
pro segregation. Nobody else seems to like that very much.
They're pretty uh, you know, they recognize that they're going
(24:47):
the wrong way in terms of relevancy.
Speaker 2 (24:49):
They're in need of a real makeover exactly.
Speaker 1 (24:54):
And so yeah, they settle on abortion, which the most
well known evangelical in the seventies was Jimmy Carter, which
is like, that's not who I come to associate evangelicals with.
But it was like a different time, and at that
time you didn't necessarily like being super violently against people's
(25:20):
right to have an abortion was not one of the
first things you associated with evangelicals, no.
Speaker 2 (25:26):
Or with the Republican Party. And I always love to
cite the fact that Betty Ford famously was pro choice
Republican and that that was a coherent political position for
the first lady to have at the time.
Speaker 1 (25:40):
Wow. Yeah, and Jimmy Carter being an evangelical again, I
a social justice warrior. Some would say he.
Speaker 2 (25:49):
Loves building houses for people. Yeah, I feel like there's
something that it is. Really it's interesting to reflect on
maybe arguably what has been lost because this is not
exactly my field, but many of my fields brush up
against it. And the history of evangelicism in America really
connects to the idea that God really is of and
(26:11):
for the people, and that prayer is about direct communication
with the divine and that you deserve to have a
connection to the Holy Spirit without there needing to be
some kind of conduit. So it really is, in a way,
another wave of you know, the various religious reformations that
(26:32):
we've seen throughout history that have made Christianity more and
more egalitarian. And there's historically been a lot of potential
for good in that and still is. But it's just that,
you know, evangelical Christianity in twenty twenty four, I think
is absolutely synonymous with the unbelievably sinister, the acratic, kleptocratic,
(26:55):
fascist dictatorship that we're now basically living in. So that's
really fun. It's nice.
Speaker 1 (27:01):
They really did not see it going that way, like
I guess I did, because we.
Speaker 2 (27:06):
Get it's the compliment sandwich. You gotta start with the
good and then you're like, now we have some news
we have we do have.
Speaker 1 (27:15):
About how things have gone since then. Yeah, I mean
you point out that one point. I forget if it
was that episode or not, but just if you look
at what the evangelical movement has done over the past
forty years in our lifetime, it's kind of what paranoid
eras of the US, you like, accused communists of doing.
(27:39):
You know, that there's going to be this secret takeover
that they were going to secretly infiltrate our Supreme Court,
and like.
Speaker 2 (27:47):
They have failed to infiltrate the media, which is nice.
You know, Interestingly, there's nothing conservatives are worse at than
making media.
Speaker 1 (27:57):
Yeah, they tried turning their hat around backwards, turning the
chair around backwards, they try everything. You still can't Yeah,
but yeah, and then it's kind of what they accuse
Satanists of doing in the eighties, like secrets.
Speaker 2 (28:14):
Absolutely, yeah, and what they're accusing you know, all these
drag queen groomers of doing. Now, there's a very in
any kind of abusive relationship where you think that your
user has more complicated motives than you ultimately realize that
they do. It's I think largely a projection game.
Speaker 3 (28:37):
Yeah, right, And it seems like so many of the
moral panics too, like they're like, you know, like all
the ones you've mentioned, even human trafficking, they're just sort
of like built on people's inability or like unwillingness to
examine actual systemic forces, and it's just much easier to
chalk it up to like, yeah, it's this other thing, man,
it's these Satanists that are going that are freaking out.
It's like, it's not that there's inequality, is that there
(28:58):
are these flash rob where they just go through and
steal everything and it's a crime wave, and it just allows,
i don't know, for people to sort of neatly put
some kind of larger issue into a problem that doesn't
quite actually get to the root of the cause.
Speaker 2 (29:12):
Yeah, I've been fascinated by slasher movies for a long time,
and I think that they do a weirdly great job
of illustrating this very i think kind of core piece
of American folklore where you know, if he was Friday
the thirteenth, as the er example, like some kind of
like the traditional slasher template is that somebody is wronged
(29:33):
in the past, Jason drowns because the counselors weren't paying
attention to making Doodle that boy drown and then some
kind of force avenging the wronged party shows up in
the present and innocent teens who are simply you know,
smoking a joint or making out suffer. And the sort
(29:57):
of arc of it is that you can sort of
momentarily acknowledge that injustice has occurred in the past, but
as long as you turn a representative of that injustice
into a force so dangerous that there's no proportionate response
except killing them, then you can justify any action in
(30:18):
the present and kind of even out the lecture. And
that feels like a really I don't know some way
that we were we were thinking through with these summer
camp movies, the kind of dominant political ideology we were
all living under.
Speaker 1 (30:34):
Yeah, well it is a kind of frontier wilderness setting
that everybody's familiar with, right that is where you know
colonial like these.
Speaker 2 (30:47):
Summer campser I can never populated my camp.
Speaker 1 (30:52):
They're always way out there in the woods. And then yeah,
they are being punished. Like I just think that at
a certain level, there's like an unspoken knowledge amongst Americans
that like, oh, yeah, we we've got it coming, like
this is this has been bad, Like what every everything
(31:15):
we've everything you see around you is built on top
of just ashes and atrocities, and we've got something horrible coming.
And so yeah, it makes sense when slasher films like
it does feel like if an alien came down and
(31:36):
just like looked at our films. Slasher films would be
pretty difficult to explain if you if they didn't have
like a psychological read all right, like we get no, no, no,
it would never happen. It's just a thing we like
to imagine happened to us. Why what is wrong? I
(31:56):
think we got to come in or something. I don't know, I.
Speaker 2 (31:59):
Just kind of active masochism. Yeah, we know we are
not what was intended.
Speaker 1 (32:07):
People, Right, So we put the Poulter guy's house on
top of a Native American burial ground and yeah, yeah,
that gets it out, That gets it.
Speaker 3 (32:17):
It's just funny how like that that sort of that
angst manifest in different ways, sometimes in films other times,
and people screaming at school board meetings, and like.
Speaker 1 (32:25):
I don't want my kids to know what a civil
war is or was about.
Speaker 2 (32:31):
People should be watching more horror movies, I think, yeah.
Speaker 1 (32:35):
Right, I wonder if that's my aversion? Why am I
so horror averse? I wonder what am I? You don't
feel guilty about anything? Yeah, I've got to clean consciousness.
Speaker 3 (32:43):
Yeah, I guess it's like a black and Japanese American.
I'm like, I don't know, bro.
Speaker 1 (32:46):
Yeah, yeah, y'all got that shit coming. Yeah, you shouldn't
feel weird about not liking the horror movies. That's us
man before liking them.
Speaker 2 (32:55):
Yeah, it's just yeah, white people four hours a week
go to the horror movie clinic a movie because I.
Speaker 1 (33:03):
Mean, like there's also like bad.
Speaker 3 (33:04):
I mean there's Japanese horror films, and there's clearly there's
a laundry list of atrocities that Japan has committed to.
And I wonder does there are there like what's German horror?
Like does this is there?
Speaker 1 (33:14):
Is there like a universal language of like sort of
expressing this like through what we consider horror, because I know, cultural.
Speaker 2 (33:19):
Difference is really interesting because I feel like Japanese horror
movies there are often ghosts.
Speaker 1 (33:25):
Yeah, no, precisely, and we have so.
Speaker 2 (33:27):
Few ghosts nowadays in American horror. We love demons. We
won't shut up about demons. Yeah, my chagrin.
Speaker 1 (33:34):
Germany just has Werner Herzog, who's just everything is an.
Speaker 2 (33:42):
Her SOG's new TV? Why crayons?
Speaker 1 (33:48):
Why do you need horror movies when nature is trying
to kill you.
Speaker 2 (33:52):
Always gardening with verner herd song.
Speaker 1 (33:58):
It's just a it's just a documentory about hummingbirds.
Speaker 2 (34:01):
In the abundance of these queens pushings that way out
through the soil. I see none of the divinity of
springtime or the pagan gods. I see only pointless tea.
But I can also use them to make a nice pesto.
Speaker 1 (34:21):
The While we're on the subject of movies, you kind
of stumbled on I don't like the Andes. You did
an episode on the Andes rescue the Alive story, as
I think it's mostly known in America, the rugby team
crashes in the Andes is living there for months.
Speaker 2 (34:40):
On a fricking glacier on a.
Speaker 1 (34:42):
Glacier, freezing to death, starving to death. Eventually turned to
cannibalism to avoid starving to death a couple. So this
past year, one of the best movies I saw was
Society the Snow, which does a really good job of updating.
You know, there was the version in the nineties Alive
(35:04):
with like Ethan Hawk, I think, and you know it
was like the hollywood ized version Society the Snow like
updates it and like adds a lot of the humanity
back to it, which was something that your episode really did.
But both movies really missed something that I loved that
you brought up, which is that people like they were
(35:25):
doing bits the whole time, right, Like the number of
bits that they did was like, at one point, they're
waiting to be rescued, and then they look off and
they see an avalanche like a white wall coming towards them, right,
and then they realized that somebody is actually using a
(35:46):
fire extinguisher to like make it look like there's an
avalanche coming with them as a bit, and then they're
like pretend they were like talking like planning bits for
what to do when the helicopter arrives at the scene
of their plane crash, like talking about like the funniest
thing to say while they were in it. But it's
just it's, I don't know, generally, just movies about true
(36:11):
stories and history feel like they have to be as
humorless as like a Christopher Nolan film, you know, right,
and totally it's just not how reality is. Like I
would have loved the bits in both of those movies.
Speaker 3 (36:25):
Oh yeah, well, because even you think about like the
like the like the wild stuff, like engineering students pull
like while they're in college, you know what I mean,
the fun they have like like JPL is nearby in
LA and like they do like wild just pumpkin carving contests,
just weird things are like now we're using our like power,
like brain power to get stuff to other like the moon,
(36:47):
to have fucking fun. And yet to think that like
they were just I don't know, at the in where
were those alamos. They were just like hanging out counting
marbles or something. They're like, all right, I'm gonna go
to bed, Yeah, see you later, like the horse and
around come on.
Speaker 1 (37:01):
Though, Yeah no, yeah, those they were doing goods constantly,
like all throughout history. And I think it, I really
do think it's the same reason that comedies almost never
win at the Academy Awards, is the reason that they
feel like they need to launder movies of any like
fun when they're about history. Yeah, no, this has to
(37:23):
be serious. We can't. We have to like remove the fun.
But I feel like it would just feel more lived
in and yeah, I don't know, it would be be
a blast if we actually saw how the people were
funny at the time.
Speaker 2 (37:37):
Well, and you know, and I think about when you
think about the movies that endure and that are a
part of your life and that you watch a lot,
like and you know, it's different. People have different requirements.
Some people have comfort movies that have no funny parts
in them at all, God bless her, But like, aren't
most of the things that you watch more than a
couple times funny?
Speaker 1 (37:58):
Yeah, they have fun the characters are having fun or
they're funny.
Speaker 2 (38:02):
Or yeah, there's the you know, because it's like a
full spectrum of humanity. It's kind of like eating an
entire meal with nothing, no sweetness in it at all,
Like you can do it, but it's it feels there's
something missing.
Speaker 1 (38:17):
Yeah, right. Yeah. The other thing that gout left out
of both movies that your episode kind of restores is
like it's kind of an important detail. Like you go
from the story of them like surviving getting rescued to
that that's kind of it. And then like today we
know them as like the cannibal people and the media
(38:41):
discovering the cannibalism, like the doctor checking them out and
being like, wait a second, these guys like had to
have been eating something. And then like a big like
moral judgment ensues and like everybody's like their family is
like upset buy it and they're like, wait, would our
(39:02):
parents have rather us starved to death than like the
Catholic church weighs in and is like, no, it's good
that they were eating people, which was very Yeah, every
once in a while they nail it. And then the
other detail was that they were like a few days
walk from a hotel full of food. Was like, I
(39:27):
don't know, I can see why you left it out,
but Jesus Christ, that's I mean, it's like triangle of
sadness like that. It's I don't know if you guys
saw that movie. I did.
Speaker 2 (39:39):
I really liked that movie and I saw that the
night that midterm results were coming in, so it was
like perfect for that very distracting.
Speaker 1 (39:47):
Yes, oh that's a good idea. Just watch a really
good like, save a really good movie for when for
election night. Yeah, gets sucked.
Speaker 2 (39:57):
You need to be transported for real?
Speaker 1 (39:59):
Yeah. Is.
Speaker 2 (40:00):
I think that the kind of texture of tragedy is
what makes it feel real. And I think that to
some extent, when we tell stories that are so grim
and feel so distant from us, that that's a way
of us feeling like it's not going to happen to us,
when you know, really, so many of these things are
the result of being in a boat, being in a skyscraper,
(40:21):
being in the path of a forest fire. Like, we're
going to have more and more epidemics and disasters and
they're just going to become part of everyday life. For
those of us who don't feel that way yet.
Speaker 1 (40:32):
Yeah, I hope we can remember to be funny, and
we're going to.
Speaker 2 (40:36):
Be so funny. We're going to be the funniest generation
that has ever lived.
Speaker 1 (40:40):
The has ever lived through an apocalypse? Yeah right, you
know the aliens will come and they're like Wow. As
their civilization was dying, they put out some of the
best comedies.
Speaker 2 (40:50):
Best content came right near me.
Speaker 3 (40:53):
The guy need a Drum set out of billionaire skulls
and they're scouring doing solos. It was really quite artistic.
Speaker 1 (41:01):
I have to say, oh, yeah, great, I think you
should leave quotes. As their city was burning.
Speaker 2 (41:09):
Down, well then once the grid went down, they had
to make those meme museums, right, those were a real tree.
Speaker 1 (41:17):
Yeah, that would be fun though, to like figure out
which memes go in the museum, Like, I might as
well just do that now. I feel like it would
be a good public works project. Biden, Come on, yeah,
come on, but these Yeah, because we're gonna have somebody
out of work TikTokers when you ban the app. Uh
you know the new Civil Conservation Corps of Meme Collection
(41:38):
and Remembrance. Yeah, all right, let's uh, let's take a
quick break and we'll come back. We'll keep talking and
we're back. We're and just generally not to like put
(41:59):
you on the spot, but I am curious that, like,
do you have some common flags that like pop up
where like just at this point, you've seen so many
stories that are full of shit, like where you're just like, oh,
like I think one that you mentioned during the I
think it was the human Trafficking episode. Yeah, it was
(42:21):
the human trafficking episode, because right, yeah, the Bob Craft
thing where it's it's a tactic you see used by
these low rent journalistic outlets like the New York Times
where they will just use a like the only source
in the article will be a cop or multiple like laws.
Speaker 2 (42:44):
That was the first thing I was thinking of.
Speaker 1 (42:46):
Yeah, yes, oh, they love to do it, don't they.
Speaker 2 (42:49):
Yeah, And It's so interesting because it is you know,
not just within moral panics, but you know, really any
story that we get wrong or report in a biased fashion.
It is just journalistic tradition in this country to write
a story where the police are your only source and
where you say, you know, police say this and that,
(43:12):
and treat it with utter credulity, because that's how the
profession has worked historically, and so it is. It's an
interesting area too, where you know, something that has gotten
grandfathered in as a convention that we've only recently begun
chipping away at, has allowed for worse reporting because you know,
(43:34):
we've inherited it from I don't know what I would say,
basically the sense that reporters have to work with and
to an extent for the police in order to get access.
Speaker 1 (43:46):
Yeah, that's what they've told themselves the least, right, like
we need to do this and you know, talk to
the people who skulls they're cracking. They're a good source,
right right. And then the sense that you're you're on
the same side or on the side of the establishment,
which is also you know, hopefully that's changing. Yeah, the
Robert Craft story, in particular Robert Craft is the billionaire
(44:08):
owner of the New England Patriots who got caught in
a massage parlor in Florida paying for sex, And the
New York Times just extensively quotes this one share of
talking about how the women were brought in like China,
from China, from China. They were smuggled in from China,
presumably in shipping containers. I don't know if that's specifically mentioned,
(44:29):
but God, the trafficking people love that.
Speaker 2 (44:32):
It's just like the shipping container thing. Just get this
woman a coach, a seatan coach. It'll be just as uncomfortable,
and her break her spirit just as well.
Speaker 1 (44:43):
But he's the cops and the forced sex with thousands
of men and you know, new women, right, new shipments
of women every couple of days or you know, every week.
Speaker 2 (44:55):
Like and again, the overhead of this kind of an
outs think about how hard it is to manic inventory
if you're selling.
Speaker 1 (45:01):
Beads just like an evil massage parlor corporation with the
budget of Amazon.
Speaker 2 (45:09):
You know, right, yeah, And I hate to sound insensitive,
but it is like it's stuff like that where you're like,
what are the physical realities of even the building that
we're talking about this happening in because that's such a
big part of the Satanic panic, where the direness of
the crimes people are being accused of means that people
are less likely to be like, excuse me, I was
(45:29):
just wondering, how are this many infants going missing from
hospitals every year? None of them are reporting these crimes
or you know, because we know that, like people actually
study real crimes that occur, and so we learn sort of,
you know, it's imperfect, but we learn certainly that there
are trends, and one of them is that people who
(45:50):
kidnap babies from hospital nurseries tend to be a woman
who's lost a child who's trying to replace that child. Yes,
that's kind of the typical profile. And that doesn't mean
it covers everything, but it means it's you know, that
kind of accounts for the cases that people have noticed.
And if there were thousands of babies needed for Satanic
sacrifice going missing all the time in the eighties, then
(46:13):
why weren't hospitals noticing that? And that's just a question
about are we advancing by degrees into a worldview where
none of these questions matter? And you know that has
happened for some people clearly, but it's I don't know.
I hope it can still have a cooling effect to
bring these things up.
Speaker 1 (46:31):
Yeah. So, I mean when the human trafficking episode, when
I first heard it, it was at the time when
TikTok and social media was full of videos where people
would be like, you see the zip tie on my
car door handle?
Speaker 2 (46:47):
Oh, the one that you could have put there?
Speaker 1 (46:50):
Yes, impossible, actually impossible when that matches the stuff that's
in your trunk. Now that means I've been marked for
trafficking and there's probably a man under my car right
now waiting, and it's.
Speaker 2 (47:02):
Like, cool, why did he put the zip tie on
there then?
Speaker 1 (47:06):
To remind himself obviously? Is it like parking enforcement when
they chalk your tires, when they're like, oh, this person's
been here for these two hours. Yeah, they're still there
in that chalk's there, I'll know. But yeah, it's a
very like it just it obscures like the real dangers.
Speaker 3 (47:23):
Because I think that was the really eye opening part
of the episode, is even understanding how we're defining trafficked
people and who they are, because most of the time
it doesn't conform to the very like Liam Niesen based
version taken version of like trafficking that people think of
like you were snatched up violently in broad daylight and
(47:44):
then sent off to some you name whatever.
Speaker 1 (47:48):
Specific horror appeals to the audience right to be.
Speaker 2 (47:51):
One of the thousands of women servicing thousands of clients
at a massage parlor next to you palm stry place
with three parking spots in front of it. And also
it's like, you know, there's this great inflation of tragedy
where it's like, do we care about people who've been
victimized in like less extreme ways, like what about people?
(48:14):
Because it And again this ties to the satanic panic
where it feels like it becomes a way of obscuring
the importance of trauma that happens on a more modest scale.
Not that extreme cases don't exist, but they're more rare.
Speaker 1 (48:28):
Yes, we take real world tragedies that are mundane or
are the things that people just don't want to think about,
and we put movie tropes over them, like we put
the movie tropes that like the warning the zip TI
thing is a perfect example because it's like movie villains
(48:50):
love to warn you before they do a thing. They
like to be.
Speaker 6 (48:53):
Coming for you and then like disappeared just a lot
a Danny Gonzalez video I was reminded of through a
YouTube comment that force of literature I'm most familiar.
Speaker 2 (49:04):
With these days about I think about flat earthers, but
some nature of conspiracy theories, where so many conspiracy theories
hange on the idea that like there are these clues,
there's this puzzle you're in, like a Michael Douglas in
the game game and he's like, if the government was
hiding something from you, then why would they leave clues
(49:27):
to help you figure it out? Like why wouldn't they
just not do that?
Speaker 1 (49:33):
Right? Because they're the snowman. They wanted to give you
all the clues, mister policeman.
Speaker 4 (49:37):
You know.
Speaker 1 (49:38):
That's that's how they get their sick kicks, is right.
Speaker 2 (49:42):
I guess. And these stories where it's like where you
get to imagine yourself as the hero of a complicated
game or Harry Potter and your letter is coming and
it's just like you're just a person. Like there are
a lot of conspiracies going on, but the thing is
that the people who conspire tend to be doing it
internal memos or out loud or in books that they publish.
Speaker 1 (50:04):
Yes, right, and just they have all the money and
a big enough legal team that you can't point out
and it's.
Speaker 2 (50:14):
Not a puzzle. They just say it because they don't
really think there's anything wrong with what they're doing, or
if they think that what they're doing is illegal, then
they'll you know, still say it like Rudy Juliani.
Speaker 3 (50:25):
Right right, and it's be like, so what though, like.
Speaker 1 (50:30):
Everybody does that actually do think? Yeah.
Speaker 3 (50:35):
The other thing that really struck me too is just
like the the way that especially things like human trafficking
it's talked about, is like they talk about it is
if it's this this gigantic thing that's happening, like hundreds
of hundreds of thousands of people perhaps are being taken
and trafficked.
Speaker 1 (50:53):
Or it happened to anyone, could have happened to anyone.
Speaker 2 (50:56):
But then it's the way to white women in their
thirties who are beginning to feel less valued by society
now that they're aging visibly. I personally think.
Speaker 1 (51:06):
The Stepford Wives episode, right.
Speaker 3 (51:08):
Or even like or even just like the idea of
you know, like that they were like you know, certain teachers,
there was information circulating around about be like how to
identify if one of your students are being trafficked and
it's like depressed?
Speaker 2 (51:20):
What if they're being abused by their very own parents?
Speaker 1 (51:23):
Right right, Yeah, we don't care about that. No, no, no trap.
Speaker 3 (51:26):
But that's what I mean, Like, that's it's always interesting
to see because even that description was so bad. It
was merely like even you brought up on the show.
It's like you're describing a teenager.
Speaker 1 (51:34):
Like someone who's like becoming maybe a little more confrontational,
maybe tired because they don't sleep, maybe like they do
they have a bar code tattoo, Yeah, a bar code perhaps,
Like come on, now, like there's not skew numbers like this,
Now what movie is?
Speaker 2 (51:51):
You would just chip them? At this point That's what
I do at my child trafficking concern. Of course, what
everybody does now.
Speaker 3 (51:59):
Right, and so much of that is born out of
just the way even these numbers are gathered. But then people,
depending on what your perspective is, like, well, I don't
want to go off what law enforcement said that there's
maybe around five hundred cases. I'd rather go with the
number that is by the thousands, where the reporting on
that is not it's not accurate, and it's quite flawed.
(52:19):
But again, for people who want to sort of pedal
this sort of myth around it, it's very convenient to
be like, well, look a look at this reporting. I mean, now,
don't look too deep into how that is, because it
can be a child that runs away multiple times and
if a parent says I think they're being trafficked, that
we can count that as like ten times. Yeah, that's
ten traffickings. Yeah, that's ten takens.
Speaker 1 (52:41):
Right.
Speaker 2 (52:42):
I guess watched my own Private Idaho for the first
time in a really long time, and it's, you know,
such a kind of artifact of thirty years ago, but
it's also you know, it's about young like teenage hustlers
working in the Northwest, and there's a scene where some
of them are telling, you know, these really horrifying stories
of assaults that they've expect sperienced and what they've gone
through at the hands of clients. But also you know
(53:07):
that this is a picture of you know, this pretty
you know, as far as I can tell, pretty realistic
view of what it's like to be kind of on
your own trying to make it in a world that's dangerous,
but maybe is the only world that there can exist
for you because you have no home to go back
to or you were kicked out of it, or at
(53:29):
home is still less safe than being out here, you know.
And that's I think, so much more present of a
danger and so much more real danger, yeah, than what
we've been talking about as a conservative fantasy. But then
it's like, again, that's a problem that directs our attention inwards,
(53:50):
and so we love to make up a bigger problem
outside to distract ourselves with.
Speaker 1 (53:55):
Right, right, trafficking is like that. The crimes of trafficking,
the section abuse, the you know, being under the influence
of somebody who is you know, exploiting you. Those things
actually do happen. The numbers are not on par with
like what the guy who made Sound Freedom might lead
you to believe, but they do happen, and it's usually
(54:18):
too like you mentioned, like queer youth who are kicked
out of their homes, just people who are living in
poverty and like need a place to sleep and are
therefore like forced to do things that they don't want
to to just like avoid being on the street and
like having their lives put in danger. And but yeah,
(54:38):
those are things that are endemic, systemic problems that people
would rather not pay attention to. And so you get this,
like it's really wild how there's not like the original
like that the US, the world is such a big place,
(55:00):
like you could you should be able to find an
example of the thing that you want to happen, Like you.
Speaker 2 (55:05):
Can find examples of really weird versions. You can have
anything you can think of. Someone is put in their
rectum somewhere in this country.
Speaker 1 (55:14):
They have not come up with, like all they have
is taken and now the sound of like they have
Liam Neeson movies and the sound of freedom, like that's
what they've got. They don't even have their like one
news story that they've like just exploited to be like
this happens all the time, because yeah, it's just there's
so little there there.
Speaker 2 (55:35):
Right, there needs to be a ranking system, and this
is like a level lower than like you know, crime
like stranger danger kidnappings, which do occur, but just not
on the scale that we ever said they did, and
so therefore can be blown out of proportion and used
to pass laws that chip away at the rights of defendants.
(55:56):
But but yeah, we're we're now on on a lower tier,
the tier if you will, where nothing is real.
Speaker 1 (56:05):
Yes, just the guys from w Liam Neeson.
Speaker 3 (56:07):
Like, from your perspective, do you think a lot of
you know, pushing these kinds of like moral panics because
like the are to do with trying to criminalize things
that they don't want. But it's also because like in
built with all of these moral panics, like we've just said,
is like this just lack of desire to actually confront
(56:28):
what these systemic forces are. And I guess by trying
to solve it, then they just enact all kinds of
like you know, criminal like just to try and criminalize
as much shit as possible and that's the solution. What
do you think the sort of balance is between like
the agenda and just sort of the human sort of
the human nature of not wanting to actually take on
(56:48):
a problem at all, because it feels like they work
so hand in hand with so many things that it
feels like maybe they do start with something but being like, no,
this is an issue, and then it turns and actually
no immigrants are bad, and you're like whoa, whoa, Okay,
well which one was it? And I know that some
people are absolutely on the anti immigration thing, but a
(57:09):
lot I think people get pulled in, probably because it's
the don't want to confront the realities of what's going
on side of the coin.
Speaker 2 (57:14):
Maybe yeah, yeah, And I think that there's I think something,
you know, this kind of connects with the pro life movement,
And as you've been saying, I think that something you know,
the human trafficking panic, the satanic panic, a really strong
moral panic, feels like it endures and it returns and
it never really leaves us, partly because it comes from
so many fronts, and also because it addresses some kind
(57:37):
of real concern right because I think, you know, we
saw such a huge takeoff in the summer of twenty
twenty of you know, the claim that you can't put
your kid in a mask because that's that makes it
easier for the human traffickers. Do you remember that we
were doing that for a while.
Speaker 1 (57:57):
It was like, you can't put.
Speaker 2 (57:58):
Your kid in a mask because God knows, you can't
tell what your child looks like with their face covered.
You don't like wash their clothes and do their hair right,
and you know, and that felt to me, this at
least was what I thought at the time and still
think some kind of response to the fact that, like
we understood that what was happening was really really bad
(58:19):
for kids, you know, Like I was very very conservative,
small c conservative, careful con conservative about you know. I
didn't go into like a place of business for like
a full year. I was extremely strict with myself in
terms of COVID coutiousness, just because I knew that if
I gave myself any parameter to screw up, I probably would.
(58:44):
And I had sort of sensitive people in my orbit,
I mean, immune system wise, so you know, just being
fully on you know, that being my life at the time,
I felt I still felt, as it's very reasonable to
feel that like we were all being sort of broiled
alive psychologically and there was nothing we could do about it,
and that this was dangerous for children. And I think
(59:06):
that the kind of the way the trafficking panic about
children took root at that time, I think, and maybe
this is charitable of me, but I don't think it's
you know, it's not maybeing nice to say this. It's
just kind of thinking about what would be on people's
minds that like, if you want and also cynically, if
you want to whip up a panic. You look at
what are parents upset about. They know that something bad
(59:29):
is going on in terms of their children's welfare, so
you can invent something that they would rather be the
bad thing going.
Speaker 1 (59:34):
On, right, Yeah, and just all that everybody's under a
lot of emotional purmoil.
Speaker 2 (59:42):
We're not thinking critically right in those periods so much. Yeah, Yeah,
I certainly wasn't. But I think just ultimately the point
that you land on in that episode is to kind
of understand what is actually at stake and what is
actually the intention of this concern over human trafficking, Like
(01:00:05):
when they actually bust a quote unquote human trafficking ring,
Like there's an example of a place that was providing,
you know, services for sex workers in Seattle and it
got busted, and you know, when they're criminalizing the people,
they don't seem interested in taking care of the victim.
(01:00:28):
They basically tell the victim like, you can go to
jail for sex work, or you can like go to
this shelter where we'll take away your phone and internet,
you know, like a trafficker would like, you know, like
we'll now we'll treat you like we are cleaning about it.
Speaker 1 (01:00:47):
Yeah, but yeah, it's and a lot of it. Like
I mean, people should go listen to the episode. There's
also some really you know that you're much more likely
to be called out as a trafficker if you are
part of like an interracial thing family these days, and
that actually goes back to the what the intent of
the original trafficking laws was were was like you know,
(01:01:08):
anxiety over slavery ending and women's rights happening, and like
they needed a way to make it against the law
for interracial couples to date each other.
Speaker 2 (01:01:19):
And yeah, so and perceived advances in civil rights seem
like a really important ingredient. Yes, for moral panics too, Yeah.
Speaker 3 (01:01:29):
Yeah, absolutely, because what was that Like I think there
was something that was that was in the episode is
essentially that like around any kind of trafficking pipeline, it
always led to some kind of anti immigration sentiment.
Speaker 1 (01:01:41):
Oh yeah, Like it was just sort.
Speaker 3 (01:01:42):
Of like that was like the that was the sort
of sequence there, and I think just yet, yeah, with
like so many things, like so many of these sort
of moral panics, right, like whether it's the anti choice
movement or human trafficking, like the rhetoric is so victim focused.
Speaker 1 (01:01:54):
Yeah, and but.
Speaker 3 (01:01:55):
Really you just but it really reveals itself how much
the victims were merely just sort of the road to
the criminalization of something, because at the end of the day,
there's no one actually advocating for helping the victims in
any meaningful way for all the people like, well, then yeah,
how about adoption if that's a route without having to
have an abortion, but we have we do fuck all
(01:02:15):
in terms of creating a system that helps people, whether
that's like a foster care system or making it easier
to adopt. It just like it just falls apart. It's
just sort of like, let me just chum the water
with this first part. And then if you're really asking
me to do the work, Oh no, I'm not.
Speaker 1 (01:02:30):
I'm not. It's not more about the end.
Speaker 2 (01:02:32):
It comes back to Shaws.
Speaker 1 (01:02:33):
Yeah, Sarah, what a pleasure having you. Thank you so
much for taking the time to gosh, where can people
find you and follow you and all that good stuff?
Speaker 2 (01:02:45):
Ooh, you can find me at You are good And
you're wrong about wherever you get your podcasts. I've always
said I should start a podcast service called Wherever because
I would get free advertising everywhere into the past and
you can find me there. And also I live in
Portland and I'm always looking for fun stuff to do.
(01:03:09):
So if you have an event or a art thing
or a fun I don't know you got a neat
squash variety, let me know about it.
Speaker 1 (01:03:18):
There you go, And is there a work of media
that you've been enjoying, either a tweet, anything from a
tweet to a film.
Speaker 2 (01:03:27):
I'm so happy you asked, because I fell in love
recently with I don't know if either of you remember this,
but the web series Chris Fleming did like ten years ago, Gail.
It's like forty episodes of it. There's a whole arc.
Gail is the ultimate high strong mom from Massachusetts. I agree,
an absolute genius. The Gail series got me through the
(01:03:49):
darkest days of winter and there's an episode I think
called The Dinner Party, Part two where Gail forces her
a cappella troop to lip sync to Yannie Live at
the Acropolis and it is still one of the funniest
things I have ever seen in my whole life. And
(01:04:10):
the Holy Spirit was in Chris Flemming that day. That's
what I believed.
Speaker 1 (01:04:16):
Amazing miles. Where can people find you as their working
media you've been enjoy it.
Speaker 3 (01:04:20):
Yeah, at Miles of Gray on Twitter and Instagram. Obviously
you know about mad Boosties. You know about four to
twenty day fiance find me there also, uh working media.
Speaker 1 (01:04:30):
Man. These Korean reality shows on Netflix, they get me
all the time. There's a new season of the show
Physical one hundred that's out that's like just about like
I guess they just pick like one hundred fit people
to do just like the wildest stuff. Like the first
thing is like who can just run on it? Yeah?
Speaker 3 (01:04:49):
The first season is like who can just hang off
this till their muscles give out? Or like in the
second seed the second season, the first challenge they do
to like start sorting people's like who's just gonna run
so hard on these treadmills?
Speaker 1 (01:05:01):
Like yeah, just spread someone? Yeah Yeah. As someone who
would never do that, I'm always like, Wow, I'm just
fascinated by people who are just such physical specimens. And
it's just a very interesting way to watch a competition
reality show and learn some Korean along the way. Also,
So yeah, watching amazing tweet I've been enjoying. Jason Smiley
(01:05:24):
tweeted a picture of Lenny Kravitz looking shredded and said
Lenny Kravitz turned sixty in a couple months, what's your excuse?
And then honey, I am a guy and I shrunk.
The kids on Twitter retweeted that and wrote, I don't
understand was I supposed to kill him? What's your excuse?
(01:05:47):
You can find me on Twitter at Jack Underscore Obrian.
You can find us on Twitter at daily Zeikeeist. Read
The Daily Zeitgeist on Instagram. We have Facebook fan page
on a website, Daily zeikeist dot com. Wore you post
our episodes and our foot note where we link off
t information that we talked about in today's episode, as
well as a song that we think you might enjoy. Miles,
is there a song where you think people might.
Speaker 3 (01:06:08):
Yeah, there's a just some new Chromebin.
Speaker 1 (01:06:12):
I love Krumbin, I love the vibes. I like being
dreamy out there. They're a great, great band. They have
a new track called May ninth that's out that came out.
Speaker 3 (01:06:22):
Just this year. So check this out. This is May
ninth from Chromebin.
Speaker 1 (01:06:26):
May the ninth be with you and all right, you
will link off to that in the footnotes. The Daily's
like as a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from
My Heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio Wrap, Apple podcast, or
wherever you listen to your favorite shows. That is gonna
do it for us this morning, back this afternoon to
tell you what is trending and we will talk to
you about fight by
The Daily Zeitgeist News
Hosts And Creators
Jack O'Brien
Miles Gray
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