Bad Vibes or Algorithms? w/ Jason Pargin 07.11.23

Shout Out Benzos. Just like a sponsored placement by Benzos. I think it's more just to be like, hey, let's be conscious.

co creator the Crack Podcast. Welcome back to this show. Jason Parjin.

twenty nineteen, So the same thing here. Like every time you invite me on this show, I was like, gosh, you know, we can have just it was just on here. It's like it has any news happened, And it was ten months ago. It was October twenty twenty two when I was last on here. But my perception of time, I guess because I'm old or because I'm constantly behind on deadlines is very strange. So everyone who I've failed to keep up with, including all the people in high

school I've not spoken to since literally high school. Please understand from my point of view, it's only been a couple months.

a deeper thing about a more broad topic. Those one of my favorite things we got to do with the Crack podcast, And for this one, we're gonna talk about, like just broadly the subject of how our brain was not designed to deal with the modern world, and like the modern world is getting more and more like a funhouse mirror for the human brain, just kind of like warping and stretching things and magnifying and you know, it's the world is more and more complicated, the way we

interact with it is more and more mediated. So it's it is still about the subject that we cover, I think, just in more of a macro sense. So that's what we're going to be talking about. But first, Jason, we do need to get to know you a little bit better. It's been ten months. What is something from your search history that's revealing about who you are?

one of the most famous people in the world. And yet another example of where one of the most famous people in the world flew totally outside my radar because they are a streaming personality for the utes and I am an extremely old man.

they do it. And this guy got paid one hundred million dollars for two years, fifty million a year because that is the size of his audience while he played video games and chats and eats on camera for ten twelve hours in a row.

an opinion of is Jonah Hill a bad boyfriend? And I feel like it's okay to just say I don't know either of these people. If I tried to approach either of them on the street, their bodyguards would just rough me up and leave me on the pavement. They care nothing about they care nothing about my opinion.

But also that's where we are. I think the other version of this Jason that I saw a lot of was especially during the Ocean Gate Titanic Submarine thing, where suddenly people became like atmospheric scientists, like out of nowhere, and I was like, really, like, you're going out there with your chest out, like with this opinion about what crush depths are, when your previous tweets have been about like, you know, puppies in different like Naruto wigs.

you're starting to get out of my depth. If like, well, do you think the legacy admissions should be done at this? I would need a year to properly educate myself to give you an actual opinion. Can I just revert back to I think racism is bad and that I'm not going to stay here a pretend to understand. And I feel like every argument eventually gets to that point where it's like I believe in trans right, It's like, well, do you think it's okay for a six year old

to go on puberty blockers? I'm not a doctor. That's a discussion with your I don't even know what that is. And if you'd say you know what that is, I think you're lying too. Yeah, And it's like they keep trying to find finer and finer points of like so we can finally have something we can nail at each

other and about fists. Like, man, when you hear a subject that you know, like from your work, and you hear outsiders yelling about it, they sound so stupid, And then you have to realize it to people who actually understand submarines, how dumb we all sounded. But it's like all these these idiots should have known not to go on that things like I wouldn't they charged me.

do they deserve it because they're rich? It's like there's nuance there. The guy running the sub company was a dumb ass. But did the nineteen year old kid who was invited to go on as he did he deserve to die. It's like he went because his dad took him.

a fucked it's a weird it's a weird cycle. But I guess, you know, in a broader sense, like if my WiFi goes down, that ruins my life for however long it's down right, like if I have it, But when it comes back up, I don't feel joy of like, yes, the modern miracle is back. I have access to all of the universe's knowledge again.

simple visual stimuli in a pretty straightforward way. That tree has fruit on it, Remember that tree? And then you know, the point in the article was, like if you only show the person who won the lottery on TV and not the you know, billions of people who lose the

lottery every day. It creates a imprint of like that's the fruit tree, that's that's the place to go, and like that is so basic, that's such a basic thing that just feels like so quaint and antiqu antiquated compared to the modern world that we're existing, where the increasing use of AI to create intentionally false stories, use of like technology really seems to be accelerating things to in some cases like make them worse or at least there's a feeling that that is the case in like day

to day our day to day lives. And so we wanted to talk about kind of all the ways that the modern world is sort of this funhouse mirror that our brand's ability to interact with it it like just warps and stretches, and it's not going well. It seems like based on some of these statistics that you pulled.

country suicide rates have been steadily falling. This is an American thing, but there's a large number they call deaths of despair where they lump together suicide, alcohol debts, drug related deaths, and all of that has skewed up since two thousand and then since around twenty ten has started to like most of them have kind of started to spike. Now part of you you mentioned, like the deaths of

the drug overdose deaths. Some of that is separately just the opioid epidemic and fentanyl, but also some of those overdoses are intentional, but if there's no note left behind, they just put it down as overdose because of course, how.

financial crisis of two thousand and eight. When we start talking about how the media and smartphones and all those things make people more anxious, this upsets people because the response is always, well, we're not anxious because of phones. We're anxious because the world is on fire. Our assertion is not that there are no problems in the world. Our assertion, or at least mine, is that the way media,

the media environment, is one of those problems. It's one of those things that make things worse.

has an effect on me. But then you kind of have to take a step back and like, what are the statistics saying you're actually getting something completely different?

through ab testing. Again there's no conspiracy here. Just through tracking user behavior, they figured out that the more emotionally charged I mean, we saw this cracked, the more emotionally charged headline gets clicked. So now every individual headline because you know, once upon a time you'd have a newspaper with a big headline across the top, you know, Nixon goes to jail or whatever. I don't think Nixon never actually went with the other Yeah, yeah, it doesn't matter.

the actual news organization's gathering news. But then you have the aggregators of the content like Coffington Post, BuzzFeed, Vox, all of these sites that basically would take the headline and then do a little blog post about it, and those titles would be things like, you know, if you're not paying attention to this, you're not angry enough, or this clip is going to leave you outraged when you see how they treated this disabled man at McDonald's, you're

going to be furious, Like literally putting the emotion in the headline. If you're not mad, you're not a good person, right, and making that part of the ethos of the time that it's like, if you want to be a good person who cares about the world, you must be angry all the time because there's so much there's so much injustice or whatever. Never Mind that that doesn't help that person in the video. Never Mind that you're watching a clip from three years ago and everyone has forgotten about it.

It doesn't matter. It has bubbled up on Reddit and now everybody's mad again to no effect, Like it's not motivating you to help this person.

just listen because they were scared of the newsies. But now they have to scare us with the actual content of the headline, and then I think, you know, we've also talked recently about how the number of people who identify with a religion or involved in a religion, and the number of people who have access to or regular contact with a community like both are just on an

all time low and going lower. And so I think that there's a broad kind of you can call it spiritual or like broadly psychological level more than ever before, where we don't have access to answering some of the big questions, and so like we speculated in past one of these like kind of broad episodes about the idea that like maybe stand culture is coming from that this need to sublimate ourselves to something higher and like some mythical like godhead figure or like leader person like because

we're not getting that anywhere else, and so like we get stand culture or the stories of the movies that make an imprint on us when we're very young, like Star Wars or you know, Harry Potter, the Matrix, Like these are our mythical stories that we have chosen to kind of put put ourselves like derive our meaning from.

And that that actually made a lot of sense of how people react, like how Star Wars fans are like fandoms react like there is a religious war when something happens that doesn't cohere to the dogma that they were raised on. But I think there's a lot of like kind of grasping for meaning as technology has isolated us from one another and from the communities that used to allow people to sort of dissolve their sense of self into like a broader, less kind of self centered way

of viewing the world. And I mean, yeah, we were talking about like consumer culture as like kind of another example of where we see this, I mean with with I guess stand culture is one example of that, but consumerism, people have become like very serious consumers, like to like on a deep, deeply personal level.

ways that like interesting to us. Because I'm not interested in religion, yeah, but I'm interested in Arsenal Football club, and that is the closest way I begin to devote myself to something that's like part like there's group, there's like a in group where I'm trying to be like identify with these other supporters.

Because yeah, like we're all we're all just trying to find something that like feels good and helps us feel connected at the end of the day at least certainly that I can speak for myself in that very narrow example.

And that's the thing where we can sit here and talk about as like a mystical thing, like there's no sense of unity or community or whatever, but from just a practical point of view, having a friend who will give you a ride to the airport, or who will help you move or you know, like just as in a practical manner, we that's part of what people don't get this, It's part of what a church provided like the church when one person got sick and couldn't work,

the other members of the church would bring food to their house. They would come help them clean like that was and you did it because it's like, hey, we all are Baptists or whatever, and we are all on the same team.

punch that guy. But when you talk about and there's a term that is for the modern situation, which is atomization, where you've adomized people, where now if you need a ride to the airport, you're going to you know, pay for an uber and so many of these things that used to be stuff that friends would do. It's like, well, now it's a corporation doing it for you. And I'm not saying that the friends you know purely online aren't your real friends, but it's a different type of friendship.

If it's somebody who you can't call when you've broken your leg, you need somebody go get groceries for you, or vice versa. If you're not the person that like, you feel obligator to do that because they're my friend, like they depend on me. It means something to be needed, to be dependent on, Like to get in a situation

where nobody depends on you. I'm like, I don't have children or whatever, but like I don't have friends where that friend's gonna call me in the middle of I said, hey, I need you to come bail me out of jail. Like that sucks in the moment, but knowing that somebody needs you is what keeps you going. When you're that isolated from real life connections, it's too easy to just drift away. Humans need to be needed. Do we need that actual in real life connection.

how you develop even deeper relationships. I do this thing with my wife where I unhook the chain from the toilet handle so she'll need me, and when the toilet isn't working, she will then associate me with someone who can come and solve a problem, and then that helps

create a deeper love. And you're like, oh my god, and people are like really like, I mean, it's that that's a kind of fringe element of TikTok, But more and more people are taking these sort of things and sort of finding ways to like manufacture these kinds of connections because they aren't happening like normally either, And you're kind of like this sounds like sociopathic. But on the other side of it, you can see people sort of like yearning for like, yeah, how do I cultivate a

deeper connection? Do I need to sort of gaslight this person? And then thinking that the toilet never works and I'm the the like magical fixer of that. But again, like you see it expressed in so many ways of that there is this deeper human thing lacking.

of your life. Right if everything's just sort of a transactional and I mean they talk about this new sort of information and also like just day to day economy as being a way to reduce the friction of that like got in the way of some of our consumer like spending habits, and like friction in many cases seems to be human interaction. So I think one thing we're

going to say overall human interaction good. Find ways to be part of a community, you know, preferably one that needs you and gives you meaning.

Like you have people living in the middle of whatever, Oklahoma or Montana, someplace where they haven't had a violent crime, and you know, like in six months, where they've got cameras all over the out side of their house and they've got a shotgun under their bed because they're sure that at any moment a gang of twenty five guys is going to come try to take over their house

because it's something they saw on the news. It's like, well, you know, like in Portland and the Walgreens, old just have like twenty five looters show up and steal everything that could happen to me at any time here in North Dakota.

I remember being like, oh, what's the ocean like? Or I'm trying to like, you know, draw on experiences I have. Most of them are like media rest friends to memories I have like of a movie or something I saw on TV that was forming even my own concept of

what something was. And now that we have like video that's like irl type sort of video from cameras that sort of that ups the stakes even more where people begin to associate well, I did see this one clip of this thing happening in this place, Now that that is exactly what is going to happen to me and has this effect of just ramping up these fears and

like a good like you know. An example of this is like you're saying, Jason, Like, especially on conservative news, the way they portray certain cities and what quote unquote crime waves are happening. That has this effect on us just as human beings, where the more we're put into

a fear state, the more malleable we become. And also it we inch closer and closer to being in a mindset or a mind state where solving things violently is acceptable because we see just how fucked up and like agro and violent the world is, and just looking at all of those things on each other, it's like, at some point for me, like I realized that the way to even break that kind of cycle was first just to have awareness because a lot of the time, if I am getting caught up on what I read in

the headlines, it it feeds on like, you know, I start ruminating on things that aren't actually necessarily helpful to

me because it's also not the reality. Because we talk about the quote unquote crime waves that were that everyone wanted to talk about in the last year that just didn't exist, and it's it's much easier to be like, Okay, I know I'm seeing a lot of like over emphasis on these like visually really like you know, uh, provocative images and videos, but that's not actually that's not that's not the most accurate depiction on what on what is happening.

a quick break and we'll come back. We'll talk about climate, which I think plays into this in a bunch of ways, and also just you know, are there solutions, like what can we do?

like bringing the environment into the conversation. And that makes a lot of sense to me that there is a unprecedented like when we talk about like these are things that we didn't have to deal with thirty years ago, the climate crisis, and like the amount of things that are going to need to change in order to address it and make the world like habitable for the next

century is this massive looming threat. So I think going into this, I was like nobody's doing anything about it, or at least like the you know, corporations are making it so it's incredibly hard to do anything about it.

And I spent the weekend like researching things like Kim Stanley Robinson, the author of Ministry for the Future, who is like, you know, a leftist who knows more about climate policy than I do, and he you know, underlines some of the reasons for concern, but he also has reasons for hope that I hadn't felt as hopeful about, like some of the economic solutions that some of the investment that is happening already like seems to be encouraging to him, And so you know, it's it's frustrating to

be hurtling towards a disaster and have like The New York Times doing sponsor content for BP. But you know, in addition to the investment opportunities that are like helping you know, get the amount of money that's being invested

into making things more sustainable. I feel like one of the things I took away from doing that research is that there's also like a more meaningful life I think waiting for us when the world is able to accept the challenge of like the changing the world from the current system into what it's going to need to be for the survival of the species or like you know, well maybe we'll have that acceptance like thrust onto us

by like a series of worsening climate disasters. But just like thinking about that as like the operational you know, thing that could give like generations to come meaning I think is at least like somewhat in the context that we're talking about, Like it feels like, I guess somewhat hopeful if we can find a way to bring that change in because like there you know, when there is a tragedy, when there's a hurricane or massive flood, like

people work together with like their community with like their their neighbor who they thought they hated, and like, you know, there's meaning and there's there's work being done that actually has results and helps helps people. So yeah, I don't know, it feels like we're going to buy necessity need to address some of this stuff in the coming years, Like we to avoid the disasters, we probably need to be

further along than we already are. But I could see a more meaningful world where where like some of the solutions to these problems that we're talking about actually are necessary.

because there may not be doctors around. I'm going to need to be able to take care of my neighbors. I'm going to need to be strong that fine. If that's if that's not what I'm seeing the stance that we shared earlier. If the message you're getting from the news you're taking in is we're screwed, so why bother And you find yourself just glued to the sofa and doom scrolling on a screen, that to me is the same thing as if I had a friend who had a wife and family and the guy was just on

the sofa all day. He'd quit his job. He's not doing not cleaning the house, not doing anything, And I asked him why. He's like, well, well, because I'm going to die one day. Like once I became aware of my mortality, Well, what's the point. What's the point of doing anything? Like you would not the way you try to comfort him would not be well, you don't know. Maybe they'll cure death, Maybe they'll you'll be able to

upload your brain to a machine. You would say to him, Look, you have a wife and child, you have friends, You need to you need to work this out. Yes, we're all going to die someday. This has always been the case. You need to find a way to cope with it that lets you get up and live your life. Not to be ignorant of it. I'm asking you to pretend that death is and a thing. I'm asking you to

come to terms with it. So there's a meme that I've seen going around where somebody's talking about like I keep being asked what I'm going to do in ten years at a job interview. There's not going to be a ten years, right. That is as unscientific as saying that climate change isn't real. That's as unscientific as being anti vax. There's no scientist saying that civilization won't exist in twenty years. And twenty years, you're still going to have jobs and memos and dress codes and bills and

weddings and funerals to go to. No matter, even in the worst climate change scenarios, is still going to be there. What you're talking about is, you know, things can get worse in the way the pandemic made things worse. But we have largely even the progress we've made so far thanks to the Paris Agreement, thanks to all sorts of meaningful actions that has been taken, we've avoided the worst most apocalyptic scenarios, or at least we're on track to.

Because most people are good. Yeah, and most people do not want to see the world burn. And even the worst of the worst billionaires or stockholders and the oil companies, even they're trying to rationalize it away. It's like, wow, you know, people need oil until we don't like better, dah, it gets it. Maybe it won't be so bad. Like even they're not sitting there giggling at the thought of

the peasants drowning under you know, the sea's rising. Most people, even if civilization collapsed tomorrow, we would rebuild it because that's how we got a civilization in the first place. Most people don't want to see the world burn.

to know and that are happening. And this is a really balanced depiction of it. I think one of the things that helps me through it is to know it's like, Okay, I'm living in a media environment where they're only bubbling up the worst shit to me because that's how that system grows and profits. And but I also have to reckon with okay, when I parse through that, what is actually what is is what is something that's telling me

something that is accurate? And what is this there for me to get my sort of outrage antenna going and for me to click on and when you kind of can give yourself a little bit of room to know like that while a lot of these things are true that are going on, we're also living in a space where the good things are not emphasized enough. And because of that that fills me with a sense of optimism

because now I have to look for it. But as I learned to look for it, and the kinds of stories, of the kinds of places where I can find those stories are that just helps offset those things, because I think the worst thing to do is to think, oh my god, it's all fucked up. There's nothing I can do to da da da, which is just zoom out a second and know like we're like in one of the worst fucking information environments ever ever, of all time. Like we're there right now, and navigating that takes a

huge toll on us. So I also don't want people to think that part of maybe if there's negativity you feel is because you're like you're actually assessing all of this information and coming to the right conclusion, because we're also getting a very skewed version of what is actually happening, especially in this country.

too is being able to like contribute to something. For me, it's to like the privilege of being able to podcast and talk about the things that I hope other people want to hear about, or you know, giving my time to like do some do things in my community. Being able to find those things help offset a lot of the other shit for sure.

this idea of like self compassion. And it really comes down to understanding that I am viewing the world through like a broken instrument, you know, like that that it that does have like an overactive like burglar alarm, that does have like these thought patterns that I've had since I was a child, and so trying to understand them, but also like understanding that I'm not alone in in those things, and like if I, if I just would talk to other people about those things, and I am

naturally more compassionate to other people than I am to myself and more understanding of their you know, having these pitfalls. But when you talk to another person and like share that stuff, you like that there is a common ground

like those those problems become a little bit smaller. And then the other thing is like what when I have feelings of despair, it really rests under on the assumption that you guys were talking about just now of that I completely understand the situation, Like when I don't have this thought, but like when I actually examine what is below the surface of a feeling of despair, it's that I understand this situation have exhausted all options for doing

something about it. And that's never that's never the case. I am an idiot like that. That is, I always take a lot of a lot of solace in the fact that I'm you know, we all individually, for the most part, are not capable of under understanding all of these things. We're pretty limited in our understanding, and that there are possibilities that my brain's not able to come up with, and so all I can do is focus on the things that I can actually affect, and that's

really all I can do. And trying to understand and predict the future, you know, from just a personal standpoint, like can be overwhelming, and so trying to steer clear of that and just focus on the like kind of the next the next day basically, or.

we're I think, just societally. We're just so good also at just identifying the deficiencies that seldom do we really celebrate, you know, like the ways to improve things. That's why I think like positive psychology is something that's only kind of beginnning to pop up in the last century because it's like, Okay, we've mastered the art of telling you what, how fucked up something is?

it too. But again, that isn't to become complacent or to wish away any problems or to act as if these problems don't exist, but to remind myself that they're like, ultimately there are people of good conscience that are also doing things to work just as actively as the people we identify as like threat actors.

a horrible change, and like they happen to go with the grain of like what is going to get media attention in the modern media environment of like outrage, But they are small groups that can be countered, and when people do it, it does seem to actually have an effect.

There are things that can be done. But because we don't hear about necessarily the stories the people successfully counter like pushing back against those small groups, like it does create this optical illusion it's hopeless, and it's not.

dumbest shit. The police came and fished them out, and it's like no. Basically, any metric of human well being worldwide over the last thirty years, from literacy rates, infant mortality rates, cancer survival rates, the percentage of people who have homes, who have electricity, who have sanitation, running water, all of those are spiked upwards in the last thirty years just due to the end of the Cold War and just liberalized trade with you know, something like two

point five billion people have electricity for the first time since nineteen ninety. That many about that many people have toilets, which is if you have not lived in a place without toilets, you do not understand what a big deal that is. But in terms of the spread of disease, in terms of you know, basically everywhere the one part of the world still lagging as Sub Saharan Africa, but across China and India, these places have gotten wildly wealthier

in the last thirty years. And I'm talking about the people at the bottom, people getting the first running water. Millions of miles of roads have been paid for the first time, which again does not sound like a big deal until you realize that people could not go to school or to the hospital because it meant going through a dirt road that turned into mud during the rainy season, and they literally could not travel to a place fifty miles away. Now they have a paved road to go there.

It's stuff that we take for granted here where we're sitting. But for the most part, the average quality of life on Earth has gotten amazingly better by every possible metric, including things like the number of people who die in natural disasters has gone down, not because climate change isn't real, but because building standards have gone up because you've made you know, you've made buildings that can withstand hurricanes and

that can handle flooding better. Infrastructure has gotten better, so behind the scenes, every single day there's people working to improve every little thing you touch. It's just that that doesn't make news because it doesn't get clicked through. Those headlines exist, so stuff gets written up. It's just if you look at the click through between that story and the one story that Fox News dug up of a trans person committing a crime, where it's like, yes, we've

got the thing that we can all yell about. We have found a trans person committing a crime near a bathroom somewhere, one single person that we're going to talk about for the next six months in a nation of three hundred million people, And that won't get as much traffic as everything else on their site combined. That's just the way. That's just the way it works. But in terms of solutions as an individual, that media environment's not

going to go away. It's not you have to. It's like it's like somebody is saying, I'm not going to go on a until they just stop selling the junk food. That's just not going to happen. I wish they sold healthier food. That you can't put that off. Like at some point there has to be a way to educate people or just a culture of I have to recognize what media is making me sick, like that this is junk food. That a story that doesn't affect me but

is emotionally charged, that's just pure sugar. That that is just junk. It's not making you smarter, it's not making you better, and if it's making you hate everyone outside your front door, it's poison like you're poisoning yourself.

I don't like any of these people. I'm on Threads even though Mark zuckerberg Berg has ruined the lives of everyone I know. He is between me and my readers. I don't know what else to do. I'm sorry, I'm not big enough. I'm not Stephen King I'm not big enough to just put a book out there and everybody suddenly knows about it. If I don't tell people about it on social media, not a single copy will sell.

So the podcast deals with kind of the search for him, if he's alive, where he's at, trying to find more about the man behind this myth. It's just a wild story. We talk about the number of times he escaped from prison using a helicopter, like multiple times, so it's just a wild rise. So please be sure to subscribe and rate. And I would really appreciate y'all's support to hear me in my more host voice, which is wild because you're used to hear me just like rambling here.

about the Jonah Hill thing. But this is a very LA tweet to say, if you take nothing else from this reckoning, never date a man who went to crossroads, not in the school that Yeah, that's that's for people from LA for sure. Tweet.

what the titles are? And they were like, wait, well, like what was the first impossible mission? Okay? What was the second impossible Mission? I was like, I don't don't have encyclopedic knowledge of the mission impossible, but that there is something catchy about that title, I guess, So you keep doing it, Tom Cruise. You can find me on Twitter at Jack Underscore Obrian. You can find us on Twitter at daily Zeigeist. We're at the Daily Zeigeist on Instagram.

We have a Facebook fan page on a website, daily zeitgeist dot com, where we post our episodes and our footnotes like off to the information that we talked about in today's episode, as well as a song that we think you might enjoy. Myles, what's the song you think people might enjoy? Uh?