Hello the Internet, and welcome to season three oh two, Episode two of D Like I Say, production of iHeartRadio. This is where we take a deep dive into America's share consciousness. Thank you Katie for that. That was appreciated. It there, it is, it needs it. It is Tuesday, August twenty ninth, twenty twenty three. My name is Jack O'Brien AKA. I have an AKA here on my phone, so I'm gonna bring it up.
That's a weird one talk yeah one, I know.
Stopping at the moon from Mars connection. We need moonlaw because we got none. We need moonlaw's cause we got none. That is courtesy of Blinky heck about the space.
Race to control the ice in the South Poldma, And there's nothing saying who's gonna own it. It's just going to be somebody's who gets there.
They can say, dibbs, we're gonna make a nice granite out of it. Granite.
I don't know what the fuck that is, but.
It's an Italian slusher, So Italian Mamma Mia.
Well, who is that voice, that thick Italian accent that here? We're thrilled to be joined by a very special guest co host one of the funniest comedy writers doing it. You know her words from the birds rights activist account on Twitter. Some more news with Cody Johnson. You know her voice from podcast like Creature features Secretly incredibly fascinating. Please welcome, coming all the way from Italy. The brilliant, the talented Katie Golden.
How does she.
Mean when you're doing podcast? There is nothing to be said?
Hell yeah, I love it.
The song of the song of the season, song of the year.
What is that song?
It's the all of the dream? How does it mean? Okay, there's the rhythm. When the rhythm is glad, there is nothing to be said. That's right, danger and dance clapping the hands.
Jack, I'm sorry, I'm not up on anything. We listened to John Williams music and the Hold at the current moment.
My kids are We're going to play this for you after the episode. You have to. It's all the rage over all the internet right now.
And I will play the finale from the end of Rise of Skywalker for you because it's really it's ten minutes long and it covers everything. Anyways, Katie, it's a full cracked reunion because we are thrilled to be joined in our third seat by the best selling author of books like John Dies At the end, Zoe punches the future in the dick if this book exists here in the wrong universe and the new Zoe is too drunk
for this yestopia, which I believe you can pre order. Still. Yes, he is also one of the hosts of the podcast Big Feats, which, if I'm reading this Paris Review article correctly, is the only Mountain Monsters podcast officially endorsed by Big Feet. He's our former coworker at Cracked, co creator of the Cracked podcast. Welcome back to the show, Jason Pardon.
Now, is it okay for me to do my fake Italian accent that I do? Sometimes I don't know. I realize there are some accents that are inappropriate to keep.
That deeply as a one hundred percent non Italian person living in Italy, I'd be deeply offended.
Okay, then I won't because it's one that's so much fun that I don't know if I'm doing an actual Italian accent or if I'm doing a Hollywood accent of actors who themselves were in no way Italian but just and did not have a language ghost here, it's like.
Why what you breaking my balls?
Yes?
There it is there.
It is the concept of Italian accent is immigrants from Naples who came to the US. And that's it.
And Chris Pratt's interpretation of Mario. Those are the two kind of key texts, the cornerstones.
He's a national icon in Italy. Actually people don't think that, but like Chris Pratt popular.
All right, Jason, how are you doing? Where are you coming to us from? Undisclosed?
Sure, I'm in the state of Tennessee. If you want to try to find me, I'm sure. There's there's one guy on TikTok who can locate anybody just from any photo they take. If you want to show up at my house, I'm sure you can do it, but it has.
He do it. Like even if you're inside he can do it. Probably not.
But if you're standing like just in your yard, he will take the sliver of sky behind you, he can identify exactly down to your address. And that's his whole So this whole bit.
Yeah, that's crazy and terrifying. Katie is coming to us from Europe, not Italy.
Though, this time from Barcelona.
Hey, well well done. On the pronunciation kid.
Failure.
It's yeah, now that feels like it should be offensive.
It probably is. Yeah, Okay, you know I'm in for it.
All right.
Well, we wanted to get together for this special, you know, Tuesday Evergreen one subject episode, to to talk placebos because they're kind of in the news. Like there I saw a thing fairly recently where somebody was saying that, like the placebo effects has actually been disproven. We did a podcast on placibas a long time ago, so I wanted to dig back in on like have they been disproven? Was all the stuff that we were talking about back
in the day a complete bullshit? And yeah, it's also like it came up a lot in my thinking around the Havana syndrome. Havana syndrome even though it's not like that's not specifically a placebo, but it does have something to do with like how meaning affects the human body, Like, are.
You telling me that's that? It was not a Cuban death ray.
It was a sound ray. It was a Cuban sound ray that melted people's brains.
A Cuban brain microwave exactly.
They used sound that nobody else could hear right. Anyways, So we're going to talk about all of that plenty more. But before we get to any of it, Jason, we do like to ask our guests, what is something from your search history that's revealing about who you are.
I searched this like a week ago, fenyl efren FDA thinyl frind. If that word in that chemical is unfamiliar to you, I can almost guarantee you you have ingested it at some point, because it is the active ingredient in almost every over the counter cold and sinus medication. Tylenol, pseudo fed pe inning, he's got the letters PE on it. The active ingredient is finol efrin, and finol efron does not do anything. Scientists have known this for a while.
What happened was when sudafed had to go behind the counter because it is obviously used for meth. They knew that would deter some customers from buying anything, so they released different versions of their products that could be sold out on the shelf, and those are all placebos, not intentionally so. I think they may have had data at some point that they relieve symptoms, but it has since been completely debunked. It does not outperform placebo even if
you up the dosage bar four one hundred percent. Wow, so now you will. Still there are people listening right now saying, well, that's ridiculous. I take DayQuil or whatever the other ones are, any of them non drowsy, you know, sinus stuff, and it makes me feel better. But the thing about sinus and cold symptoms is one they are variable. For instance, for most people, it's worse in the morning and gets better as the day goes on, so invariably
it will get better. And also your body naturally heals it. So it's like, well, yeah, I took it for like four straight days, boom, I was good as threat. It's like if you had also, your body would have done that anyways, yes, if you had taken tic tax for four straight days. And so this is why bringing this
up obviously the theme of the episode. That's not a placebo in the sense that this stuff in the garbage aisle of the pharmacy where they've got all of the herbs that will increase focus by selling you some sort of you know, the root or flower something.
Yes, focus, that's what I go into that section.
For increased focus on focus below the waiste focus right.
One laser guided focus.
That stuff.
I feel like there's an understanding among educated people it's like, well that stuff will see bo It's you take a powder, you put it in your tea, and then it gives you the confidence to get in erection when you're having sex, because and it works, like people will buy it again and again because it's like, yeah, it reduces their anxiety because like, I'm good, I've taken my my boner tea and then that actually does help them perform.
But I don't I didn't.
Realize confidence was sort of a key part of the erection. Like if you're just not confident enough, oh yeah, there is a dysfunction.
Yeah, I think so, Oh my god, we could do the whole episode about this. Yes, I'm and also like tea, like I feel like tea. Like you're also just not drinking enough tea. I think those are the two main things. Not enough confidence t.
T gives you boners.
I think gives you you just drink it with your hands cupped around the tea and give it a little while wearing a cart.
Again, that's why the British we're super into it.
Yeah, but yeah, confidence is definitely important.
There's crippling performance anxiety to the point that it is like a physical symptom because men feel such pressure to do it right that that can Actually, we'll talk about.
My little scorecards might have been overkill causing problems.
I see play by play commentary, But the reviews you left later on whatever website where women lead disaster is disaster.
Boner yelp, boner, yelp.
That has to exist, right must Anyway, back on this sentence, I was finishing like four minutes ago. Most of us know that stuff is placebo. What a lot of us don't realize is how much of the stuff sold in the rest of the pharmacy is placebo. And I do not mean this in a I'm not from like the wellness corner of the Internet. It's like a Western medicine is nonsense. I mean literally the efficacy of like headache medicine.
Headaches go away on their own eventually, the percentage of time when you took etcetera and the headache went away because the etceteran versus it went away on its own, or went away because you drank a cup of coffee and it was just caffeine withdrawal, causing your headache. You would be shocked at how many of the pills you've taken from the real medicine part of the pharmacy didn't actually do anything. Likewise, when I used to go to the doctor for flu, cold, sin of symptoms, they would
give me an antibiotic. Antibiotics don't do anything against a virus. But the doctors know you will be mad if you don't walk out of there with something that's a placebo. We waste a lot of antibiotics on as the placebo effect. It works, It will work, but it worked because you were going to get better anyway.
And they're also making the bacteria stronger and more ready for a.
Back, like the bacteria thunderdome.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, but yeah.
The headache thing is really interesting because I've recently discovered this technique for headaches where it's like you think to yourself, like where is my headache? And then you ask yourself weird questions like what color is my headache, what shape is my headache? What flavor is my headache? And like you're like really focusing on your headache, and you're supposed
to like actually answer those questions. As silly as they sound, you're supposed to imagine a shape for it, imagine what color it is, and it actually is fairly effective for me when I have, like not for a really powerful headache, but like you know, like a minor headache. And I think it's interesting because like part of it could be like your body's relaxing more because you're focused on a task. That's like not it's not a stressful thing to try
to think about shapes and colors. It's also like making you kind of like think about your head in a weird way. It's very strange. It's super weird that it works, but it does actually work for me.
Yeah, that's that's super interesting. Yeah, I think like the thing that I ultimately the conclusion I ultimately came to from doing the research on this, and we'll get more into it as we go, but is that like there's just this massive like placebo is only a tiny portion of a much larger field that connects like what is like meaning and like what either social meaning or like personal meaning and like just language with like what is
happening inside our body? And so it's yeah, I don't know that the study that was like the placebo isn't real, the like I take the point that there's a reversion to the mean, But I do think that there's also something that is realer than common understanding when you say placebo, like, there's something realer than what happens in at least my mind, that happens inside the body during a placebo effect. But
we will get into that. But so what is We also like to ask our guess, what's something you think is overrated.
That's is not related to this subject. But I would say just the concept of streaming media because, for example, I decided I was going to go back and watch the show Westworld on HBO because I thought maybe I had judged it too harshly, maybe there's too much conversation around it, and found and found that it is gone from hbox. They when they canceled it, they pulled it from the library. So now if you want to watch it, you have to go pay for it, either episode by
episode or by a season. To buy all four seasons is one hundred dollars. It's twenty five bucks a season. So to give you an idea of how skewed the streaming business model was, which is obviously this is relevant because of the strikes and the actors and writers all trying to get new deals, and you have all the studios saying, well, our streaming services are losing billions with
what money? They're losing billions because they set up a bad, intentionally bad business model that basically rendered physical media all but obsolete and what turned out to be a very bad deal for consumers because they are not going to keep these libraries. Your subscription to HBO doesn't guarantee you any access to anything that they choose to pull next week. And it's yeah, but that's what dispute was about.
There was some series called Willow. I never watched it, but apparently they like released it and then completely obliterated it, like memory hold it after like a month.
Yeah.
It was just it was it was wiped from the face of the earth. Everyone who had watched it had their memories pulled from their brains.
They were actually put in prison, right, Yeah, we're made to forced to undergo oh horrifying psychological.
They were lobottomized.
Yeah, Willow being the show that was like an expansion of the Willow cinematic.
Universe, right right, exactly, the w w C which we were all, yeah, we were looking for so what is something you think is underrated?
Jason, I'm going to say just physical media, which, by the way, I don't own any DVDs or Blu rays any what ones I had I gave away. But when Netflix had their DVD rental program, they had one hundred thousand titles they rent they mailed to people. Netflix streaming service has about six thousand. Yeah, so they lost ninety four percent of their library for this little incremental gain inconvenience of well, what's on the man? I just set
in my chair and turn on. It's like you gave up ninety four percent of your access for not having to deal with a disk. I find that fascinating. But that business model, the move from like physical media to streaming has been bad in almost every possible way, except for the frequency with which you have to get up out of your chair to change the disk in the machine,
which we will now not tolerate doing, never will. I will be damned if I'm going to walk all the way across the room and put a thing inside the thing. I want to be able to pull up the show with my remote from my chair, and for that I will lose I will lose everything, Right, do you.
Remember the smell of VHS tapes because like the smell good. I like that.
Smell burning dust is what I always assumed it was burning being heated.
It smelled good enough that I think it killed some brain cells. But yeah, that was I do miss sort of just the mechanical sounds too. That came with, like you pop in a VHS and then you hear it working and doing the like, and then it's it's it's it's excitement. It's a you know, foreplay to be moving watching experience.
There was also that moment when you started to feed the tape in and the machine would grab it from you and pull it the rest away in. Yeah, that was always great because the machine's like, no, I've gotten in charge.
Now let me handle this for you.
This is no longer your problem. But it is a little terrifying. It's like, what the fuck what's going on in there?
So we need we need like robots whose job is specifically to get a VHS tape and pop it in for us, and that'll be the future.
Yeah yeah, yeah, because we don't we don't like that out of control feeling of having the tape taken from us, like they've also gotten rid of the ATM machines that like pull your card in also, so maybe that's we're all just trying to avoid the feeling of like a mechanical object being like I get this from here. It is wild, Like I I guess I hadn't even really thought about the fact that there you could watch anything on on like when you had the Netflix DVD service,
you could watch anything you want like that. That there wasn't like a, oh, does Netflix have this, or does like where where do I look for this? It was is just assumed basically that they were going to have
almost anything that you wanted. But we've like slowly had that taken away from us, and and now it's just like, you know, I feel like now every time I google something, they're like, you be Youber has this if you want to like start your free trial for you bur and like get some ads from the Czech Republic in the middle of like this Michael Mann film that you want to watch.
Like you were an actual one of them.
Or no, I think it's a I think there's like voododoo to.
Be verb yeah verbo, or that I think verbo is a vacation rental.
Yeah verbos yeah, but see, this is this is the problem.
Once upon a time you had cable channels that the word meant what it was like, this is classic movies turned classic movies like Boom.
You know what you're getting that history channel.
A right, Yeah, nope, it's free V. That's as close as we get to like it having a meaning, And that doesn't even really make sense. And even then, I don't know what which part is free? Is it that it's ad free or it has ads in therefore the content it's free? Yeah, I don't know. Nobody knows.
Nobody can't.
You can't find that out.
Jason, if you're interested. The way you get around that is by having a flex server. Are you familiar with that?
I have seen people on Twitter every time I bring this up. Tell me, Yeah, you can get a plex server and then you can put all of your physical media on there, and then it just looks the interface I guess looks just like a streaming service, right, like you can just take your movie.
Yeah, my dad has like eighty thousand movies on his that will never go away, just so you know.
Yeah.
See, if I and if I had any sense, I would have kept my old DV library because I used to have a bunch like everybody, you know, in the two thousands, I had shelves of DVDs. I had entire shows on there that I love that now, I you know, but again, I gave all that stuff away because it's like, nah, I'm not a boomer. Yeah, I'm I'm a modern man with you know, I'm not doing things the old way.
Yeah, as a group of people who send him movies like the like they upload them themselves. They have a physical copy and they just give it.
And the quality is higher. Like people don't realize that, Like Netflix doesn't broadcast in blubray quality. It's even what they're calling four K. They're not streaming. It's not the way it is off of a physical disk.
Yeah, absolutely, Yeah, and with like the internet provider, good luck, Like even if it is a high quality stream, like good luck getting that without it stopping every like half hour.
Yeah, that'd be like a twenty five gigabyte file. They're not going to stream that in real time. It doesn't.
Yeah, I personally like the image quality of my movies to look like they've been water damaged in some way, So that's actually what I'm looking for. But I can see how people who want high fidelity could I like it by that.
I like it when it freezes and other actors face emerges from the face as a frozen actor. That's always a cool effect.
Yeah, all right, let's take a quick break and we'll come back and we'll talk placebos.
We'll be right back, and we're back.
And so as we as we started talking about the placebo effect again, you know that there was I think, Jason, I saw you tweet about the congestion medication, and I saw somebody else tweet about how like a lot of the studies that assumed the placebo effect was real, we're just ignoring reversion to the mean, like you talked about like it you know, you will not Your body will
naturally get better on its own. And so when people are responding well to a sugar pill, it might just be that they are responding well period, because the human
body as good at healing itself. But I so the thing I've been thinking a lot about, like sort of this bridge between body and mind in like the past few years with regards to the Havana syndrome, because I think I was thinking a lot about the stuff we had covered before with placebo effect when when I was like kind of going through trying to understand what had happened and like how these people were having the experience that they were having, which was that they felt like
they were physically being attacked by like a sound wave ray that left them debilitated.
Yeah, I remember this. I remember being very skeptical on the like onset of this story because I couldn't think of a ray that would cause such a thing that would have no physical signs. But there it's not like they were just kind of making it up for like they were. They seemed very much actually suffering, which was why I think it caused so much consternation, because it wasn't just like a prank. These were like right, you know.
Those seem to be the two like that. I think that is just generally where the two ideas that take hold. When you hear like, okay, this sci fi technology that scientists say like couldn't really exist is attacking these people. You either go with like Okay, everything is what it seems there is this sci fi sound ray weapon that is attacking people, or these people are making it up.
And I think, like that's why I was thinking about placebos a lot is because it had created this like third option, where like the meaning of the story that you're telling yourself is actually creating a physical reality, like an illness that inside your body that like is a as real as like the cold or the flu that.
But by the way, a fun thing to do is to be researching a episode on the plassy bo effect and like the mind body connection and also coming down with a cold, which I have been for the past forty eight hours. Highly recommend it's a real mind fuck.
I'm actually just coming out of a cold. So maybe I placeboed that like an inception onto you.
Yeah, But I think the best description of like what I ultimately thought was going on and what I suspected before I read this was going on is still this like New York Times piece from twenty nineteen. So it wasn't. It wasn't like people had it wrong for a long time and then only recently somebody got it right, Like this article was written, explained what it was, and then people continued on being like, so what are we going
to do about the Savannah syndrome story? But I just want to read this, So they basically say it's a functional disorder. It's this meaning based experience that people are having where they actually feel the symptoms. The symptoms are real, it's just it is happening neurologically. It is not happening because they have been physically attacked, and so in the article they say for all their mystery. Functional disorders are not diagnosed simply after eliminating every possible normal disorder that
might be causing a patient symptoms. Rather, neurologists look for signs and symptoms that are inconsistent, varying even during the course of an examination, and incongruent with what they expect to see in known objective disorders caused by physical injury
or illness. One of the most remarkable aspects of the diplomat's illnesses the people who are suffering from Havana syndrome is that even if all of them experienced an actual blow to the head shortly before their symptoms appeared, which none of them did, most should have fully recovered in a matter of days, weeks, or months, as is standard
following a minor head injury. Instead, many of them experience symptoms that remain steady or worse into over a period of months, and some continue to suffer chronic perhaps lifelong symptoms.
So basically, if they'd gotten hit in the head with a bag of rocks or like a sonic weapon, as they claimed, they would have healed along a predictable timeline because the body is really good at healing itself, because it's a machine that is like designed to do that like over millions of years, and unless the problem is in the mind, in which case it gets complicated and it kind of it can linger longer than that.
But I mean, someone might respond that the Cuban death ray just like put some kind of undetectable cancer inside their brain or some sort of like thing that is a chronic condition. But yeah, but they didn't find anything in MRI scans that would suggest any kind of like structural abnormality in the brain, right.
They did find like an increasing gray mat like this. This story also like made me you know, I've seen this elsewhere where. It's like brain scans. Can you can get a lot of different interpretations out of brain scans. Oh, there's a big story after this one came out that was like they say, there's an increased gray matter, so they were attacked, And everyone I saw was like, that doesn't necessarily mean anything.
Well, right, because the brain. Like also like if it's increased activity in parts of the brain that you're detecting, that is because your brain is your mind, and if you are having a psychological issue, that will actually affect your brain's functioning. So it's like your brain, your brain and mind is an organ. So it's it's kind of it's a weird thing to think about. But even though our mind feels very like non physical, very esoteric, it
is a physical organ. So if your mind has some issue, right, like you have some kind of psychological issue, that is an issue with the organ that is your brain. So you will see things on scans potentially, like if you say you have depression or some other sort of psychological issue, like you would actually see evidence of that potentially, not always, but potentially you would see the functioning of the brain being different in scans.
That gets to the heart of.
The issue because we have many, many, many things in society that function the way Havana syndrome does. You have people who claim that they are allergic to Wi FI or five G and they can show where they break out and hide so or they have nervous disorder, they have tremors in their hands or headaches or whatever. And again we will our habit to say walts just all
in their head. It's hard to overstate that. Like you said, they're not faking for attention, the same as people during witch hunts swore that the local witch cursed them, and ever since the witch gave them a dirty look, they've had I can't think straight, I can't sleep.
I did da da da.
It's like their symptoms are real, witchcraft is not. And I think the Western idea of the mind being a mystical thing that exists separate from the body, like in our body switching movies, where you're somehow two people's minds switched, but you're in somebody else's body. It's like, well, if you're if you went.
Into someone else philosophy, yes.
Yeah, yeah, if you went into somebody else's brain, you would just be them. You wouldn't perceive any switch that happened because it's all it's all there, like it's just an organ. So I think that actually screws up the way we think of a lot of health conditions because if you say, well, it's just all on your head, it's like, well, you're saying there's magic occurring that somehow my mind can magic make me break out in hives.
It's like, well, no, your brain's just another organ your body releasing whatever chemicals or hormones or whatever that cause you to break out or change color or become inflamed. It's all just a mechanism. It's gears. It's so it's like what you're saying, my mere thoughts can cause my body to do something weird. It's like, well, yeah, I have irritable vowel syndrome that we treat with an anti anxiety medication. There's no it's like, oh, so you're you
tricked yourself into pooping your pants. It's like, no, your gut produces serotonin too. It's it's all part of that. That mechanism. You regulate serotonin, you're also going to regulate your digestion. There's a reason you feel anxiety in your gut. It's not it's not magic. It's just it's all just nerves and my body. When I aim under a certain amount of stress, my body takes blood flow away from
the digestion and it doesn't digest very well. That's it, but trying to fix it is extremely difficult in science, anyone who's ever gone to the doctor for something like this, some sort of physical condition caused by they think anxiety or stress or whatever. It is a frustrating process because they do seem to just be throwing pills at you, and they do seem to be trying placebos, because you will run into people say, well, I've got I found this cinnamon t that is just it cures my ibs
like nothing else. The thing is, it probably does, and it's not magic. It's not you know, and the same thing, this is terrible, treacherous territory, but what he prayed for me and that cured my ibs. I personally, my belief is it's the same thing that the belief that you did. You took action and you did something cured it. It's not magic. And I if you stop thinking of the mind as magical, this stuff makes much much more sense.
Yeah. I mean that the brain gut connection is incredibly strong. Like you have neural type cells actually like in your gut, and that sort of the relay between your gut and your brain is very very strong. It's like why when you get nauseous for some reason, you might feel anxious and then visa versa. So it's like maybe you have nausea for some reason, Like you have food poisoning, right, and it starts in your gut, You're gonna feel anxious
from the nausea. It's going to cause this very strong reaction in your brain of like, oh my god, what is wrong? Like when I got food poisoning, I had a huge panic attack because I thought I was dying, and it was just because I had really bad nausea. And then vice versa. And when you're anxious, you can
have very severe gut problems. And it's not like it's like you have the physical evidence, right, Like it's not that diarrhea is imaginary, it's real diarrhea, but it is that your brain is actually causing your gut not to function properly, and then you get diarrhea. So it's like it is an organ your brain. The organ is causing dysfunction in your gut, which it has a very strong connection with and then you know, voila diarrhea.
Yeah, and some diarrhea is imaginary, but that's like just based in my mind. And we've talked about how I should stop talking about that on the show. This sort of materialist idea that like a medication is something that causes.
Jason, if you're interested, The way you get around that is by having a flex server. Are you familiar with that?
I have seen people on Twitter every time I bring this up, tell me, Yeah, you can get a plex server and then you can put all of your physical media on there, and then it just looks the interface I guess looks just like a streaming service, right, like you can just take your movie.
Yeah, my dad has like eighty thousand movies on his that will never go away.
Just yeah. See, if I, if I had any sense, I would have kept my old dv library because I used to have a bunch everybody, you know, in the two thousands, I had shelves of DVDs. I had entire shows on there that I love that now I you know, but again I gave all that stuff away because it's like, nah, I'm not a boomer. Yeah, I'm I'm a modern man with you know, I'm not doing things the old way.
Yeah, as a group of people who send him movies like the like they upload them themselves. They have a physical copy and they just give it a duplicates of it.
And the quality is higher. Like people don't realize that, like Netflix doesn't broadcast in blubray quality. It's even what they're calling four K. They're not streaming. It's not the way it is off of a physical disc.
Yeah, absolutely, Yeah, and with like the internet provider, good luck, Like even if it is a high quality stream, like, good luck getting that without it stopping every like half hour.
Yeah, that'd be like a twenty five gigabyte file. They're not going to stream that in real time.
It doesn't.
Yeah, I personally like the image quality of my movies to look like they've been water damaged in some way. So that's actually what I'm looking for. But I can see how people who want high fidelity could.
I like it. I like it when it freezes and another actor's face emerges from the face as a frozen actor. That's always a cool effect.
Yeah.
A chemical to go into your body and that chemical interacts with the chemicals that are already there to make you better or make you feel different in psychoactive drugs like like that That's how I've I came to think about, like when I thought about medicine or like the medical world, Like that's totally what I thought of, And I think
that that is somewhat unique to our modern condition. Like what one of the articles that I read for this was talking about how Ben Franklin was like really fascinated by the subject of placebos, and he said, like one of the best doctors he knew told him that he like handed out bread pills and like food colored water
much more than real medicine. But like not not to like prank people, like we said it was because he was a good doctor and was able like knew that there was a healing component to the belief that people held, and that the meaning that getting a medicine from a doctor who actually you know, has a career's worth of bedside manner and like confidence and reassurance like built up and like has a gift for this sort of specific
interpersonal human connection. Like that all of that working together with a bread pill that allows you to like focus all of all of that meaning into something and like take it inside your body. Like that that works. But I feel like in the modern world, if a doctor went on a show and was like, yeah, I'm giving all these people bread pills and securing them like they would be you know, people would demand their medical license be taken away.
Being bread pilled sounds like some kind of weird Internet ideology like yeah, can be red pilled, but you can be bread pilled, where you're like bread is better than dating people.
It kind of is in a lot of cases.
Yeah, I mean, god, bread is so good. I mean it's interesting because like it we're talking both about the placebo effect, which is like the bread pill, uh, and then the the like the Cuban brain wave is a no ciebo, so like no cebo is a type isn't a specifically an effect where it's actually negative, So like it's been a treatment that should have no effect actually has a negative effect, or an imagined treatment or something has an effect on someone, so like they've actually there's
actually been research on the no cebo effect in terms of like when people take say a sugar pill or a dummy pill when they're testing medications, Like if they're told it has a specific side effect, there's a good chance they're going to actually feel that side effect. That recently, I mean somewhat recently, with like testing the COVID vaccine, there was like a review of the literature that found that like the no sebo effect of the sham covid vaccine.
So this was like this was just essentially saline in a vaccine, Like over seventy percent of these participants, Like the negative reaction to the vaccine was accounted for by the no sebo effect for the sham vaccine. So a bunch of people were like, oh, yeah, I have my arms sore, like I feel bad, and it was after they got a completely fake inert COVID vaccine.
Yeah, we've seen very dramatic videos of people show off their horrifying symptoms from what they thought was the vaccine. And we've seen social contagion of like people with eye twitches, like even before there was the vaccine conspiracy theory of like young people on TikTok like having weird twitchy reactions and like claiming, you know, not not really knowing where it was from. Not not as part of like some QAnon conspiracy, but just they're like, social contagion is real,
and yeah, there's a long, long history of it. All right, let's say, let's take another quick break and we'll come back and finish this out. And we're back, and just a few things I wanted to hit, So like that, there is this one experiment where they figured out people who were particularly susceptible to placebos, and they then like during the course of a experiment, gave them a thing that like blocked the opioid receptors in the brain, and the placebo effect cut off, which means that's so cool.
I mean, it's that's super weird.
Yeah, it's weird, but it's basically it makes sense when you realize when you think about the fact that, like the brain is like its own pharmacy. It's creating the dopamine. You know, the like add medication and stuff like that, or you know, they're illegal drugs that cause your brain to like make more dopamine that like make you feel even better. But your brain is creating its own dopamine on its own schedule.
My brain is my favorite dealer.
Yeah, your brain is its own like drug dealer slash pharmacist. And you know that then doctors get involved when like it's not doing the job that it needs to do. But you know that what is happening in like that, This study would suggest that what's happening when people experience the placebo effect is that your brain is producing the actual chemical that the medication is supposed to be producing.
It just didn't need the medication to actually be in the pill to get you to to get the brain to do the thing that your body kind of knows it needs in that moment. So I mean, from that perspective, like being susceptible to placebo is such is such an amazing like superpower where it's just like, oh, yeah, my body and brain can just like make these medications for.
Me, right, And it's not I think it's important to note it's not like gullibility. It being able to get the effect of a placebo is not that like you are stupid or gullible. There's like a study on seeing like, oh, are people who are easily hypnotized also like susceptible to placebo? And there was no connection there either. It just seems to be a thing that like affects almost everyone in terms of being able to you know, benefit or suffer from the placebo or no cebo effect.
Yeah, we understand. We understand so little of this because listen listening to what you guys say, think about how difficult it is to study this and how difficult it is to set up an effective trial that perfectly filters out every possibly confounding thing that could be some form of placebo or no cebo effect. This is why our mental health medications have barely improved in the last fifty
years or something like that. It is unbelievably difficult to nail down the effectiveness of something like an antidepressantory anti anxiety because again, Pacibo's work really well for anxiety. When you have somebody telling you, well, my anti anxiety pills, I go work in my garden, they're not lying. Like repetitive motion, exercise, sunlight. Those are physical things that affect all of those biological reactions to anxiety. They're not being a hippie. And you know, I don't you sound like
a scientologist. We start ranting about how ineffective these medications are, But the truth is you get about seventy five percent of the same effect from a pasebo for mild depression, because of course you do it. You know, if you've got some whatever fancy tea that's supposed to really you know, calm you down, just the ceremony of making it and give you a loaner, the ceremony of making it, sitting down,
drinking something hot, drinking it slowly. There's yeah, that can have most of the effect of a medication without the terrible side of the issue is that is such an incredibly dangerous thing for people to hear because some people who have very severe symptoms who definitely need prescription medication, they tend to be the ones who's like, see, I
don't need that voodoo. It is incredibly difficult to nail down the effectiveness of any of these because, as you just said, like that, we even now have doubts about exactly what's placebo and what's just no treatment at all. Depression is just like a lot of those things we mentioned earlier. It cats better and think about all the factors in a person's life that can improve their mood. It's like, we have three months, three months on these
sugar pills, and my depression went away. Also, I got a different job and the boss that terrorized me is no longer in my life. And also my chronic knee injury stopped hurting, so I didn't have the chronic pain weighing on me. It's like, which of the four million factors in a human life caused your depression to go away? And us people who to sound smart, who like to say, well, it's all just brain chemicals it's all just serotonin or
whatever that is that is boiling it down. That's simplifying it so much as to make it wrong, right.
I mean, it's like it's true that it's like all brain stuff, but your brain responds very well to your environment. So environmental things are going to have a massive effect on your brain. Like you know, your general habits, what your life is like, what you're eating, what you're doing, what you're thinking. All these things just kind of like form this like cyclone that can really affect your state
of mind. It's also really difficult with the studies on medication for like say, depression, anxiety, et cetera, because the like everyone's brain is very different, so the heterogeneity effects in these studies are just very hard to compensate for. Like a medication that works really well for someone may not work at all for another person even though they both have depression, because one person's depression and another person's depression.
It's not like a you know, simple like disease. It's not like a broken bone where it's like, okay, you can kind of like the procedure for healing a broken bone for one person another person is generally somewhat similar but for something like depression, it's like you have a totally different thing going on from one person to the next, given how complicated the brain is and how like broad spectrum something like depression is in terms of what's causing it,
what's going on, And I mean the same can be said for a lot of like non psychological disorders as well, Like there are a lot of diseases where it's like, well, treatment for one person seems to work before another person does not work at all because their bodies are different and their systems are different. So it's like a huge challenge in medicine.
Even if they were genetically the same, which they're not. Are their diets different, are their sleep patterns different? Is their home life different, is their social lives different? Do they have different numbers of friends? All those things can impact how your brain works exactly.
I mean, your brain structure changes over time based on your environment. It's not like you're born sort of with a baby brain and then it goes like it's genetically programmed to turn into an adult brain. Like you're born with the very plastic brain that responds incredibly sensitively to your environment and what happens to you.
Yeah, the two examples that jumped out to me this time doing the research on the side of like just a straightforward plas ebo effect, like this is a pill causing you to do causing your body to do a thing. It's still like the pill color things is still like
so mind blowing to me. Like they gave a group of medical students two new drugs, one a sedative and the other stimulant, and like they were given either one or two blue or pink tablets, and the tablets were all inert they were sugar pills, but the students' responses on a questionnaire indicated the red tablets or pink tablets tended to act as stimulants, while the blue ones acted as depressants, and two tablets had more effect than one.
And it's not it doesn't really make sense, but like you can't boil it down to anything that is like happening other than with like meaning like pink or red means like hot or danger, and blue means like cool and quiet, and right.
Blue means cool ranch stritos, Red means flame.
And hot nacho cheese. Yeah, exactly. And that's why I wake up to get wake up in the morning, I eat nacho cheese and to go to bed and I eat cool ranch.
Yeah exactly.
Yeah.
Giving an example even without an experiment. I know people who will drink an espresso or drink an energy drink, and while they're drinking it, we'll talk about how wired they are, like, oh my.
Gosh, it's hitting me.
Well, it takes forty five minutes for caffeine to enter the bloodstrein. Yeah, that's you. You drinking the red Bull and after two gulps is like, oh my gosh, I can feel it hitting me. It's like it's like you didn't inject it into your vein. You drink it. It has to be absorbed into your system. But that's paceibo effect, you know. And if you if you felt it that soon, you just told yourself. So think about did you need
the energy drink at all? If you can talk yourself into bouncing off the walls because you thought that, oh my gosh, the whole eighty whole milligrams of caffeine has slammed into my system, which by the way, is not very much. And I personally believe making the can big and with a big, loud, stupid name like C four bomb, sickle and it's got like a stick a dynamite on it. I think that helps the policy. In fact, I think you drink a big, bombasty can of something. It's like, man,
this is gonna hit me like a freight train. I think it can have it could be decaf, and I think it would hit you mostly the same way.
Yeah, I want an energy drink that's just called brain bone or juice.
Your brain is gonna fuck so hard. And then the other example that's kind of in the other direction was they looked at the cause of death between Chinese Americans and randomly selected group of white people in California, and it was found that Chinese Americans, but not the white people, will die significantly earlier than normal if they have a combination of disease and birth year, which Chinese astrology and
medicine consider ill fated. And so it's you know, Chinese Americans whose deaths were attributed to lymphatic cancer and if they were born in Earth years and consequently were deemed by Chinese medicine like especially susceptible to diseases involving lumps, not nodules or tumors, had an average death age like four years younger than people who were not born in one of those years, and no such you know difference
existed among the group of white people. So it's just and that that was true across Like I don't know the ins and outs of what Chinese medicine believes and like what the different year meanings are, but like it just it feels like very strongly determined by like meaning and like the stories that we tell ourselves about ourselves and that like we like exist within and so I don't know, it's I find that one like kind of hopeful in a way because like you can I don't know,
like tell yourself stories and like sort of free yourself from some of the stories that we tell ourselves that it can be damaging about ourselves. Like like what there was also a study where they told people the truth.
They were like, this is a placebo effect study, and like the truth is that like placebo effects have been shown to like help people, and like that it had clear like positive results just by being honest, which I always thought like an important part of the policicibo effect would be the lying, but apparently not, which doesn't really make sense to me.
But like, like rituals I think can really have a strong effect, like you put the pill in your mouth and you swallow the water, and even if you know it's a placebo, you've still done the ritual in your body. You may still have sort of this like connection to
the ritual and feeling better. So it's you know, it's like if you've ever found like a calming routine, like some kind of meditation routine or calming routine that you do, like once you sort of get into the typical position that you're in, that it's like, well, I start listening
to music, I sit on the couch or something. Once you practice it and do it a bunch, it works better, Like meditation or calming yourself down, like works better once you've practiced it, because once you start to do it, you make the association between like, well, once I when I light this candle or listen to this music, I
start to feel calm. And then it's like, even though you know it's not like medicine, yeah, you've come to associate the ritual with feeling better, but yeah, with the with the that study on like the zodiac or wait is it zodiac?
Yeah, che medicine like that right, It's it makes.
Me think about when we when someone has a disease and they're given a timeframe for like how much longer they have to live. I've always had mixed feelings about that, because, on one hand, I think it's good right to like prepare people for like, hey, you know you have terminal cancer, so you might want to like prepare and get your
affairs in order and all this. But having a time frame in a way also seems like you are kind of potentially negating any kind of like placebo effect of like, well if I can like you know, like maybe this thing will kill me eventually, But then if you feel like, well, I'm definitely going to die in like a year or X months, I wonder if that has an effect on
like how long you actually have. It's not to say that the diagnosis is incorrect or that's something like terminal cancer you can just think your way out of, but there is something on the margins in terms of like how healthy you are and continue to be based on
your mind frame. Right, So it's like I don't think you could beat a terminal diagnosis through some kind of placebo effect, but I could imagine your quality of life and your lengths of time left could be affected by whether you feel completely doomed or not within a certain period of time.
Right, I think you stumbled on a big, big thing in our society, which is, for example, to me, it is not surprising at all the yoga cures all sorts of things. You're stretching, it's you've got you a room to see the silent or with white noise or with music. It's something you often do in a group where a bunch of people all doing something in sync. You know, we humans are social animals. That has its own benefit. It does not surprise me that that helps cure all
sorts of things. None of us stretch enough and just. And it's also its exertion. You know, it's very strenuous. If you've never done yoga before, it will kick your ass. You don't. It's not just stretching like it's holding difficult positions. But part of yoga is that there's a religion around basically, and it's all of this stuff that I know is on scientific about Well, this stretch will release any financial stress in your life, because financial anxiety tends to store
in your hips. Or you've got to realign your chakra. You've got the mystical spiritual energies and the body. Thetans have to be released through your spine. So the question is does the mythology make it work better? And once you apply it, think about yoga, you think about all of the other things in society where we tell people a story to get them to behave a certain way and the story is not true, but it is effective at healing that we're making them healthier. And what are
the ethics of that? Because, for example, it is my understanding that studies has consistently found that placebos work better when they are expensive. Yeah, because you don't want to feel like you wasted your money. So the ethics of selling somebody a powder of ground up shark bones or something and this is going to cure you anxiety And it's like, well, actually, people don't just buy it once. They buy it for years because they swear, they swear
by it it works. Yeah, I would like to accuse those people being thieves, but are they right?
We should start like making it not like shark bones and stuff, because sharks are endangered in some cases and it's bad, but like animals that we hate, we should make up stories about their bones and blood and stuff being good like, hey, ground up mosquitoes are an aphrodisiac because like, who cares they kill a bunch of mosquitos, or like an invasive species of like you know, like hey, the crowd of the crowd of thorns, starfish. You know they're invasive, but if you grind them up, it'll give
you a boner. Like let's let's let's like, let's start making shitty animals the ones that we turn into medicine.
Yeah, I think I think a lot of supplements are mostly sawdust. By the way, Like when they tell what's actually in there, they're like, oh, this is.
Well, yes, yeah, this is just things like saying because it's not regulated, that doesn't have to go through the FDA, and because it also doesn't do anything so who hears.
But if you buy Saint.
John's Word or Jen Singh or any of that stuff, you'll often find that the amount in a pill is somewhere between ten percent or four hundred percent of what it says in the label because they're not being precise about it, because you can't overdose on it because it's just just an herber or whatever.
Yeah, it's also just like medicine is a relatively news science. I know we think of it as being very old, but it wasn't that long ago that we were like cutting holes in people's skulls and thinking that would like take the demons out.
And it did sometimes, and.
It sometimes trepening, sometimes worked. It's not to say, you know, like I don't think any of us well I don't want to speak for anyone, but I don't think any of us believes that like medicine is bs. Like I think, you know, if your doctor is like, hey, you need treatment for this thing, you shouldn't be like, yeah, right, jerk,
like there are like medicine. Modern medicine is pretty incredible in terms of how it actually like we have actually figured out how certain proteins interlock with other proteins and that it affects your body, and that's incredible. But it's also I think there's this separation of like, all right, here's the real, hard, physical medicine, and then the brain the mind stuff, which is just kind of like you know, like hippie dippy brain stuff. It's not real. And I
think that's I think that's a big problem. Like I think that a lot of things could be accomplished if we kind of didn't have this disconnect between like the body's health, the like the body and the brain, and this like separation of like, well there's real medicine and and there's like you know, like just sort of mind
over matter, you know, silly stuff. And I think combining the power of modern medical advancement and the understanding of how the brain impacts the body can help in a lot of ways, like you know, preventing like over medicalization of things, but also treatment of things that do need medicine, but could also use like the idea that you know, you treat just the thing that's happening in the body without addressing sort of the psychological impacts I think is kind of limited.
I also think we have unrealistic expectations of medicine compared to where we are. But we think everything should be be able to have an instant diagnosis. Here's what it is, here's the pill that fixes that. Including things that are like well, I'm fatigued all the time. It's like, well,
what else do you have going on your life? As like, wow, I work three jobs and I have a big right and I need you to give me a pill that will make my fatigue go away or you know this is Ask any therapist and they will have the patient. It's like, I'm depressed. I need the treatment for depression. It's like, oh, when did your depression star Approximately, well, when my wife died and then my dog died six months later, and then I lost my job because of my I was so sad about my wife dying, and
now I got kicked out of my apartment. And it's like, Okay, your life is a disaster. You want a pill that well, and I think that you know, it's not it's stupid to say we have too much faith in science. It is unfair to ask a pill to fix that. You have a long mountain to climb of getting things back in your but your body is telling you, you know, man, this sucks. It's not because your brain's producing too much of a chemical. It's because your life is a disaster.
It just is.
Your life is not as good as it was before, so it is part of it is. It's funny because you have part of the population who refuses to believe in science or vaccines, but then you have another part of the population that, for example, thought that the moment they invent a vaccine for a disease that are just vanishes overnight. It's like the truth is, these are inventions by humans. They're not magic. They're miraculous and since compared to what we were able to do three hundred years ago.
But no, sometimes you're going to go to the doctor and the doctor's going to say we don't have a way to fix this yet, and usually patients do not take that as an answer. They demand a to walk out of there with a prescription, and lots of times they just gave you something to make you go away, right because it's like, we don't know how to fix this yet. It's just that's the situation.
I've literally like felt, oh man, I'm so fatigued. Am I sick? And then I realized it's nighttime, it's bedtime. I have to go to sleep. I'm like, oh god, am I coming down with something. It's like, well, no, it's midnight, and I should.
Go to bed this nighttime fatigue disorder.
And I did the normal thing where I looked at my phone for four hours after I went to bed, and I woke up the next morning feeling like crap, I'm coming down with something.
That's happened all right, Well, Jason Katie such a pleasure having you guys on the show, Jason, Where can people find you? Follow you? All that good stuff.
Then the book that is up for preorder now is called Zoe Is Too Drunk for This Dystopia. It's part of a sci fi series and the Zoe Ash novels. Just look up that title and it will also show you the other books in the series if you want to read those. I am Jason K. Pargan on TikTok and all of the other platforms, including the stupid ones that nobody goes to, like the.
Red You're everywhere amazing. Is there a work of media that you've been enjoying?
Yes, I linked here for you. There's a muscular lumberjack on TikTok named Thor Bradley, and he just chops stumps for his videos and they get like one hundred and fifty million views. He's one of the most famous people in the world world apparently. And he's just a very muscular man who chops who chops stumps.
With an axe just like an innuendo chopping stumps. Is this some kind of like sex thing that I don't know about?
Oh no, watch the video you'll get it.
Yeah, chopping literal stumps.
You'll get it immediately. He has he has many female fans and uh, but also it's many male fans. And there's just a big, muscular, sweaty man who chops wood for his videos. And you watch him until he finally gets through, you know, chopping the wood, and you feel a little bit better.
He is a hero. Wow.
It is nice once that once that stump finally chops. Fine, when once he finally splits the stump, Oh man, that was my favorite part.
There are entire There are entire movies that I've watched that cost two hundred million dollars to film that did not provide me as much satisfaction as watching for chop his way through that stump.
It makes me think about what the stump resents.
I couldn't even begin.
With Whatever you want, whatever obstacles in your life, if you just they keep at it, you can get through them.
And he's I'm going to say that, I'm going to say it represents a sex but a sex but yeah, sex but some kind of sex but thing situation.
Really interesting, take, really interesting read, Katie. Where can people find you as their working media you've been enjoying?
Yeah, I mean, I have a podcast on this very network called Creature Feature where we talk about animals. I've actually had Jason on my show too, so yeah, we have good, good discussions about animal behavior and sometimes how it relates to human psychology. I just started a TikTok it is Katie Golden k A T I E G O L D I N. I'm doing some animal content on there, a game I play where I have you guess what animal noise and animals making it is. I'm brand new, I have like no followers, so if you
check that out, I'd be very grateful. And I think I'm Katie Golden on other stuff too. But you know, like on the Musk site, which you know is becoming less and less usable every day. The media that I like is from the Musk site. It is from Twitter user pe Moskowitz, who writes for sale baby Shoes Never Worn is the saddest story ever told in six words, here's a sadder one in four baby died from exploding.
That's pretty good.
That story is actually kind of awesome though, unfortunately.
Yeah.
You can find me on the Musk site, Twitter at jack Underscore O'Brien and on threads at jack underscore, Oh, underscore, Brian, although I don't I haven't checked that in maybe a month. Tweet I've been enjoying. I liked p Puck just tweeted a collection of cute designs from the distant past, and it's just like really cute. Like one of them looks like a sad character from Bluie but it's from fourth
century BC, like a, it's just adorable stuff. I don't know, so sometimes I, you know, like for the thinking about history, like doctors in history just being like, yeah, here's a blue pill that I just died, and like it makes you better. Like I tend to think of people from history being like stoic people who try to walk off a compound fracture and had no joy in their life. And this, this collection of cute designs from the past made me made me smile warm to my heart a
little bit. And then I also enjoyed a tweet from the writer at Jason K. Pargan, who responded to a CNN tweet Say and Bob Barker, the beloved television picture who hosted The Prices Right for decades, has died. He was ninety nine, and Jason wrote the rumors that he was going one hundred and sixty miles per hour at the time of his fatal motorcycle accident are not confirmed and people should not be spreading them. Same with the rumors that he was swinging a flail at other drivers.
Wait for confirmation. I've enjoyed that. Well done? All right? You can follow us on Twitter at daily Zeigeist. We're at d daily Zeikeeist on Instagram. We have Facebook fanpage and a website Daily zeikeist dot com boy. We post our episodes and our footnote but where we link off to the information that we talked about in today's episode, as well as a song that we think you might enjoy. Super producer justin Welcome Back, is there a song that you think people might enjoy?
Yeah, So there's this new artist who just popped up on my radar a couple weeks back. She's an amazingly talented singer songwriter with a very powerful voice and a real knack for writing songs that just get stuck in in my head all day. I played this track for Miles actually the other day, and he was commenting on how she kept finding interesting little paths in the melody where she didn't repeat herself too much, and I just really respect someone who can bring that kind of talent
to the table. So this artist goes by the name of Annie Tracy, and this track, by far and Away is my favorite that I've heard from her so far, but all of her tracks are incredible. This one is called times It by two and it's got a really nice R and B vibe. It builds to something very powerful and I loved the message behind it. So this song is called times It by Two by Annie Tracy, and you can find that song in the footnotes.
All right, Well, the Day lesaik As is the production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from My Heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio ap Apple podcast or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. That's going to do it for us this morning, back this afternoon to tell you what is trending, and we will talk to you all then Bye.