Circling the Drain

a mass shooting event. I should probably start keeping score, because last week, right, I was having, as many of you know who follow me with having a bit of, you know, an existential crisis kind of day where I needed to take myself out on a walk, do some stretching, do some meditation and some breathing because I just can't and take watching this country just spiral down the fucking sewer dream. When I came back, I had tweeted out so what did I miss while I was gone for

all of an hour? And what I had missed, of course, was a mass shooting event that had happened in Atlanta where the suspect was on the run who has now since been caught after shooting up a medical facility, killing

one person and injuring for others. And you know, I am, as you all know, have been home on Long Island, visiting my family and just to get a breather right, just to surround myself with a little bit more nature ground myself, you know, with the you know, just being around my family and ground myself, because I have the tendency when I get too embedded and invested in the news to just catastrophize. Right. But the thing is that I'm realizing is it's not a figment of my imagination.

Like I'm not losing it, right, Like, it isn't normal what we are experiencing every single fucking week. It's not normal. It hasn't been normal since Donald Trump came down that escalator. It hasn't like we have literally been experiencing trauma just on a regular basis. My mother is not, unlike everyone else's mother, who has pretty much stopped watching the news.

She gets alerts on her phone like everybody else does, and we'll read through some of them, but she has stopped ingesting the news except when her youngest daughter is on the news, because she can't stomach it, because it makes her fearful to even want to leave her house and then realizing that you're not even safe in your own home, and that if she were to continue watching the news at that rate, then she would never leave and probably never leave her bed. And that's how I

feel most days. I'm not going to lie. It's why I have doubled down, tripled down in my meditation. It's why I, you know, get outside each and every day to just you know, see some smiling faces, take in some fresh air, look at the sun, look at you know, spring blooming all around me. To remind me that there is good in you know, that there is good out there, that that there is beauty. And I say this to you all at the beginning of a new week because

I think that it is important. We are being inundated. When Steve Bannon said flood the zone with shit, this is what the fuck he was talking about. You know, to just open the hose and spray everywhere mayhem, cruelty, disaster, misery, anti semitism, racism, transphobia, homophobia, islamophobia, misogyny, you know, just spread it everywhere, right to every nook and cranny, every crevice, so that we lose hope, so that we are exhausted

and lose the ability to fight back. So I say, at the beginning of every week, right, we only get pretty much like a day and a half to really relax. If you really think about the weekend, that if you are not making time each and every day for rest, hydration, joy, beauty. You are helping them win. It is not winning to be sitting in front of a screen, tweeting into the late night, posting and watching every scrap of news that

you possibly can. That is how they win by making us fear, our neighbors, fear going outside, shrinking our world. It is more important than ever for you to stretch, for you to make connections, real life connections with people who don't think like you, who don't love like you, to build community, write real life community as well as online community, because that reality is harder to penetrate with disinformation.

So it is important now than ever to use your rest and joy as resistance to build up that reservoir so that you're able to move through the weeks which are harder and harder to move through. So please take that on at the beginning of each and every week and check in with yourself, check in with your friends, check in with your family to make sure they too are keeping themselves and their energy safe. Coming up next, my conversation with our friend, our in house doctor, doctor

Jonathan Metzel. Folks, you know that whenever we have any opportunity to speak with our friend doctor Jonathan Mepzil. Each and every week, I am always pleased. However, today I am Jonathan. I need to stop going on the internet. It is just wholly not good for my mental health and wellbeing. As you can see, I'm with my family on Long Island this week because I just needed a break and I like to come out here and just

get a peace of mind. But this week I'm just I'm on Twitter, which is just the dumpster fire, and every single story that is sent to me, whether somebody dms me or I see it in the timeline, is like one horrible shooting story after the next, one horrible story about like, you know, a BLM protester that drove into a crowd didn't get jail time. You know, she's getting like five hours of community service. The Supreme courtus completely and totally corrupt, and apparently has been since the

two thousand elections, are probably before. And I just wondered these days, Jonathan, like one, how you're keeping your wits about you? Because I'm really fine. I am back to a place where I am meditating multiple times a day, not going for multiple walks. I'm doing everything that I possibly can to stay sane and it doesn't seem to be working.

I don't know, tell me how you feel. I feel in a way, Like, on one hand, Twitter is so much worse, Like you go on now and my feed is either black people committing crimes and getting away with it like that that's like eighty percent of it, and then somebody punched somebody in the face and like I'm like, I did not ask for any of this stuff, or right wingers talking about how Jesus would hypothetically Jesus would be fighting trans people also, you know, and it's inferiating,

Like I want to say, like, hey, that's a hypothetical question about transfeable you made up to answer about Jesus, Like if I ask if Jesus was your cellmate in a maximum security prison, would you tie his shoes or something like. It's totally hypothetical, but it just it ties. It just taps into all this stuff. So Twitter is objectively worse, and I'm more addicted to it right now, Like I can't get off it, and so whatever they're doing,

it's keeping me on Twitter. And so it's kind of weird that I want there to be some like nice I mean, it's it's hard, like what are we going to think about communication right now? I just keep wondering this because, on one hand, Twitter reaches a lot of people. It's it's more addictive than reading the New York Times. It's more addictant than reading the Atlantic. You can scroll through and see stuff that either infury it's you, pushes

every button or justifies your thing. But the other thing is it just has a kind of reach leading into

an election. So saying that I'm going to go on Mastadon or Masticator or whatever the heck it is or some other stuff and reach one hundred people like you know Facebook used to do twenty years ago, it just feels like it just feels like, Okay, that's great if you want to talk to your friends, but right now, considering what the issues are, you actually need big alliances, and so I don't see what the Remember when Must took over, there was all this Oh, we're going to

go on all these alternatives and it's going to be also great and stuff, and I just don't see that emerging. And so it increases the risk of Twitter and increases the manipulation of Twitter as you go toward toward the election, but it also increases like the importance of Twitter because there's no viable alternatives. So I don't know. I feel really, I feel really torn about this, Like I feel like I'm very aware of these things, and I still get

I still get hooked. And I know. So I did a podcast the other day and the interviewer was telling me about research that showed that American polarizations started to get worse in like twenty thirteen. Everybody started to get a cellphone and stuff like that. Like I believe that's true. I believe that this thing is like the polarizing agent of all time. It's being used against us, but I don't know it's the same thing. Like I also then

get insomnia. I also then think about these images and think, like, oh, do I you know, whatever, it's it's yeah, it works.

out at like nine forty five. I'm seeing it on my phone at ten thirty, and then I'm on Twitter until twelve thirty in the morning and couldn't stop, like, couldn't get off of it. Everybody seemed to still be awake, you know, who was on the East Coast at twelve thirty in the morning. Ye kind of going through, you know, going through this story and I'm like, what is going on?

that the other shoe is consistently dropping. It isn't just one thing that we're waiting for. It's this steady drip of horrific coverg right of like every single thing, and just recognizing that all of it comes back to the

fact that there is no accountability, there's no responsibility. We have these supreme and I put it in quotations, thinking about the Supreme Court, these supreme entities that we've put into place to police themselves, right, and then wonder why there is erosion and corruption and corrosion of our systems. And so I just find myself at this place. You know, I am I'm being this is funny. I'm being honored by my former high school. Yes, and I am being asked to go and speak to a group of two

hundred and fifty nine through twelfth graders. Right. I love this, And I'm like, and I'm like, what am I going to tell these teenagers who are inheriting literally a pile of shit like I have nothing like I have. I just I was stunned when they were just like, yeah, and we'd love for you to you know, calm into you know, one of the periods and and and speak to like the young people about your path and your journey. And I'm like, into Mayhaw, Well.

like we could fight it back against them. And the whole idea of Cambridge Analytica is that they realized that it wasn't that they had to convince people to vote for a bad candidate. They had to convince people that the system it meant that their vote didn't matter. And so I do think that's an important message for students.

I mean, that's I'm giving the Vanderbilt graduation speech for my department next week and that's what I'll be talking about, which is that engagement is key because there's every force in the world trying to get you not engaged and it doesn't matter what you know. Hopefully, in school you learn how to talk to people who are different than you. It's one of the times in your life where you really can't completely select your audience the way you can as the older you get, yeah, and so you meet

people who are different than you. And so the importance of school is learning how to talk to people who are different than you and to fight against that Cambridge Analytica narrative which tells you that your engagement doesn't matter

because that's what the system wants you to feel. And so I think that's an important message because I don't know, we're seeing it right now in Ashville, where we had thousands of students out for gun safety reform, and it was an incredible a couple of days, and then the

system went right back to where it was. And so there's in my own hometown right now, students are saying, look, we went out, we marched, we protested, and just last week the Tennessee politicians passed a bill protecting gun manufacturers from any liability. That's the only thing we did. And so it just takes persistence right now, no matter what side of this year on, it takes talking to a little different to you than persistence. And I think that's kind of what I mean. I think that's a message

for students. But again it's also coming from somebody who's up until three in the morning, you know, watching just waiting for like one dog tweet or one thing about like cute little monkeys or any kangaroos or something. You know.

was wonderful. And this is my first time in a public high school, probably since I went to high school. And I was walking with my sister the other day and I said, I am terrified to go to a high school. I haven't been in one since there were mass shootings. Like mass shootings are the norm, school shootings are the norm. And she and my sister is a teacher and at a at a middle school, and she's just like, yeah, you just need to kind of put it out of your mind, you know, and just you know,

and just go. And my feeling, Jonathan, as I was like grappling, as I'm grappling with this feeling of fear of going into a public high school, is that like I'm going in for forty five minutes. Once these kids go in every single day, all day, how how are they able to push past what I was starting to feel like this paralytic fear of like, oh my god, I'm going to be in this auditorium, like where are

the exits? Like I don't know what these active shooter drills are like running through this fear that I have. And I'm just like, and this is how we're sending kids to school every day?

did everything right. We had armed guards, we had a gun policy, we had under the desk policy, locked door policy, every policy, and it's and it's still didn't do anything because the shooter but seven guns legally in the two weeks before the shooting, and so and there was no recourse. And so I just think it's you know, people kind of laugh and say, oh, we're living in a war zone, but we are kind of living in a war zone. People talk, People talk when they feel like they could

have their life threatened in daily interactions. This is just kind of how it sounds. And so it's, uh, it's.

can be on Twitter right and see people tweeting, you know, until the wee hours of the morning, that we are so disconnected and so isolated, and it is causing greater instances of diabetes and heart disease and dementia and all

of these things. And I just wonder, Jonathan, about these feelings that particularly young people have, right and are grappling with the sense of fear, the lack of control because they can't vote yet, right, and this sense of isolation, and how we really discuss this kind of Quo Wyatt pandemic, that this quiet epidemic that has been infiltrating our society.

another rate increase. Screenwriters are on strikes, right. I just keep thinking about the people in France actually who are protesting about the It just seems so quaint by our standards, But the idea that basically raising the retirement age is something that people are kind of going to the to the barricades about. But we live in a world where the kind of old social contracts between workers and their bodies and their lives and their employers is starting to

break down a little bit. And so not a little.

thirty years from now, and if America actually exists. And I find myself having these conversations with friends on the air, with PEA people, and it just seems like there's this never ending existential threat. And Jonathan, I have to ask you, like, has there been another time that I am missing that we were all collectively going through something like this.

elected and had not been given power. And then there was basically an economic crisis, and the Chancellor of Germany all of a sudden made a deal with Hitler, which trying to be a deal with the devil, but it was kind of out of desperation, right, Fascism rises through economic desperation, And so I do feel like, I mean, and this is my own family history, so I'm very attuned to this, but but I do feel like I do feel like we're kind of leading up to it

just feels like that moment. It just feels like that moment. And I don't know if that's going to be that come. Maybe we'll learn from history, Maybe we're going to learn and turn another, you know direction. I mean, I hopefully that's that's what's going to happen, because it's not that long ago. It's not that it's not that long ago

that all of this happened. But I guess I've been thinking about it in light of this debt ceiling issue, honestly, because everybody's like, oh, they'll never cause a default, and they're never going to cause a default, and they're going to negotiate, and at the end of the day, the economy matters. But I do think history shows us that, like fascism rises out of the kinds of conditions that

would be created if we default on our debt. And so it's not like automatically they're just going to rush to, oh, let's find a middle ground or something, which they would normally do during a regular economy. So again, we're going

it's a very dark theatory right now. But I do think that there are historical correlates, and I think we should look at those historical corelates to figure out how we can change course again, because the really the economy is, it's just such a key player in all of this, and it's not it's not just like, oh, let's boost the American economy. It's like the American economy doing poorly serve some people's interests.

Democrats were kind of resigned to that. And so I think we learned from the midterm that we don't that the dire predictions don't have to come true if people can mobilize it against this feeling of against this feeling of helplessness, and your vote doesn't matter and all those factors and I and the stakes are obviously going to be much higher in twenty twenty four, and the resistance

is going to be much greater. But I do think that that really is the lesson is the lesson is the lesson of the midterm.