Hello the Internet, and welcome to this episode of the Weekly Zeitgeist. These are some of our favorite segments from this week, all edited together into one NonStop infotainment laugh stravaganza. Yeah, So, without further ado, here is the Weekly Zeitgeist.
Miles.
We're thrilled to be joined in our third seat by a real dried up piece of shits you as you said to him when he joined the zoom this morning for some reason. Brilliant comedian, writer, actor who's brought you comedy albums such as the Blake album, The Stuffed Boy Live from the Pandemic, twelve years of voicemails from Todd Glass to Blake Wexler and his new special Daddy lung Legs. Very funny. You can go watch it right now on YouTube.
You must go watch it right now. Please welcome. Be hilarious, the chaotic, the riding a coming bike in short shorts.
This is Blake Wexler AKA. We're going to get to know you a little bit better, but first we're going to tell our listeners a couple of things we're going to be talking about today. Guys, thank you for having me. Hey man, that's fucked up. Yeah's aka that's how people refer through Jack.
Nobody.
Nobody refers to as constantly. You're talking to me right now, No, like you always are, you always are. Yeah, I am the stuff of my mouth.
What were you thinking? Are you just came?
Were you like like tossing and turning in your bed this morning in your head?
Weird weird time change. Yeah, you know, there's a there's an alarm at my house, like somebody opened our garage in the middle.
Of the night, freaking my wife.
My wife out, So we're, uh, you know, we're going on a little bit of sleep. And that's what bubbled the surface of my brain.
And then you're talking about how you're philating the whole town of.
Late in the whole town of Austin Man the of your tongue and the back of your throat. Oh but did you ever go garaging when you were younger? Was that a term that you were aware of? When I'm not would go to I guess like parents or I guess people now our age grown ups would keep beer in their garage and you would break into a garage.
I do know about this from Sea Isle City.
And yes, yeah, yeah, that was the.
Shilly suburb of Sea Isle City.
Yeah wait, wait, wait, so that it was a good thing where it's like, yo, they have a garage fridge with beer, let's fucking bust in there and take the fucking beer.
It's it's interesting. I think you're even taking it a step further of research. Where there was no surveillance, it was assumed there's a garage. Yes, there must be beer kept in it, because the garage is generally cooler. I think, like before you refrigerate it, people would just keep beer in the garage. But I guess they don't have a garage. But if I did, I probably wouldn't keep I would keep it in my basement, keep it in my gun safe and my gun we went gun safing as well. Yeah,
with their firearms to be white. They have a bad time like just whimsically breaking the garage for beers. Yeah, that's a quick part of a domicile, you know. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
When I was a you know, seventeen year old in Kentucky who just wanted nothing more than to drink at all times, I can't believe it didn't occur to me. Like I'm actually disappointed in myself that we.
Didn't do that.
We just like went to the liquor stores and played hey buddy, which is so humiliating. Yeah, like, hey man, hey many, I'll suck you, dick man, come on call to the south by Mouth guy, Get the fuck away.
You know my nickname bro? All right? Whatever? Wait man?
Like, Yeah, if you had a time machine and you can right one wrong or change decision in your life, Yeah, get back in time and tell my teenage self.
And there's this thing called garaging you're gonna learn about in a few years because your cousins in Sew City do it. Were actually more likely your aunt and uncle like tell us that it's out of control in Sel City. The youths are out of control, fully out of control anyway, shout out to Sea City man, what a town? What is something from your search history that's revealing about.
Who you are?
Right now?
My Google search history is filled with me searching for all Mary Kay Nashley books that I have to buy used because for whatever reason, they're not selling them new anymore. And you know what's crazy, I keep trying to Google answers like why has no one else explored why Mary Kay nashally don't.
Have those available? Like you could buy the damn federalist.
Papers, books that happened before you like, but I can't get Mary Kay Nashally books new.
That's right, that's what I'm searching.
Were you raised on Mary Kay Naturally?
Like?
Are those nostalgic?
C you understand that if Mary Kay Nashley was on it, I bought it?
Okay, I wow? All in books? Okay, I love you. I love them.
You got the first edition Brother for sale?
Listen.
I had when I had a bookcase in my room as a kid, and it was completely just filled all in books.
Every time it would be like a book sale at my school.
And you know what I liked. It was before the internet was what it was.
It wasn't like you could just google, oh, here are all the Mary Kay Nationally books. It was just like it would be random new like, oh, they're on this one.
It's the Adventures of something Else. I'm getting that. I loved Urrigay Nationally. I went up for them. Those were my favorite two white girls in the world.
They were in the grade below me in grade school, at the same school, and they were never at school. But I look, I'm like one of my point at pride. You know, Mary Kate had you know, shattery on me, you know what I mean?
So, okay, look at why were they out of school? They were too busy typing out all those novels.
Yeah, I mean because they were just like you know, like in La like a lot of times you go to squick their kids who just are in the business. They're just they're fucking working all the time. And then they also just have set teachers, so like when they even even when they come to school, they're like, I don't know what the fuck's going on, man, Like I just came here to just like see just to let y'all know how balling we are, and then we'll maybe see you in like another couple of months.
Yeah, the brand was real, though, you know. The thing that I always heard was that they had like become billionaires by the time I think we were like in our early twenties.
Were I definitely gave them a billion dollars. I'm telling you me alone.
But like I didn't know the publishing side of their empire. I knew that they had movies, Like.
It's such an underrated part of the empire because it was huge every for fuck the movies, Like the movies they would go and make the books up. They had like a little show when they were young called like the Adventures of American Nashley, and they turned that into a book bag every time they had and anytime they did have a show, they would turn every episode of their shows into one of those books.
It would be the Adventures of America and that. So listen.
I I grew up in Obahama, so understand if I'm telling you giving them all my money in the Bahamas, and there were a.
Community of other little girls giving them all the money to buy the globe.
Around the globe they had, they had it in the bag. I had them all every series they had me locked into. They we like nineteen and they just decided they didn't want to run an empire.
No more, right is boring? I'm bored with this. What was your introduction to them like in the Bahamas? I'm curious, liked it? Was it full house or after them?
No?
My mummy so my household, my daddy is Nigerian and my mummy is this partner.
So there was no fun and joy in my household.
All I was allowed, all I was allowed to do was school and read and so the only thing that made Bye she'd never buy like video games and let me go do anything, but she would spend a bag in the bookstore. So I'd go in the bookstore, sit on the floor and just pick things. And I liked, you know, it was appeal was marketed to you as a girl. So I think I got the first one, and then I got all them, all those and lemony snickets, the series of unfortunate events.
I had it all. Do you like?
Do you have like a book you're chasing right now, like Ail Mary Kate Nashley booked, You're like, man, I got to get my hands on this.
I have like one hundred Mary Kay and Nashley used books sitting in my Amazon card right now.
It's ridiculous.
Like I'm like, I've told myself.
I told my boyfriend I'm buying them for our future children as the investment.
That's what I'm justifying it.
I would be so upset if my children tell me they don't like it.
Right, and it's gonna rise up like the after the Apocalypse, Like it's gonna be the Book of Eli type thing that everybody like uses as the gospel.
Right, I'm waiting for them to make a bounce back. I don't know.
I want them to sell new books, but Mary Kay Nashley, like, I don't even think there's a place to put pressure on them.
They just off the grid somewhere.
They just quit us. They were like, yeah, we could continue to like build an empire and at this point be challenging Bezos's fortune, but we're just like it's boring to us. We're gonna go.
And that's the thing, right, because that's obviously an executive choice, because it's one thing if they don't make new things, but they won't even sell the old things, Like how is a book just out?
Everybody? Y'all have fun a lot of print?
Why are you doing this.
Is one of them still with the brother of Jacques Sharrock.
I have no idea.
I remember, yeah, okay was not the old guy, but I don't remember like what came of that?
Yeah, yeah, okay, okay, Oh no, it's Nicholas Sarkozsi's brother, That's who it was. And I was like, what French president was it? Yeah, the brother of Sarcozes money?
I had, Yeah, I feel like those books, like I read every Hardy Boys book that came out. I read like the Red Wall series of books, and I feel like if I went back and revisited them and read them now, I'd be like, oh, this is like what my entire imagination is built out of it, like fabric of these and hardy boys talking about.
My mommy loved the hardy boys. My mommy is also a copaganda establishment democrat.
Now people.
They were, I feel like their story was that their dad was a cop, and then they were like, but that's not enough cop for one family, and so they kind of like moonlight as they were high school students by day and then crime fighters by night.
Yeah, riddled in copaganda every boy's dream.
I love that.
I find out childhood me didn't like coppaganda before she knew it was copaganda because my mummy.
Loved those books.
She bought me that and Nancy drew to collections and I wasn't fucking with it. Something about me new the ops was around, right.
But Mary Kate Nashley solved mysteries, didn't.
They, you know, not like you cut yours against the cars.
And they started moving with that. Times they would make little like new new collections would come out as they ate. So they had they they had the Mary Kate Nashley Adventures American Nashley. Then they had the Starring in series, then they had the So Little Time, and then they had the My Sweet Sixteens.
You see, I know too much? Yeah, I felt. I felt.
If you have any extra copies laying around, hit up a line me, you know, slide it for a way they will go. They will be appreciated.
I would love that.
Jason, what's something you think is underrated third party presidential candidates this year? Not that they're going to win that Robert Kennedy Junior. Not that he's going to He's not going to be president.
But you think they should win, you're saying.
But for example, I hit Twitter yesterday that one of his short lists for VP candidates is quarterback Aaron Rodgers, Wow, of the New York Jets.
That is not a joke.
That was a story that came about that he is one of the people he's considering adding as a running mate. And right now he's pulling between like nine and twelve percent at Robert Kennedy Jr. That is not Aaron Rodgers. That's super high for a third party candidate in the
United States. Now, traditionally, by election day, most of that support melts away because people don't want to throw away their vote because our system is specifically set up so that only two people can run and anyone else there just wasting their time. But if he gets only let's say, four percent, that is more than enough to throw the
election one way or the other. Because if you say, of whatever, however many million votes, that is, if maybe twenty percent of those people would not otherwise have voted, of that remaining eighty percent, if they break, say forty seven to fifty three toward Trump, as in that's who they would have voted for otherwise, that flips the election. Because again, all of our presidential elections come down to like twenty thousand votes in three swing states, right, you
don't have to flip that many votes. So there's not a ton of coverage of Robert Kennedy Junior, though he's very popular on social media because it is mostly just a side show and he's big into the anti vax stuff and conspiracy stuff. But I think people are badly underrating how much this election is going to come down to, how much those third parties peel away because these are two historically unpopular candidates, were pool of disgusted voters is probably literally all time high.
Right, Yeah, I guess it's just we don't know which way it will go. So it's just this kind of free radical kind of variable that's out there that we're like, man, that's gonna fuck shit up, and we don't know exactly how at all.
Right, Yeah, yeah, yeah, I mean, I mean he's like, he's like, I'm not going to be a spoiler or whatever. I mean like that, but maybe if you're intent is that or not? The fact remains, like to Jason's point, there are a lot of people who are like, man, fucking neither of these two guys, And yeah, how will that break down? Because already you're seeing people already begin to like protest vote, whether that's to vote uncommitted like in a primary, and what that appeal looks like again in November.
But yeah, this would not be unprecedented, Like a lot of people think that. Bill Clinton, the reason that he ever became president of the first place was because Ross Perrot was a third party candidate who took a bunch of the report can vote away from George Bush one.
So Clinton won with forty three percent of the vote. Yeah, like that changed the course of American history. He won with forty three percent. But of the three, you know, obviously the three candidates, that was the most because Ross Perot peeled off. It was a bunch, but it was like fifteen percent or something. And it is it is extremely difficult to pull where that that support is coming from, because if you do a poll, that's just it's just
it's just between the two candidates. You don't let people pick, you know, a third party. You get a decent chunk of I think it's like twelve percent saying either neither or undecided. It's a very high number, sure, but it's extremely difficult to discern of those people who would come out for a third party. Again, how many of them if if like if RFK dropped out, how many of them just wouldn't vote versus okay, well I'll go with Trump or okay, I'll go with Biden. It is extremely
difficult to pull. It's difficult to know this, and I suspect that on a election night in November, we are not even then, we are honestly not going to know who's going to win. And this will be a big reason why because of the high number of voters who just hate vote Canadates and trying to figure out how they're going to behave Will they stay home or vote for somebody else, or hold their nose and vote for whatever Canada if they think is leakes bad.
Right, Yeah, it'll be yeah.
Because the other thing too is like you see, with a lot of people who even they pull about RFK, not many people know all of his positions. But then again, people even like that, we're not even sure how much that's gonna affect things once they learn of what his positions are, because like in some polls it's like sixteen percent of Republicans will vote RFK, eighteen percent of Democrats would do it. Others it's kind of like inverted. So yeah, it's a truly we just don't know.
So RFK junior junior, Oh shit, that changes. It was way off.
I thought RFK came back because that would be fucking that would that guy had some riz as the kids call it.
Yeah, it's funny. And even into the future, if this ends up swinging things to a pretty drastic degree, it
will probably be written out of it. The way that the ross pro thing, you know, it's the way that we like to think about history is with a single protagonist and it's like, well, they won because they were the talented politician and you just kind of write out the third place person who you know, So even even if he swings it and as the spoiler, I feel like that that won't be the story that we all get. Aaron Ross, It's just is the truth is. You're about
to say it's just my favorite politician quarterback. No, it's just so funny to me. Like I was reminded recently how hard he was lobbying to take over for Alex Trebek after Alex Trebek like announced that he'd be stepping down from Jeff and it just like hit me a second time, how weird that is? Like what like what did he think? How does he think we view him?
And again this is this is interesting. Like he's not gonna be the one who says no to being the vice presidential candidate, right He's he's like, I mean, yeah, I should, I should probably be running for president, but I guess I'll I'll be your v yeah yeah.
Like for the listeners who are not sports fans, Aaron Rodgers is currently the starting quarterback for the New York Jets. He's not retired athlete under contract the Jets are very much depending on him to be their starter on opening
day when the football season comes around in September. So the question of could he serve that role while also being on the presidential ticket knowing that if if, if you know, his team were to win as in his you know, if RFK were to somehow win the election, that Aaron Rodgers would miss the player because he would have to assume the he would be out that that week when the Jets are in the you know, the AFC Championship game or whatever, like their started quarterback would
be out for the inauguration.
Yeah, and and then his O line is all secret service. It could be all very interesting, very interesting.
They he would have to be forced to recuse himself from one of the roles, Like I feel like he'd be like, no, dude, I could I could do both.
Be so funny. He just fucked.
He's like he's like, oh yeah, dude, I'm not gonna be VP. Dude, I gotta play football man.
People who are really successful in one place just gain this outsized confidence that they're good at this, like everything, everything because they're surrounded by people, especially in this country, who will tell them repeatedly that they're good at everything, and this might he might be on the verge of being like the greatest textbook case of that ever. Like guy throws a beautiful bamb But don't get me wrong, guy throws one of the beautiful balls I've ever seen
that last time. I don't think that was one of the things that I mentioned a lot in the twenty twenty election. Who threw a more beautiful ball?
Who could throw a tighter spiral?
Tighter spiral?
God, Although I feel like we're fucking that. I feel like we're headed there, like the White House is going to be Like just so you guys know, should like shout out at Joe Biden on TikTok for fucking launching this pig skin through a fucking tire the tightest spiral.
Folks, he's doing it. You don't trust as America.
I mean they have like talked about doing like push up contests or like fighting each other, so we're not that far off. What is something you think is overrated?
Period? Tracker apps M Now, I just want people to stop using him because you.
Know it's weird, because I have my reason.
Yeah, well you know it's weird. It's weird to put your blood day in a machine, and two like, is the government using it to track who is fertile enough for us to go full handmaiden stale? You know, overrated? We should subscribe.
No, I remember that was like an actual people were many people were talking about that in terms of privacy. It's like, as we shift towards a weirder version of the Handmaid's Tale, that it's like, that's also data that nobody should have access to except you, and damn sure, And I'm like and maybe Apple and a few other maybe Google, So you know, we'll just stop there.
The more advanced my phone gets, the more I know it's time for me to take my uterus out. So like, no, you guys are gonna have to go.
Don't need this, You do not need this information.
Don't need this anymore. Just throw you just I'm just gonna throw my us away.
You're going to like a Google News updates. That's like why scientist think it's a bad idea to throw.
I never googled that.
Yeah, yeah, I mean yeah, it's true though, like the things that were, like the information that we give our phones, it's like becoming. It's like it's truly becoming like a like a miniature medical clinic. It's like because you can be like I get your blood sugar in there, your blood pressure, and I get that. It's convenient, especially if
those are things that you have to track. But it does feel like there was a point where I'm like, the phones are doing just enough for what they need to do, you know, without.
It getting.
Yeah.
Yeah, because because now your apples like why are you so stressed out ful?
And I'm like, yo, what.
You stand up?
Yeah? Once you stand up lazy as.
Your AI is trying to pretend to be dumber than you, you know.
Scar, Yeah exactly, They're like, oh, why you had some party right now?
It sounds real loud man. Yeah, yeah, volumes up too high just in general around. Yeah, you need to go somewhere quiet and stand, not sit. Wake you up in the middle of the night.
Get up.
Yeah, we found you a nice suburban home in Kansas City.
Gwyneth, have you have you tried her products?
They're really great?
Really what I never asked, Well, you just seem like you'd use it based on all these biometric readings you've given us.
Yeah, it's a wild how far we've come, not in a good way. But as mentioned recently, I just watched the movie BlackBerry that's about the rise and fall the email phone thing, and uh like one of the big scenes is them realizing they're about to be destroyed by the iPhone, and they show the the press conference where Steve Job announced iPhone and he's just like, it's a phone, it's an iPod and it's in the same device, and like that's it, Like right, you know, it's just like
such a simple thing. And from there we've gone to like it knows you are insides.
Yeah, exactly, it's given you an alert.
It knows who you have a crush on because it can read your body meter.
Right, it's like maybe you should think about who you're voting for for president. Also, it's time to move your bowels and you're.
Like, hell, how right?
How we just seems like you might be lying. Your blood pressure just spike.
Yeah, don't need that, don't need that, don't need like cop pseudoscience built into a phone, right.
Right, all right, let's take a let's take a quick break. We'll come back and talk about the future. AI We'll be right back, and we're back. We're and I mean, we we've talked about copaganda. It's kind of it's like describing water to a fish a little bit. In the United States, especially if you grew up in like the eighties and nineties, just so many TV shows, so many movies are fucking copaghanda like the cop like that is like a default that oh yeah, well, the protagonist of
this is gonna be a cop. But Miles, he found a study from twenty twenty.
There's a lot of analysis because you know, I think in twenty twenties when people started to being like, what the what the fuck are our shows saying about the police? And at that time, you know, the study show that like almost nearly twenty percent of scripted TV was about cops, and that didn't even include shit like live PD or cops and not like the reality end of the spectrum. And then another subsequent study took like study nine of these scripted police shows. They found wow, this and this
will blow you away. Those writers' rooms zero black people show runners, zero black show runners, and the kinds of people that were in those writers' room were like posting shit on Twitter about lighting up protesters. And then even Dick Wolf or I think it was Dick Wolf had to be like, hey man, I'm sorry, bro, you're gonna you're gonna have to fucking bounce on this show because you kind of too out there with your opinion about
how you see people in the streets. But hey man, thank you so much for your work completely obscuring what police do in our society. So yeah, I mean, like you, just the menu of shows is staggering, like the number of ways you can sort of interact or intersect with some kind of narrative where it's like and the police, you know, they're just complicated folks doing their best, you know, so let's not go too hard on them. Let's not go too hard.
Yeah, and it don't even be just the police show. The police shows, to me, the ones that are more blatantly obvious like this is a police show are actually easier to deal with because at least I don't have to try to convince you why that's coropaganda. You could see that, but it's baked into all the other things. Like I was watching the Chippendale, the Chippendale Rescue Rangers movie, which if you first of all, I'd never even really
dawned on me. The Chipendales themselves, right, like they're little police of their woodland, of their woodland world. But in the Chipendale live action movie, the whole thing is that they're working with their taking on the mission for the police because the police are being held up by all
these Fourth Amendment protections. They're like, oh, the police can't do the jobs that the police go to the chipmunks that have the chipmunks do it because all of these constitential protections and rights he's supposed to have in the way. That's the whole I'm like sitting there watching it, like, ain't that the pitch look at this?
Or I was watching a new one, the one, Yeah, the new one.
The live action, Go watch it.
It's crazy.
Yeah, that's what happens in the live action or even if you look at me and my boyfriend talk about this a lot because he's a he loves Spider Man and the Spider Verse. And I went on and watched the second one and I was I went with my friend alex Elo all overruled on TikTok who's also a PD and he he we were just.
Both like, what is this?
So Spider Man is like they have it and specifically Spider Man would otherwise stringing all Over the place, but suddenly he needs to take the subway just so he could stop and you could see the subway station stops for which areas in Brooklyn, which black dabuds they would choose in, and just having him fight crime there and then leave.
Go back on me. I'm like, look at this ship, look at it.
Look at it? Is that?
That's the second one, the Tom Hollands. Yeah, the second Holland one.
No, no, the Spider Verse. No Black Spider Man.
Oh yeah, yeah.
Relentless NYPD promo. The amount of NYPD cars in that in that Spider Verse is crazy.
Yeah.
I was watching Zootopia with my kids recently, Like that is wild copaganda. Just yeah, Like the protagonist just all she wants to do for her whole life is be a cop, even though people don't think she can be because she's too small, and then she Yeah, I mean it's just like every eighties crime movie, like partners with like a wily criminal and then they like kind of, you know, figures it out. But like Zootopia, I would I wouldn't have even really thought about it that much
until you watch it. Paw Patrol we've talked about on the show. Absolutely cop again the worst.
Those those to me, those kinds of shows and stuff are the worst because especially when people like the like people will think it's not copaganda if they like a character or something, or if they if they like it right. That's the thing with Spider Man. I'm like, that's what makes it bad. Like all the other things bad copaganda, is that it's effective that all the other things you like about it. This animation is amazing that they gave you a black kid. You know, it's not lost upon
me that they gave you a black Spider Man. And they said his dog, his daddy's gonna be NYBD, his best friend's daddy gonna be NYBD. We gonna have invite, Like that's what it is. And so yeah, those men are more harmful than even the cop shows. It's when you think you're not watching copaganda, because at least you could go into a cop show, which you're like, Antenna's up.
But if you think you're gonna go watch your cartoon, you're gonna go watch Lucifer and all these things, and they find a way to be cops, shoots, even charmed. Why are the witches? Why are fucking witches and wizards working with the police. Why do they need the police assistance? They are working with the police. They had they had what's her name, pru was in a relationship with a cop.
Wow, you know, just for her safety, I guess, or not safety.
It's very hard to tell you.
The one thing too, about Miles Morales, that character his dad's name is Jefferson Davis. You're like the President of the Confederacy. It's just a coincidence, man, his dad Davis. Like this is also throw that in there for our history, buffs. But like I think also too, like I think about
like New York Undercover. I think that's when a Dick Wolfe's most underrated contributions to copaganda, like the and for the entire genre, because he took two detectives of color and put it's like, hey, for the hip hop generation, look at this, we got we got the we got it like a Latino detective, a black detective. And we will even cast rappers in the show, you know. And I remember that disarmed. That was so disarming for me because I was like, oh shit, like this rappers and
they're okay, cool, this is cool. Oh what are they trying to do?
You know what?
You know? Because like now, kids that were like raised on here in NWA and fuck the police or public enemy are like, well, you know, Detective Williams and Detective Torre is like they are right.
Though, Yeah, that's how it works in real life, right, Like that media media is replicating a strategy that they use in our politics in real life. That's why Eric Adams is a cop, right. The mayor in New York City is a cop, the biggest cop, the lover of NYPD. But that's what makes him so dangerous is because they're able to advertise. And he calls himself Memory, calls himself
the hip hop mayor. He brings a bunch of rappers around, even though he actively criminalizes hip hop music like Declaire the war, Declaire war on drill music and rap music like days after he took office.
But people aren't That's not what they're hearing.
What they're getting presented to them is a black guy putting on airings telling them you know yeah, and that's why it's.
Bad, right, And he's like, Hey, I'm at the after parties, you know what I mean. You see me in the background celebrating to launch the new Chase credit card.
You're like one percent.
Because it allows people, it affords people of protection, right, because then people get to say, oh, it can't be racist, or it can't be a problematic or whatever has to you because we have this diverse, this marginalized persons as the avatar for it, when in reality, that's the whole
thing with systemic systemic institution. Once you put you diversify a systemically racist institution, what happens is those diverse members have to go even harder about punishing their when people to prove themselves to that system.
And then ah, yeah, I mean.
That that point about hit like Dick Wolf taking like putting rappers in his show Iced Tea, who was like when I was a kid, was at the center of a controversy about like having a song about killing cops and then the thing he's mainly known for now is playing a cop on TV.
And as politics have moved that way too, right.
But like, yeah, it's just capitalism is so insidious like that. You know, we talked about capitalism being the singularity that everybody was afraid of, where it's like it gets smarter and more advanced than any single human mind can conceive of. Like that's just if you if you had a million
years to map out. Okay, So how are we going to deal with this swelling from like actual people who are struggling, who don't have enough to eat, and who are living victimized by police, and they're creating this music that really connects with people. Like the idea of like taking them and putting them in the most powerful copaganda like is so insidious, But it's not. It's not a thing that like any one mastermind had to come up with.
It's just like the forces of capitalism and the media just like kind of put that shit together.
You know exactly.
And it's funny should bring up Iced Tea because it was Iced Tea that actually declared Eric Adams the hip hop mayor of New York City.
I mean, it's my first episode on my show.
I think a lot of people like because we've talked about on the show, we've had you, while, we've had we've you know, had Alec Rrick Sanas on and talking about these issues, I think a lot of people are pretty well like they they're able to recognize like the cop of the copaganda element pretty well. But another thing that I hear you talk about in many others is it's not just the cop part, it's.
Also the praganda as well.
Yeah, Like coropaganda isn't just about when people hear it, they think of it as just police, but it's what it is. Coropaganda refers to anyway like the media tries to feed you or indocrinate you into supporting policing or or prisons in policing.
That's what it is.
Anything that essentially essentially reiterates a cops narrative, what a cop would want you to think about of a situation. So it's like they want People will say, they're like, you'll tell them lawn artists copaganda, and they'll act like it's not because it shows Stabler doing legal things. And it's like, that's the fucking point. You love Stabler, It shouldn't you you it gives it feeds you a show where you love him.
You watch him, you you.
Recognize why this character does this, and you see it as necessary or you come to to see it as normal. There's a reason why if you watch if you watch shows all the time, you're you're and law and order is is the influences, uh cannot be understated. But so if you take a law and order if you watch for for years, it become a normal part of policing that the.
Police you love, who you believe are justin.
Are trying, they want to do the right thing, and their intentions are so good, and you watch them regularly be aggressive or beat up people. As a reason why police brutality is the narrative of police brutality is only ever when someone dies, but never just the regular aggression and abuse that we see as a regular part of policing, no one thinks anything about you. You see police roughing people up, and you don't think of that as brutality or illicit.
You think of that as that's policing, and that's normal to you.
Right, Yeah, can you talk to just a little bit too, because I think the one part that I wasn't always wrapping my head around was how like the prosecution element of it works because while the police are the people on the street, this harmful system, it continues through the actual like judicial system and things like that. And I think that's another part that like when you watch a law and order you're like, oh, okay, so like they get mad when like they take a plea deal. They're like, oh,
he got away because like he pled out. It's like, oh, it's a loophole that these people are like, you know, acting being able to abuse or whatever.
But came ohout.
Prosecutors love plea deals more than anybody else. Like they're the ones, like they they want plea deal. They're the ones they weaponize plea deals and cash bail in order to get convictions that they otherwise wouldn't get.
They're the ones that do that.
So whatever, what often happens in the criminal system is police someone someone will be arrested, take for example, like a homeless person or someone with mental health issues who has a long rap sheet, because that's what the media likes to sensationalize. What happens how they end up with that long rap sheet is say, they'll arrest somebody for something, something petty that shouldn't even be criminal or whatever. They'll
arrest a homeless person because they can. And then what will happen Even though this case would if this, if this were a case against me or you, the case would end up being thrown out or resolve some other way, would not end in a criminal conviction under any circumstances. But what they'll say to the homeless person or the person with mental health issues or someone who they know don't have any resources. They'll say, plead to the charge.
You can plead to the charge and be released now, or you'll set cash bail on you and you have to go to Rikers while this case is open. You know, so someone wanting to go to Rikers for e period of time, they will plead to the charge, so they'll take the and then that keeps happening, and now they have this long criminal sheet that could be weapon against them.
But what happens what coppaganda when it comes to prosecutors is, first of all, a thing America loves to do in general is America likes to discard parts so it can.
Preserve the whole.
It will curtis America will allow you to criticize police, or it will feed you a narrative about private prison so that you don't criticize prisons in general overall, or you don't criticize the criminal system overall. So police are who the narrative gets rested on. You know, they never let it get past police, so people go, oh, police are bad. Police do this, Police do these things, but they never recognize that it's the prosecutors who have to
carry that out right. So, and also how copaganda I think really is really really probably one of the most harmful things it does is it encourages people to talk to the police throughout across all mediums of copaganda, all the different top shows or shows that are not even about cops, and they just happen to have that kind of scene it they always have where people are faced with the stillm of talking to the police. Talking to the police, they're negotiating with the police about their case.
In real life, the police don't have shit to do but your case. Police make the arrest, and then you're dealing with a prosecutor and a criminal system. The police will just be witnesses at most in the case. They have nothing to do with what would deal you end up with or what you even get charged with.
But the shows are always like, hey man, you talk to me, you know, you come you come clean to me. I'll make sure, I'll make sure this isn't messy for you, just for.
A lawyer and pa right well, and also you also fed this thing too, Like if you watch shows like Dateline and stuff that are about like you know, like murder cases and things like that, the detectives will always be like the second they asked for a lawyer, I knew they were guilty, you know what I mean.
And it also feeds this thing to to sort of like you know, create the subtext and like actually exercising your rights makes you more suspicious and maybe you are actually because why wouldn't all the or all the.
True crime And you know what I think is so funny.
Every every true crime you go and watch is about some case where the police fail to do ship right, like every single one, and that's somehow, yes, but they will still somehow and what is very obviously policing failure.
The whole thing is about policing failure. The argument will be how the.
Police like they their arms were tied by some bullshit that their arms were not tied by by Oh they didn't have this, they didn't have that, and it will become this like indictment of the defense. So people have been rights so or blah blah blah, rather than the fact that the fucking police don't do shit right.
Yeah.
Yeah, the law and order thing is so insidious, like you just you don't get to follow a single criminal prosecution anywhere else, like from arrest through trial and like it really feels like, you know, the thing we know about Hollywood is like they they like an underdog story. There's this massive like machine that is swallowing up innocent people and just making them disappear from their everyday lives. And we never really see like how that machine actually works.
It's just Yeah, A big, a big aspect of corpaganda that got talked about in all these shows is the investigation, because in real life there is none, Like, there is none.
There is no fucking investigation.
All these shows show you police just fucking beating their heads in trying to get to the bottom of something.
Police don't solve no fucking crime. What happens in real life.
Is someone accused of something of something, the police arrests them and what they knew at arrangments is the case with the information you got, Like, they don't go trying to figure something out. No one is on a quest to get to the bottom of it. Also, another thing klapaganda does is it makes defense. It reinforces this idea that the only people who are deserving of representation or can be victims in a criminal system, or who are innocent or what have you, right because they'll always have
defense attorneys. They'll paint defense attorneys. Is these people who believe their clients are innocent or who are either stum who know that they're representing these bad, terrible, evil people they're getting out and they're rich for doing it, or they're naive and think that they're innocent and they're on a quest to find out that their client is innocent, to confirm that their client is innocent, or otherwise they can represent them. I just watched Tyler Perry a movie.
Oh Jesus, Tyler Perry. I just watched the Tyler Perry movie just the other night where he had it where this defense attorney is supposed to be representing this guy accused the murder, and all she's spending her time trying to do is trying to like undermine the story, trying to find out whether or not he's he's innocent, And then once she thinks he's guilty, she quits, what the fuck? That don't have nothing to do with the praise of Tea in China, Like you have to represent him?
Like what are we doing?
Like that?
That has nothing to do with nothing, But that's how it paints it to you.
So the defense are automatically made up to be bad people on the side of bad or otherwise, if they weren't on the side of bad, if they would, if these were people who deserved, they would be washing their hands in this case, or they would what they love to do in copaganda's have a defense attorney quit and become a prosecutor.
They love that.
But that's gonna say the light light after this.
They did that in Lucifer.
They actually had They and Lucifer a show about the devil, about Satan Satan. They have Satan himself come to earth and the only way for Satan to reconcile him himself with God is to work with la PD and the worst person he comes into contact with, they say, is the defense attorney, who in order for her to make it to heaven, she had to become a prosecutor.
Is that real?
That's what the fuck happened in that show.
Wow.
Imagine you're me thinking you're gonna go and watch a nice, wholesome show about the devil and you get nothing but copaganda.
It's like wow.
Even here, it's like, well, why are the LAPD the arbiters of who gets into okay whatever.
Get all the fucking lapd In the show of Corrupt, they have like really like corrupt, but somehow that's not the problem they had like the wife of the man cop that he works with, the husband of the man cop that.
He works with.
Ex husband is a whole crooked cop doing all kinds of shit and they have his real moral dilemma to be like when he's dating the prosecutor, I say, ain't this about a bitch?
Right?
It's it's just wild, like how the effects of the the you know, obviously copaganda helps is like pr for the legal system and police and things like that, and helps support like the biggest myths we have, Like so you know, it's completely just dead's our ability to think critically because if you go like like I wonder, man,
are police are they a threat to marginalize communities? You're like, no, no, no, man, because I've seen TV and most of them are just good, and you know, some of them are just going through stuff like the characters on the on the shows, or what if can they do like more with less money?
It's like, well, no, absolutely not, because they're the only thing that keeps us in our society from fully devolving into the purge and then on the other side too, it completely we have no idea actually how the legal system works, So if you actually begin to interact with it, you're like, well, based on what I've seen, I don't I don't know if I have rights or maybe I should talk to the police, or do I go to trial?
Because you don't you also don't see the part about how coercive, like the whole plea deal thing is in real life, where they're like, hey, man, if you actually look if you go to trial, like you're looking at twenty five to life, but or they make.
It feel like that's what good aggressive policing is, right, like when Stabler and these people are blowing down on these people and being real aggressive and confrontationalless to those on the shows, they act like that's what's needed. That's that's what tough on crime is, right, Like tough on crime as a whole concept. Law and order, which Republicans speak all the time long art is an actual term
they use twenty four to seven. So it's like a coincidence like what law and order is and what that is, like it's it's a direct correlation.
Yeah, And just going back to the true crime point, like we find you find out these staggering lapses and police werek Like we talked about that serial killer in Long Island who was on the loose for like a decade, and they had a description of his like extremely rare car from like one of his first crimes, and it was like he lived like blocks away from it. And they knew this the whole time. They just like didn't chase it down. Like it's just they don't because it
was a while. Yeah, they don't give a fuck and.
They don't, like they literally don't give a fuck, Like it's funny, Like people who so believe in policing and believe police solve crime don't be the people who have experienced having to try to you ask the police to solve a fucking crime, like you've obviously never called the police if you believe the day solved shit, Like you.
Know what happened.
So when I when I like a year ago, my TV got stolen, right, I ordered a new TV and I left it in the hallway, right, And I left it in the hallway because I was like, oh, I my guys come in and mounted in the morning. I don't feel like carrying it up the stairs, wrong decision the minute I left to go to the gym. Clearly some girl who live in my building told her boyfriend to come jack this TV. It's very clear to me that this was happened. And I know this because I have proof.
Now.
Anyhow, I'm not the ops and I'm a defense attorney, so I have no interest whatever. You lost a TV like they took to TV Amazon and replaced that for me, I have no interest in getting I don't care nothing about nothing. But what I think is interesting is that even if I did want them to go to jail, let me take you out.
The police don't give a fuck about nothing.
Right Because Amazon, I go to Amazon to put in that I need a new TV because my TV was shacked. Amazon goes, Oh, you'd have to you have watch out the police state works, right. Amazon goes, you have to file a police report in order to get the for us to give you a replacement. Right, so you gotta call the police. My I ain't laning lord. I tell my landlord my TV was stolen. My landlord goes and gets the security footage and shows me the guys stealing
my TV. Like, oh, seamless too. It was excellent. I couldn't even mean I was excellent.
It was very clear.
They had their eyes on that TV all day. The minute I left that building, someone texted them.
They buzzed. They came in but their face masks COVID protection.
They came in with their face masks, and they literally they picked up the TV like walk right out the door.
You can see them.
You can fully see the people. The Beliics ain't even ask. They don't give a fuck. They were like, they know I have a video. They were like, yeah, so anyway, that's what you needed, right something, didn't ask, didn't didn't get the video. They were like, real, right that you had a video, didn't look at it, didn't look at it. Didn't ask me to be sent nothing. The other day,
there were two little girls. I was walking in my neighborhood and there were two little girls running, a seven year old and a four year old running through the street, and I'm like, what the fuck, where are their parents and stuff? So and then I see them run to this white lady, and me and this white lady end up going on and spending the quest the rest of the evening trying to where these little girls came from.
Right.
One is seven and one is four. The seven year old's badass was in on it. The seven year old snuck them out of the like when the people at the day care, and I'd figured her out at the daycare, turned their back. She took the little four year old and she went running. She wanted to go to her little friend's house. And she don't know where she's going. She is seven, but she's not trying to go back, so she won't help us. So she's like actively leading
us in the wrong direction. Spend hours a little four year olds who did it? Anyway? When I finally get these little girls back to the house as the police are coming outside to us, they're fen police inside the house just looking at these people for hours, like I don't know where the kids is or whatever.
Hadn't gone searching around the neighborhood. Nothing right. I returned to kids.
They did not even They didn't take my name, they didn't talk to me. They didn't make it not a statement, not a check for how the fuck did they know?
I didn't snap the I didn't like take those little girls.
They didn't know that anywhere they'd come from, if something had happened to them, how they know.
They don't know that, but they ain't checked because they ship.
Yeah, it could be a lot of work if we have to look into this.
So I'm just gonna say, all right, cool, thanks.
Uh literally, I promise you. Literally.
I had to like volunteer, like like trying to tell them, like, hey, this is what happened.
Is weird.
This one was that I did not give them.
It was just looking.
They had been in the house for hours, just looking at them brothers cry like just like this.
They weren't even like outside, like they weren't controlling the neighborhood or anything.
They were just more and I'm coming just looking house like I don't know where the.
Kids are, got some more of this food.
Like we were walking around the same neighborhood in broad day like to like falling.
Look all right, let's uh, let's take a quick break. We'll come back and talk about some more of how this ship works. We'll be right back, and we're back and justin Timberlake making a comeback. That that's a phrase that we've never heard befo right, just every five years.
I feel like I was just I wanted to, you know, I wanted to bring this to everybody today on the show, because so like a few nights ago, right, he performed at the Wiltern in LA to roll out his new album, and it gets it turned into like a mini and Sync reunion, and some people were like, Wow, that is so cool. That is really smart. That is how to
get people interested in the album. But part of me is like, I wonder if the reunion is a way to get people to remember the Justin Timberlake that people were like less annoyed by, because in the last few years, right, I feel like his reputation has like faded, like as he like more people were talking critically about like he's like, yeah, man, you threw Janet Jackson straight under the bus, Like what the fuck was that about, Justin?
Or what was going on?
Like you and Britney Spears like you kind of you kind of come off as like an asshole and his like response wasn't that great? Or other times you being like you sure love black culture, but you didn't really say much. In twenty twenty, Justin are are you there? And like I think he's recent SNL performance with the Gospel choir like that definitely also got mixed attention. So I'm like I liked the Justified album of two thousand and two, sure the subsequent records not so much. But
I'm also not his target audience. But like after a future sex Love Sounds, the twenty twenty experience and then Man in the In the in the Wooded Plane or whatever that album was, where he's wearing a faster shit in jeans, people just like started to care less and less.
So like personally, I'm wondering for Justin. Timberlake is like the n SYNC reunion, his version of smashing the button that says do not break glass unless in case of emergency to be like shit, bro, like I need to fucking get a like a jet fuel injection into my relevance. Let me bring like, let me bring and sync back because it's something he was very reluctant to do in the past. But I think maybe deep down he knew
was something that could be potent. So then I'm like wondering if by embracing his clean cut ramen hair past, he can try and get people to remember why they liked him when they were thirteen. And that's that's what I bring to the two of you, is what it like, Because I don't I just don't. I don't think that he has the same amount of pull that he used to when people are like, oh my god, Justin Temple Lake's back, just like like every subsequent Justin Temple Lakes.
Back has just been met with Yeah right, yeah, I guess.
And is it more a function that like he peaked during a time where we weren't having like really honest conversations about like sexism, racism, appropriation and he's just a weird fit in like how we view all these topics now in this current era. Or is he just washed and I'm thinking too much.
It feels like if they're like this one could go either way. If there's like a bunch of great songs on the album that people respond to, then they'll find a way to get over all that other stuff. Maybe, But maybe all that other stuff and like that there just might not be like maybe all that combined to make to make whatever he's putting out there just not not resonate with people, you know, right, I don't know the Man of the Woods, Like I'll just say that Man of the Woods was not an album that no
thought was put into. I'm sure like an entire you know, Ivy League universities, graduating class worth of like marketing minds and like songwriters and all that shit. Like put We're working around the clock on that shit, you know, to try and make it as successful as humanly possible, and it just fucking flatlined. You know, just belly flopped into that pond in the middle of the woods that he was standing in for some reason on the album cover.
Because it felt like like his like right word turn. But I don't know, Shila Way, what what are your thoughts on the the psych that the Timberlake cycles that we experience in popular culture.
I think it's back to it goes back to taste. Does Justin Timberlake and his team have their pulse on the the you know, their thumb on the pulse of anything that people are interested in or believe in. At the moment, I can't remember the last time that a Justin Timberlake song hit me and I'm like, yeah, this is a banger in a way that I will forget all of his past defenses. You know, I'm still waiting
for the recovery of Janet Jackson's career. I feel that that is owed the world, and I feel very much like the you know, the scorched earth of his continued Sissphician role back up the Hill is you know what's what's due to him for the fact that he destroyed, you know, an actual icon. So I you know, I justin I need to be married to a dutch Man. And what Justin Timberlake reminds me of each time he rolls himself back out is how how hard my ex would try every time we went to a family barbecue
to pick up the steps to the electric slide. And when he he felt like he was getting it, you know, it would show all over his face like he really he felt like he was in this time. And each time we were just you know, doing our best to just like you know, clap him, clap our hands and and parade him out and you know, like and make you feel good about himself.
We love that for you.
That's just like a child their first like pedal baby steps.
You know you're still like, yeah, you know, but if we don't live there anymore like that, you know, that was that was something that we were all doing in our twenties that just we've all gotten over.
Like yeah right, yeah, I mean that is the thing, like I just feel like over the years that just like the not like every time people look back, you're like.
Yeah, man, you fucking did. Janet's so fucking.
Dirty like that, you're like that, Like I just remember that was like early on in our show, and I remember we're talking about that because I think it was when talking about Les Moonvez and like when his all his allegations came out, how central he was also to being like I'm going to punish the black woman in this instance, and and we're riding with Timberlake here and then yeah, and even like as like all of the attention was came around like Brittany and like all of
her hardships throughout her career and how justin Timberlake wasn't the best partner. Like again, you're like huh. And then again, like I said, in twenty twenty, a lot of people are like, this fool isn't saying shit about anything. And you are out here doing collaborations with black artists, black producers, you do it. Your whole R and B style is
very black culture centered. Yet you're just you're really showing yourself as one of these vulture type people who's like YEA, all right, well I got what I wanted, and the second it's about like having a stance. I'm just gonna do my Kirkland signature moonwalk.
I was just trying to like get the timeline on in Sink's original like rise. So they came out in nineteen ninety seven in Germany and then nineteen ninety eight internationally, that first album, which just like that takes me back to it time when like that sort of shit only flew in Germany, Like that was that was the thing that was like popular that we were like, yeah, no,
that's like corny shit the German people are into. And then they're like our resistances were down, you know, towards the end of the Clinton administration, and they're finally let it in. And now we've been moving towards German history in a lot of different ways.
Every Yeah, I wish we could go to Germany in nineteen ninety seven rather than Germany nineteen thirty seven.
I know.
But yeah, yeah, yeah, we'll see, we'll see how it all pans out. But I do like, I like Sheila your observation that maybe more than washed or not washed, it seems more karmic than anything.
Yeah, it's a look, I.
Mean, I'm all for a J. C. Schawse comeback. I am all for putting things together to put lamps on a spaceship, you know, but it's it's the Justin Timberlake comeback for me. Then I'm like, well, this is what you get?
Like, yeah, yeah, yeah, Justin Well he's doing what he can.
Yeah, right for real.
I just feel like I should launch in Women's History month, don't you guys think?
Yeah, yeah, remember, but I'll do with him sync though, so they remember that guy, not the the other dude with the murky ship. Just remember me when I wore that that matching denim outfit with Brittany. Please, that's me. That little boy.
Ramen hair is really like truly what what a what a look so evocative.
I can still hear it, you know, I can still hear it crunching underneath. Yeah.
Yeah, he puts a hat on it, like, bro, just step on a.
Bag of chips. No, man, it's my jail. My la looks gel that I've been putting in here. Yeah.
And finally, Bernie Sanders just introduced a bill proposing that the country adopt a four day work week with that loss of pay. That last quote is important. Yeah, And I'm assuming something that will immediately be ignored in the context of him proposing his bill and presumably in the execution of the bill if if it ever picks up any sort of traction. But the four day work week is something we've been talking about for a while on
this show. It is both in line with, you know, better quality of life and also, when it has been tried out, companies do better, their employees are healthier. That it's just more in line with what a company driven by human workers should be doing.
It turns out, and well, it's like it's one of those things too where any ask any person who works five days a week, they're like, yeah, would you rather work four days a week? I'd imagine conservatively polling on that is, I would just say conservative, right, because they're two percent people who are.
Probably just like no, no, no, there's no way I can get it all done, because, like, you know, the boss was like, hold on, would your life be better if you only worked four days a week? The worker money, yeah, The workers say oh hell yeah absolutely. But the people who are the ones in the c suites, the you know, the owners of the businesses, are gonna then seed headlines like this in Fox Business that say, Bernie Sanders moves to reduce work hours for millions of Americans get the
fuck out of here. Yeah, I mean, yeah, sure, while also giving you way more time to do things that maybe will help you have a like more like life work balance. That's it's a very it's it's so misleading. But yeah, I just I'm curious how long it would take for something like that to really catch like momentum here, because you see it being trialed in Europe in Asia, and the results, like we've said in past episodes, they always it's never like and then that company crashed and burned.
More often than not, the companies come out and say, let's keep doing that. That worked out really well for us and our employees. And yeah, I mean, Sanders pointed out, it is like not a radical idea. It just makes more sense. People are more productive, happier, don't have to operate within a system literally created by evil, old timey car factory owners.
Yeah.
H Like, it's just a system that we've been going with forever because that's where we started, you know, right, It's a win win, right, Yeah.
No, And like when you think about like, well what about efficiency, it's like, people today work at a tick that has never been seen in human history. We are four American workers are four hundred percent more productive than they were in the nineteen forties, when a lot of people would say, you know, back at my day, I used to go here in the factory and then we would you know, do a couple of hate crimes and
go home or something like that. Now we're we're talking about now, we're talking about people doing four hundred percent more than that. And it's just like, I don't know, man, four days sounds risky, sounds risky, Yeah, hardly.
Anybody who works these days is drunk the whole day. That's a huge improvement over a place as recently as like thirty years ago. And if they are drunk the whole day, like that is viewed as a problem that they should deal with and not just like the standard order of doing business.
You know, Sheila, what's your what's your like work life balance as a as a writer? You know, intellect like, do you do you have do you give yourself a certain amount of time that you like to be productive?
How do you sort of use your time to be productive?
I've really unsubscribed from the capitalist framework of working. So much of my work is catered around my dream like my my literal dreams, trying to figure, you know, trying to decipher how to turn my dreams into story that
are prophecies of future of our nation. You know, the last time that I worked at an office, what I would really love to see is a poll, really that a totally anonymous pole in which we looked at how much people are actually working within the frame of their work day, if they were supposed to, if they were going to sit down and say, because I just remember how much of the time I was a cat jift, just trying to look busy, just tapping away at a computer for no reason, like I was really working a
solid three and a half days out of the week if I was totally honest with how I was spending that time. So if we actually let people have that extra day so that they regained a sense of mental health and agency, they too could go about their world's you know, looking at flowers and you know, coming up with the next great idea. You know, there's just so much more creatively that would come out of us if we had that option.
There was there was a super producer Anahosys. She shared a clip with me of James McAvoy on a talk show and he was talking about how there's something about like how fifty percent of like the UK's award recipients went to private schools, like for when it comes to the arts, and he was saying about how the way that the arts are being pulled out of public instruction are is like this very insidious way to keep people like sort of trapped in this mindset that the toil
or the turn of capitalism. Now he wasn't using those words exactly, but that that's the only way to live. And without exposure to the arts, you're fundamentally cutting people off from the ability to look at things in a broader context in a way to interpret things with like
with deeper meaning. And that is just one way, because we see this, especially in the United States, how the arts are constantly being attacked when it comes to public instruction, and like how important it is for people like I look at my own life, like if my my father is a photographer, so I was just by like just
osmosis around more artistic things. And luckily my school had a music program, so I got really into playing music and I feel like so I really do credit so much of that to like me thinking just in general that there's so many other things out there aside from like, well, do you want to be an accountant, do you want
to work in a trade? And not that those things are less than but like that, I've merely had the perspective to see many other possibilities, And I thought was a really interesting point about how that sort of affects the youth and sort of what the outcomes are later in life.
Yeah.
Absolutely, the possibility of us being allowed to have ideas is destabilizing, and I think that's more frightening than anything to these big companies.
Yeah.
Yeah, I mean we saw that when people had more time during the pandemic.
Everybody looked around and was like.
This is fucking bullshit. But I think it's interesting because your point that we're already working three and a half days a week, Like they have that data at this point, right, like your work laptop, your work computer is loaded with spyware at this point, Like Amazon is tracking their like their employees' bathroom breaks. They know what people are averaging out to. So that actually makes this whole movement and
the fact that companies are willing to try out. The four day work week make a little bit more sense to me now because in the past I've been like, wait, why are companies willing to like even entertain this. It's probably because they're like, oh, yeah, well, people don't only work like three and a half days anyways, and so in this way, we actually get four full days out of them, and then they actually think we're being nice
to them. The fact that it's not being adopted more widely is it is a little wild that they're just like yeah, but still that's given them too much power, given them too much time to dream and come up with ideas for something better.
So right, we're going to keep.
Them in the cubicle just uh we we want our employees to spend at least ten hours a week pretending to be busy, right.
Yeah, yeah, what's writing your Victor?
But Victor was saying, oh yeah, yeah right, super producer Victor was saying that basically every company that did this in a UK study said productivity either maintained or increased. So but Sheer innership.
Data is right there.
Yeah yeah, oh, I mean I can I can totally see how it's the kind of momentum that business owners do not want to like contribute to, you know, because then they're like, what's next, They're going to start unionizing in mass Then what are we going to do? Then they're really gonna then they're going to ask for us to share in the profits that that we're extracting from their labor.
No, No, let's just let's slowly.
Maybe what if we do, like rather than forty hours, we start off with like thirty six, you know, and then and we'll go down like maybe a half day Friday now, and then maybe we can get rid of Friday completely. But yeah, it's just look, the proof is there in the pudding. Just just it's right there. People are more productive and happier.
Don't They usually just say like forty hours over the course of four days. Like I feel like that is oftentimes.
That's another version of it too, But like, you know, to what we're saying here, most people do not need forty hours depending obviously this is this is occupationally dependent, but like do not need the forty hours to achieve whatever their company's goals are. Yeah, obviously you can't do that if you're doing something like working as a like the health services or something like that. But yeah, many Sandway.
Bill specific specifies forty two, making the national standard from forty to thirty two hours. So no, no loopholes, sorry, big corporations.
I mean shit, do fucking you know, like do three eleven hour days?
You know what I mean?
Work three days a week if you've probably got to thirty two because I'm only going to work you know that quarter of those.
Anyway, there you go.
Well, Sheila, what a pleasure having you on the daily zeitgeist.
Yeah, it's been a joy.
Where can people find you and follow you and all that good stuff?
You can follow me at Shila Lawson on Instagram and you can find me in my latest book, How to Live Free in a Dangerous World, in which I say fuck capitalism and the patriarchy.
Wait a second, now, now hold on, just to god, damn second. Now, I'm just joking.
I thought you were cool.
I wait until the end book to stick it to the man.
No, yeah, no's do cool the whole.
Time, and so we throw out what I actually do with my life.
Amazing. Yeah, please everybody go buy the book. And is there a work of media that you've been enjoying?
Fuck? I don't have one. I mean, that's the kind of hole that I had to stay in to write a travel book about trying to traverse the world in most decolonial ways as possible. I can't stay on the internet like you know, the bots can do that for me.
Yeah, it's true.
I was as good. People should go read your book.
Yeah, let's let's go back to reading people.
Yeah.
I got through about the first forty pages and I'm around the party you're in Zimbabwe, uh, And it's very very eye opening as someone who's half black and trying to like have introspection around blackness and what that means. And I found that just this one passage was reading about you in the car was very like eye opening.
But yeah, when I went to Zimbabwe right after Trump got elected, and I was still afraid of getting arrested as a black person in a fully black country, you know.
And they're like, oh, that's not oh see yeah yeah you're yeah, so you're black from America. This is right different. Yeah yeah yeah, no, I'm yeah. And man, your writing style is really it's it's like art, it's like pro So yeah, I really encourage people to to definitely check the book out because it's gone through the whole thing, so maybe it might might have it might take a weird turn about being anthy tablist or something.
Suddenly it's on the front, you know, colonial dangerous. I'm not you know, I'm not shiitting anybody.
I'm geographing.
Being. At least one review being like now wait, just to goddamn second tier. Someone said this was like, E pray love, keep your politics out of my memoir reading. Yeah, all right, that's gonna do it. For this week's weekly Zeitgeist. Please like and review the show if you like, the show means the world the miles he he needs your validation. Folks. I hope you're having a great weekend and I will talk to you Monday.
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