Jack O'Brien

Jack O’Brien is the co-founder of Cracked.com and the co-host of The Daily Zeitgeist. Follow him on Twitter here. Follow The Daily Zeitgeist on Twitter here.

What’s something from your search history that is revealing about who you are, what’s something overrated, and what’s something underrated?
Search History: Looking into the movies that came out in 2015. I like to use the Oscars each year to relitigate the Oscars from five years before. I think that’s the schedule the Academy should be on so we can appreciate the film’s actual impact. It seems like it takes movies a couple years to fully soak into the cultural consciousness and for people to decide how much they matter to them. The big one from 2015 is that Mad Max: Fury Road didn’t win Best Picture, even though that seems like one of the stand out cinematic achievements of the last decade. I love Spotlight, which won, but it’s a different level.

Specifically my search has been around documentaries of the time. There was some really great stuff from that period around the US / Mexican boarder and revolutions that commented in really interesting and meaningful ways on what we were about to live through during the Trump administration.

Overrated: Mainstream media. Weird that my answer is probably the same as a lot of Fox News commentators (of course I count Fox News as part of the mainstream media). The longer I spend paying attention to the way the news relates to the Zeitgeist, the more I see these baked in biases towards sensationalism, defending the status quo, and ignoring disadvantaged communities that have created an incredibly toxic cultural ecosystem in America.

What do you think podcasting has done for internet culture and society in general?
I think it’s filled in for some of the social relationships we’ve started lacking in this time of loneliness. There’s something about my relationship to the podcast hosts I listen to that is different and more personal than my relationship to anyone else who I don’t actually know. I feel like I could start talking to them like old friends.

How many hours of podcasts do you listen to per week and at what speed do you listen? Sometimes I hear you mention all the listening you do, and I wonder how it's possible. (I also once heard that you listen with only 1 earbud at a time so your headphones never run out of battery and you can listen longer. Is that lore?)
I probably listen to 15 hours a week, down from 25-30 at a particularly unhealthy point in my life. I stay between 1 and 1.25. I used to listen to more information based shows at higher speeds but feel like I wasn’t absorbing the information as much as I would if I just read the article. I do tend to keep one pod in ear and one in the charger. I don’t ALWAYS have a show on. I’ve tried to stop leaving the headphone in when I’m not listening because it really changes how you interact with the outside world. There’s something about having both my ears literally open to the air that makes it possible for me to fully engage.

What shows do you make sure you never miss?
Like I said, I’m less and less of a “must get this information” listener than I used to be. Chapo Trap House, The Read, Desus and Mero, Behind the Bastards are shows that I think make me better at my job because of the perspectives and voices of the hosts. Blank Check is starting to join that group.

Then I have my guilty pleasure shows I save for the weekend: Doughboys, The Dollop, Last Podcast on the Left, and I never miss The Flagrant Ones with Carl Tart and the hosts of Hollywood Handbook, which is probably my favorite podcast at the moment.

You are obsessed with the coal gas study. Why? Does it kind of connect a lot of things you’re interested in? Does it symbolize the kind of content that fuels the Daily Zeitgeist?
I think it illustrates something that is hugely overlooked in the Zeitgeist, probably my biggest underrated overall: second degree suicide, the likelihood that you, the listener, the reader, will take your own life.

The Zeitgiest is obsessed with murder but twice as many people die of suicide each year. I think it’s important to always keep in mind that I am twice as likely to kill myself than get killed by someone else, and also keep in mind that that’s true of every person I know. That might seem strange because of course I know I’m not going to kill myself—I’m me—but then there’s the main finding of the coal gas study: suicide is often a spur of the moment thing. We talk about second degree murder but we don’t talk about second degree suicide. The way we cover suicide is that it’s the final answer to a riddle that was a human’s life. And it’s frequently as simple and stupid as the person who shoots a spouse they catch cheating or a friend after a disagreement over money. They get really mad at themselves for something stupid and if they have a gun, they lock it in.

So back to your original question—I talk about it a lot because I still don’t think people understand how important it is, and it reveals a lot about the human condition, something I’m interested in.  

Does your wife listen to the show? How do you two support each other in your work, which is very different?
She listens to the show sometimes, which is weird because she feels like she talked to me during the day and I didn’t get the same interaction with her.

We support each other by having real, engaged conversations about each other’s jobs. I find what she does incredibly interesting. I read a novel she was assigned in medical school just because I thought it was interesting that they were assigned a novel, and I’ve been fascinated by the lives of doctors ever since.

So when she tells me about work, I’m engaged and want to talk about it. And she gives me the same attention and interest.

Thanks, Jack!