{"podcast":{"title":"Free Thinking Through the Fourth Turning with Sasha Stone","slug":"free-thinking-through-the-fourth-turning-with-sasha-stone-5501501","podcast_index_feed_id":5501501,"rss_url":"https://api.substack.com/feed/podcast/66221.rss","website_url":"https://www.sashastone.com/podcast","image_url":"https://substackcdn.com/feed/podcast/66221/36b7823df12a5b8d9115f36ad187a369.jpg","author":"Sasha Stone","episode_count":279,"summary":"Analysis of Hollywood's newly adopted ideology destroying storytelling, however good its intentions. Film reviews, essays, perhaps an interview of two.","last_synced_at":"2026-06-21T02:21:00.378485+00:00","page_url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/free-thinking-through-the-fourth-turning-with-sasha-stone-5501501"},"episode":{"title":"Close Encounters of the Totalitarian Kind","slug":"close-encounters-of-the-totalitarian-kind","published_at":"2026-04-08T23:16:10+00:00","page_url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/free-thinking-through-the-fourth-turning-with-sasha-stone-5501501/close-encounters-of-the-totalitarian-kind","show_page_url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/free-thinking-through-the-fourth-turning-with-sasha-stone-5501501","url":"https://www.sashastone.com/p/close-encounters-of-the-totalitarian","audio_url":"https://api.substack.com/feed/podcast/193399072/da4060dec49bb491c097f076cb1cb744.mp3","summary":"—Jacob Siegel, the Information State, excerpts from audiobook , which can be found here. Totalitarianism came to America slowly at first and then all at once. It began as a utopia, one I helped build. It seemed like a perfect new America and gave all of us godless creatures, who’d been chewed up and spit out by the Boomers’ counterculture revolution, a collective sense of purpose. It was all going so great until it wasn’t. A Virtual Utopia I got online 30 years ago. I never planned on living half of my life on the internet. It just turned out that way. I had motive, means, and opportunity to kill off my real-life self and be reborn in the virtual world. Why wouldn’t I escape a life that had become a full-spectrum failure at everything I tried to do? A relationship that blew up when the man I thought loved me went back to his wife, the Graduate Film Program at Columbia I’d targeted as my life’s dream ended in one semester as I chased that loser guy back to LA. There are things about that moment that are too painful to write about, at least for now, but I will someday. The result was me staring at the wall with nothing achieved and nowhere to go. I had just turned 30. The internet allowed me to remake myself as someone else. I could be strong. I could be confident. I could be beautiful because who knew what you looked like? I could just use words, and I was good at words. So I dove into a life online full of excitement and wonder, a dreamscape of endless possibilities. There was no Amazon, no eBay, no Google. There was barely a web browser. I fell in love with an Italian I met online and came back from Italy pregnant. He didn’t want to be a father, but I wanted to be a mother, so I had my baby, and then I built a website so I could stay home with her and support us. I wa…","meta_description":"—Jacob Siegel, the Information State, excerpts from audiobook , which can be found here. Totalitarianism came to America slowly at first and then all at o…","key_points":[],"chapters":[],"topics":[],"duration_seconds":2015,"processing_state":"not_requested","actions":[{"name":"request_transcript","method":"POST","url":"https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/free-thinking-through-the-fourth-turning-with-sasha-stone-5501501/episodes/close-encounters-of-the-totalitarian-kind/transcription-requests","description":"Idempotently request low-priority transcript generation for this episode."},{"name":"read_markdown","method":"GET","url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/free-thinking-through-the-fourth-turning-with-sasha-stone-5501501/close-encounters-of-the-totalitarian-kind.md","description":"Read the agent-friendly Markdown representation of this episode resource."}]}}