Red Scare - Cat Food People

Episode Date: July 13, 2021

The ladies discuss the true story behind Cat Person, why

How's it going? It's going okay. How are you? Okay. Well, football did not come home yesterday. I have no idea what happened. England lost to Italy in the cup. Is Italy the final boss?

Yeah, yeah. Italy won the cup. And they started engraving that trophy so quick before I could even like get my wits about me and then I walked home sadly in my Fred Perry polo. Yeah. But it's okay. The World Cup is next year. I've gained kind of an appreciation for soccer that I didn't have.

Oh, wait, this wasn't the World Cup. I called it the World Cup on the last one, but it's the Euro Cup. Okay. So it's like the primaries for the World Cup or what? I think it's just a different, yeah, soccer stuff. But I feel like I've turned a corner and I've started to enjoy kind of masochistically how tedious it is and then it's like edging, you know, the moments of like, um, actually something happening or so much more satisfying because, oh yes, because it's again, it's unlike baseball

where they stand around for three and a half hours with their dicks in their hands on a field. This there is some like action that leads you to believe something will happen and it very and something can happen at any moment, but you don't want to, you know, you don't want to take too many smoke breaks or like one zero. It was one, one, and then it went to penalties and then yeah, sad. Um, but okay, but fine, not really my, you know, I'm not English, I'm just in any, an angle file.

Yes. Um, sorry, I'm looking for my jewel. You, uh, you went to Boston pause. Yeah, I went to Boston and I went to Rhode Island, the baby's first road trip was nice. I saw a lot of cool, uh, billboards about Jesus, remasons, abortion. I always think it's weird when people name their kid Mason because it's such a white trash name, but it has this kind of high society aspiration to it or something. It's such a weird name.

I think that's exactly what it is. I mean, it's, I always said it was weird that Courtney Kardashian named her kid Mason because she's Armenian and her baby daddy's Jewish, it's like a weird kind of like pseudo wasp thing, but then fun fact, my sister got to the bottom of it, Kardashian means son of the stone Mason. Oh yeah. Yeah. So very fitting name.

Yeah. So that's probably why he has this like, yeah, stupid, pseudo elite name. Mason, Barron, another great elite name for a big towering, towering boy, six, seven Baron Trump. Is that confirmed? Yeah. Well, that's what I read in the Daily Mail and he's only 14, he's 16, I think now. How?

I don't know. I swear. Just the other day he was, he ages exponentially. He's getting bigger and older. He has like, Marfan syndrome. He has like a kremigol here. He is looking pubescent. He had some acne in those pics of him like towering over his mom with a Louis Vuitton

bag. Oh, that happens. Of course. Do you think he'll be able to preserve his golden boy jeans because the other Trump sons are really inbred looking? They look like McPoils or Peacocks. Yeah, they look awful. Maybe Melania will kind of counteract some of that like pear-shaped Trumpian physique.

I don't think it's possible. I think like the Trump family are the only like blonde blue-eyed people with like a recessive jean package that like somehow became dominant. Like they own everybody they interbreed with. Ivanka is pretty attractive. She's the most attractive one. Yeah. But she also has like a chin implant.

Well, yeah. She's had some procedures. Yeah. Sorry. Oh, excuse me. Oh my God. Well, edit that out. Atchoo.

Atchoo. Sorry. Oh, excuse me. Bless you, mother. That's how, that's how Barron says it. What else is on the, on the dock? I don't even know. If I was brain dead before, I'm even more brain dead now.

That's good. That's what the fans like to hear. I'm like on that Joe Biden tip. Rapid decay. Yeah. Seriously. Cat person. Cat person.

Remember that story? Yeah. Back in the news. Yeah. Back in the news. What did you think of cat person, the story? We talked about it on the pod and I don't remember what my hot take was, but I remember liking it.

Yeah. And then I revisited it and it seemed shittier than I remember. Huh. Interesting. I should have revisited it, but. You probably have. I mean, it's, it's very mundane, but at the time I remember finding it like impactful and successful as like a short story, and I think feel like we had like a good convo

about it. Specifically, the description of like the sex in the story was interesting. Yeah. Like fairly accurate and naturalistic. Yeah. I remember that I asked because I also remember it being pleasantly surprised by auto fiction style short story published in the New Yorker at the height of the two. Well, that's why it was so, so viral.

Yeah. Yeah. And then I was revisiting it after this, so this Slate article came out. That's why people are talking about cat person again. That was written by a woman named Alexis Novicki, no wiki. Alexis Virgil Texas. And the headline was something to the effect of like, I thought cat person was based on my life and then it turned out it was.

Yeah. And she described a relationship she had with a man in his 30s when she was in college, who when she read cat person, it was very reminiscent of this real person that she knew who she calls Charles under the pseudonym Robert in the story. Yeah. And the story Robert in the essay Charles, but his real name unknown and doesn't really matter. And she had a hunch that this story was somehow inspired because that Kristen Rappinian story

was inspired somehow by her relationship with this man, Charles. And then after his death, she a friend of his confirmed that he did in fact know Kristen Rappinian. And had had like a sexual encounter with her, right? That was the idea. Like they had had some kind of. Romantic or. Sexual.

Encounter. And then he told her that he was seeing someone, a younger woman, this Alexis girl. And then she took the creative liberty to sort of fictionalize her projection of what their relationship seemed like to her. And so there was a lot of talk sort of about the ethical dimensions of drawing from life and fictionalizing in this way, which I felt where it was pretty overblown, obviously, or well within your rights as like a, as a writer to do something like that. Yeah.

A literal creative writer. Yeah. To cherry pick from your personal experience or your second hand experience. It's like literally what writers do. Yeah. Especially because she didn't actually know this girl and what hurt, what she found kind of painful and challenging Alexis was the way that Robert slash Charles was described in cat person.

She sort of portrayed him in a highly unflattering light as like a predatory misogynistic character. Okay. Well, I have a bone to pick with Alexis's perception of Rupenian's portrayal because I think that she deliberately and willfully doesn't fully get it. But also this feels like, interestingly enough, Alexis is also a writer. Like she alludes to having an editor and I think possibly an agent or something like that. So she's trying to make it big as a writer and this just feels like her kind of coming

for the throne or whatever. Or not even that, but I think like she was probably miffed because she also had like three subject matters that she could write about all three of them failed. One was having an older boyfriend and then Rupenian swooped it up and told her truth for her. I would preface this by saying that writers like fiction writers are notoriously horrible nefarious people who treat other people in their lives as caricatures and mock and humiliate them.

But makes them great in part. That's the essence of art. That's why you should never fuck a writer. Have you ever fucked a writer? Yeah. Like a fiction writer, an author, not like a journalist. Yeah. I had a, well, I had a playwright.

I had a boyfriend who was a playwright and I'm sure I inspired him. I was his muse and I was his muse and no, I mean, yeah, I probably slept with a handful of writers and I hope no short story of her surfaces about a girl named Glosha, Sasha. Yeah. So, well, okay, I, you have a bone to pick with Alexis. Just a little subtle bone because she's her, her kind of like point that it's a, it's a weird article because you would think that she would, she's fairly moderate and measured. Like she doesn't try to cancel Rupinian like outright.

She doesn't really confirm narrative that email and Rupinian responded in like a canned like quasi apologetically, sort of, yeah, um, which she didn't need to do and probably was, was sweet of her to, to acknowledge, I guess. Yeah. Or she was also nervous that there might be some sort of like cancel campaign or legal action down because there was, because the real cat person wasn't a misogynist. He was a normal guy, a nice, normal sensitive guy. But here's, here's the quote, about half of cat person is a sex scene in it, Rupinian

depicts the type of bad sex that's easy for readers to relate to, not explicitly harmful or abusive, but towing the line of consent and leaving Margot feeling repulsed afterwards. This is where the story diverges completely from my reality. Aside from the fact that like Margot was my first time not having to sneak around in suburban basements to hook up, the latter half of cat person does not mirror my relationship with Charles. In Rupinian's story, Margot laughs when Robert asks if she's had sex before. The first time Charles and I hooked up, he was surprised when I told him I never had.

In cat person, Margot was turned off by Robert's aggression and embarrassed by his vulnerability. Rupinian spends a good portion of the story describing just how disgusting of a person he is. Of course, I know nothing about how Charles was with other women. I can only speak for myself. With me, at least he was careful, patient and gentle. It was the first time someone asked if they could kiss me instead of just doing it. To me, that's a very confused misrepresentation or account of things because she's willfully

and deliberately confusing the artistic devices Rupinian uses in the story with Rupinian's own opinion of Charles, which we don't know. This is Margot's opinion as the protagonist and I think she's also the narrator, right? I think what Rupinian did really well, elegantly and subtly, was that she created this image of Charles as the perception of a young and inexperienced woman who was simultaneously flattered and repulsed by him and was maybe exaggerating certain repulsive characteristics of his in her own mind to kind of rationalize the relationship or her break with it or whatever. You see what I'm saying?

Yeah, definitely. I mean, the portrayal of Robert in the story is very uncharitable, but as you said, it is from the perspective of the young female narrator who's confused and doesn't quite know what she wants and is enchanted by her own effect, the effect that she has on men is very much like a creature of the Me Too moment. I think that that was very impressive of Rupinian because she basically kind of creates or imagines the mindset of a young contemporary woman, which is easy for her to do as a young contemporary female writer.

Much like Wellbeck, right? Imagine these exaggerated male protagonists who are repulsive and misogynistic and have like a very like uncharitable view of the women they date. Yeah, and it probably wouldn't have been a very compelling story if it reflected Alexis's more tepid and mundane reality of having a fairly normal relationship with a person who was within a kind of a normal spectrum of human decency and attractiveness. That doesn't, that's not going to hit the, that's probably why they didn't publish her story.

Exactly. But I think, but again, I thought her exaggeration was like a very, again, like very elegant and subtle and not too on the nose or too moralistic. Like the beauty of cat power, which a lot of people missed is that she doesn't really moralize it. You said cat power. Oh, cat person. Sorry.

I love cat power. Fun fact. The beauty of cat power. I would give it a reread. Okay. Yeah, I think, and maybe because I read it after reading Alexis's piece, it did feel more uncharitable. Okay.

And maybe my initial impression of it should have rang more true, but I mean, the other thing to remember is that like these are fictionalized personas where certain details may have been lifted from Charles and Alexis's lives. And they're, they're sort of like descriptive naturalistic details. They don't really necessarily mean anything. Yeah. That's not really what the story is about. And the story is now being like adapted into a film.

And so that it'll take on an even kind of a new life and that's sort of what's interesting about it and why the story is so enduring, I think. Did you notice the, which she talks about after finding out that Charles has died? Oh yeah. Spoiler. She, she said, this is like in reference to I think maybe their last like correspondence because she never asked him if he knew Rapini and weirdly, and she didn't find out until after he died.

Right. And she says that maybe she never asked because she didn't want to know like, you know, it's a lot of, yeah, I wouldn't get so bent out of shape about, about a little story personally. But she said, I'd posted on Instagram that I was collecting money for Black Lives Matter related orgs, something aggressive, fist emoji, not milk toast, neoliberal. He labeled his Venmo to me. I texted him the receipt. Yeah.

Definitely red scare listener. Charles. Yeah. Robert, RIP. Yeah, neoliberal. Yeah. Come on. Yeah.

That's the real smoking gun of this whole thing. Yeah. That he's stealing from us. Cat person. Rapini is actually stealing from us because she knows the guy who, yeah, let's confront her on the pop. The guy from cat person is a average male red scare listener. It turns out, which really comes as no surprise.

I'm so, so humble and so self abnegating that it would never ever occur to me to think that this weird guy, that this weird story was modeled on, listen to your podcast. That's the real story. Yeah. That's the real scoop. I liked, I don't know. I was intrigued and entertained by Alexis's essay. Yeah.

I, obviously one could like call into question why she felt the need to sort of set the record straight on the reality of this fictional story. Yeah. It's being made about it. Yeah. You could, yeah, make the case that she's sort of like cynically trying to maybe boost her own writing career. But I thought the essay was decently written and kind of interesting.

Yeah. I agree. I mean, I was intrigued also and entertained, but also because I really did enjoy cat person. It was like one of the few works of art of the Me Too era that I can remember being actually good and complicated. Yeah. But, and not just because Rapinian is half Armenian, but. Well, you know, Nicholas Braun is going to play the guy in the movie.

Who's Nicholas? He's on succession. Oh, okay. Greg. I was just palling around with him in Italy. He's going to play Charles Robert. Yeah. And I think he's going to do a good job, honestly.

That'll be great. He can say milk toast, neoliberal in a Netflix series. I don't know if it's a Netflix movie. Oh, okay. It's a major, but I think it's like a studio film, but I'm looking forward to that. Yeah. I'm biased, obviously. Yeah.

It'll be interesting. I'm excited. We can definitely review it. I guess we could review it, but yeah, I think like, I don't think. Cat person podcast for all your cat person, I don't think like, and I don't think it's so conscious or cynical necessarily even, and, you know, stories like these are like a dime a dozen by now. So this one isn't particularly like horrible or egregious, you know?

Yeah. No, no, no. I actually have a charitable view of her motivations, I think, and part of what's interesting about it is that it does feel like it kind of, it closes the auto fiction kind of loop that then self perpetuates, you know, you could see how this could be done with like a number of like auto fiction pieces that have kind of like a companion personal essay. That's all that's doing a essayistic auto fiction take on that that then, you know, yeah, it's did you read the Sally Rooney?

I did. Story. What did you think of that? No, no cat person. No, no cat person. I'm not really a Sally Rooney fan. I am. I guess.

Well, I, I liked, I don't, I'm unclear if it was a short story or like an excerpt from a new book of hers, it seems like the latter maybe because it wasn't very kind of wasn't a very contained narrative, but I enjoy reading her. And I think I enjoy auto fiction generally just because I'm like lonely, to be honest. So there's something, I don't know, easy and kind of comforting about reading about people looking at their phones in a internalized voice that kind of like mirrors one's own. Yeah. And, and it's, yeah, and there's something, there's some sort of like psychic linkage that

occurs when you read about the experiences of similar late twenties. I should play that girl in the Sally Rooney movie because I'm really good at looking at my phone. Yeah. Just like flicking through. Yeah. I'm a shoe in for that part. Yeah, it's like, you know, when you look at like, when you read these accounts of like

late twenties to late thirties millennials kind of stumbling through life as like permanent renters or whatever, stumbling through like romantic episodes, that sort of thing. There's like some kind of psychic link of recognition that occurs that makes the process very familiar and enjoyable. I don't think like Sally Rooney is an atrociously bad writer or anything like that. She does have a certain like faculty. I think she's a good writer. I actually think she's very adaptable because she is kind of a cinematic writer.

Yeah. And the way that she describes people's internal thought processes and kind of the omniscient narrator who's kind of like noting all these little personal details that people are doing, I think is very cinematic kind of. Yeah, it is. It does. But this is, I guess this is my problem with Sally Rooney. I find her to be overly, I find her to be overly calculated and cynical as a writer.

She knows what she's doing, which is getting these kind of stacking future adaptations, which, you know, again, I don't blame her for managing her own career or whatever, having ambition, anything like that. That's like fine. But like the content itself. I don't blame anything, but everything is up for IP because they're so... And what do you mean? Intellectual property, like any story or book of note basically will be adapted.

Yeah, totally. But I guess... It's like a law. I mean, listen, I'm coming at this from like, you know, a boomer perspective in the sense of like, I like Bernhard and Yellenek and I like very cruel writing that is cruel, not because the writers themselves are cruel or an empathetic or whatever, but because they are describing the cruel reality of, you know, existing in the world. And I think like Sally Rooney is...

She's very smart because she sees how kind of sad and atomized everybody is and lonely. Like this story was about like a very lonely young woman who was like striving to make a connection with a childhood friend. But I think like there's something I can't quite articulate about her... While looking at her ex-boyfriend's sound cloud. But it's very... I mean, to me, I guess it's very kind of like unworthy A of description and B like pandering to the tastes of people like us, like it's too easy.

And so like that for me is kind of, you know, frustrating. Definitely. Well, it's unambitious and it's not particularly creative. Yeah. Well, it's ambitious in the wrong way. Like you're, it is like unambitious on an artistic level, but ambitious on a professional level. Right.

Yeah. Right. That's what I mean. And that's what... I mean, creatively, like auto fiction has like a kind of end of history feeling to it where it's like nothing new. It really gets generated. Everything is just sort of descriptions of atomization, basically.

And that's kind of the best that we can muster as a culture. Yeah. That's... Which is unfortunate. Yeah. And that there's... I don't think that there are... Like I don't think that new ideas are impossible.

I think that they're absolutely possible and we're going to see new ideas like emerge in the next five, 10 years or whatever, but... I'm working on a short story about me reading the essay about that person. Just like scrolling through your phone on New York Times. They hit you with that. You've reached your limit of 10 articles. She sighed, pressing the login button, striving to remember her New York Times login. She typed in fake news 69, gaining access to the rest of the article.

Yeah. Yeah. There's something... I don't know. I think Sally Rooney, when I read her and when I read Rupanian, I noticed you can feel the distance between the fiction and the reality. You can feel their little engines turning in their heads. And it's funny that Rupanian talks about how she had to bat off all these questions and

allegations about the nature of her private life and how it overlapped with her fiction because it's very clear that there's a wide chasm there and that she's very smart and doesn't necessarily throw her life into her work in that way. Right. Though I'm sure the cat person story was like a malgome of experiences that she projected and actually did have and then... But I almost think that... The Robert character at least does seem to be at least descriptively, which again is

not what the story is about, so it shouldn't really matter. But if we believe Alexis' account, she seems like certain things about his character she did kind of exploit and describe. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think it's inevitable that little kind of particles from your real life will enter any art you make.

All fiction is auto-fiction fundamentally in the sense that all polemic stems from personal subjectivity. So I think even having that kind of category is murky. And also, I mean, you know me, I'm also not really particularly a fan of feminine female confessional writing in general because I think it's not even like the old argument that people will say, well, this is uninteresting and unworthy of description, as I just said moments earlier, but that there's something very kind of, again, indulgent and pandering about being so hyper aware like Sally Rooney and her constant references to like meta-references

to discourses people are age are having about like Marxism and communism and this sort of thing. Yeah. But I think that's all very true to her experience because she's Irish. Yeah. Yeah. So she kind of is out of, you know, is in this milieu. And I actually found it in that story specifically because the girl, I guess she works in publishing

or something. Yeah. She works at like a boutique literary magazine. Yeah. The references to like Marxism and stuff sort of caught me a little off guard because it didn't seem entirely plausible for her to actually be inhabiting that same milieu that Sally Rooney clearly does, you know, like. Well, Dublin is small and they all know each other, right, right, right.

Kind of like the people at the U of Michigan creative writing department. Right. All those MF phase, just all those horny, sucking and fucking and writing stories about it. But yeah, what was I going to say, but yeah, that's, I think that's what I remember having this conversation with Angela Nagel, who's also like not a fan of Sally Rooney, that like all of the little breadcrumbs that she leaves about kind of Marxism, communism, socialism, whatever, it makes, it kind of also creates a continuity between her fiction and her persona.

And for a long time, Sally Rooney wrote this kind of post like chapeau post Bernie wave of popular socialism. And people were like, Oh, she's a Marxist and a socialist and also a fiction writer. And that I always thought also her like branding was always somewhat kind of cynical in my mind. And a bit on the nose. Yeah. And I think now she's doubling down a little bit on her kind of implicit ironic critique of Marxism, making these people look a little bit foolish and like out of their element because

that whole political platform or Vanguard or whatever is has been kind of discredited. And if she was a truly like a vigilance kind of convicted Marxist, she would be writing about like factory workers, like people texting. Yeah. I mean, I don't know. I'm just kidding. There's something yet about like her kind of conspicuous branding that has always bugged me.

You know what I mean? Yeah. Like she, it seems that she, again, she's a very diligent, fastidious writer and I like her more than a lot of writers who just pepper the writing with like hyper research details because they can't develop plot or characters. Hallie Rooney doesn't really need plot or characters like those she functions and kind of like abstractions or archetypes or whatever. But yeah, I think in spite of clearly being like committed to a certain kind of level

of storytelling or whatever, I would say that she probably puts kind of her reputation before her art in a way, at least that's how it comes off, which always freaks me out because that's the wrong way to go. But I think it's hard when you become kind of like a young literary star. Yeah. That's true. That's also it's entirely her fault because you know, it's like, I remember having this conversation like a million times in 2014, 2015, when like post internet art was a really

big deal about how like if you peak at like, whatever, 23, 25, that's actually not such a good thing. Right. Because it's very hard to follow up any exactly and it's much easier to like break the mold when you're not celebrated and rewarded for creating the mold. Yeah. In a way. Yeah.

That's true. But anyway. Shall we next on the docket? Next on the docket. Vice article about hot girls eating tin fish. Oh yeah. From which I felt kind of conspicuously absent a little bit. Yeah.

I thought that was a little bit of Dasha erasure. I kind of put tin fish on the map. That would be good. I've been sardine posting for a decade probably. Yeah. Um, I put socialism, both on the map and I get no credit for it. Um, fish is actually just the food of socialism. Also Soviet socialism.

Um, also, did you notice that everybody quoted in this article was somehow associated with nylon? I was like, does vice own nylon or the other way around or what like every single person was like, yeah. Yeah. Well, I almost thought that it was PR, yeah, like a PR puff piece for that like tinned fish. Fish wife woman. Yeah, totally.

And then so then they had said like source kind of, um, quotes from, yeah, it felt like a, like a publicist wrote it where they were like sourcing quotes from people who they already had relationships with in media and that's why it feels that way. Yeah. Um, and the piece itself doesn't really have much of a, much of a thesis. It goes literally like anything can be hot girl food. Yeah. Hot girl says it.

Hot girl food can really be anything according to Twitter, oatmeal, coffee and a croissant, buttered toast, the Crunchwrap Supreme, blah, blah, blah. Hot girl food seems to suggest an appreciation for eating, but not in a complicated way or an unconventional way or a way that's particularly concerned with wellness. It's more Alice in Roman than it is Gwyneth Paltrow. It's like, like hot girl food is literally flavorless, low calorie food or food that you can only eat in small portions. It's literally deferred enjoyment food.

Yeah. That's all it is. And it's funny cause this woman Caroline food is liquid. Yeah. It's, it's just like congealed. It's juice. Yeah. It's on the spectrum of just oatmeal or the oil that they put the fish in, um, anyway,

there's this woman, Caroline Goldfarb, who has some like probably like undesigned, neolive reboot canned fish company called fish wife. And she told nylon that it's just like vice quoting nylon, um, that that tinned fish is the ultimate hot girl food. And this, her stated reason is that it's high in protein, but it's obviously also because it's like cheap and locale. All the Omega threes as well, not just the protein, yeah, but it's healthy, healthy fats, healthy oils.

Yeah. It's mercury, low in mercury, um, yeah. I mean, true, I guess, yeah, but I would disagree, I guess with the premise that it's like that hot girl, that sardines and hot girl food have like a kind of like unfussiness about it. Yeah. I think what's hot about eating sardines is that, um, it takes a kind of like confidence in your dietary choices, you know, because they, until recently until these puff pieces

started getting published were pretty maligned sardines. Yeah. Well, yeah. So in America, yeah, I have a very specific traumatic childhood memory of being cruelly mocked by, um, yeah, by bringing a Sprat sandwich to school, really excited for lunchtime. And then getting like cruelly mocked by like a bunch of first graders and throwing my sardines in the trash. All Russian immigrants have this memory of like their mom, like making a gross like lunch

for them that American kids don't understand because they like ate square pizza or whatever. And like coveting, like being like, mom, can you buy me like cotton candy or like a hot dog on the boardwalk? I like was looking at this like a Russian meme page and the mom being like growing up Russian or Slavic youth and the mom was like, yeah, and you always want like, um, the American. Oh yeah. I coveted lunchables, which in retrospect such such trash, not hot girl food. I think we should some, well, somebody would make big bucks if they came up with like a

dime's deli, like servo's version of lunchables, like a bento box kind of, yeah, like a tapas. Yeah. So that's a good idea. Yeah. Probably with some sardines. I mean, the margins on sardines are fantastic with this new with this new craze. Yeah. Well, yeah.

Sardines are like the perfect food for women who again, want the most amount of nutrients for the lowest price with the lowest calories. That's like all it is at the end of the day. Yeah. And then there's probably like some ethnic component, like a Euro Slavic component. Yeah. Kind of exoticism of, of, I mean, anchovies also. Yeah.

I love anchovies. I mean, I'm, they're my favorite, it's my favorite food. Canned fish. Canned fish. And I think I do deserve a little. I was, I not on this PR, PR mailing list, did someone float by like maybe Dasha? No, it was really weird. And also, didn't that girl weigh in who literally interviewed you for like, no, no, no, or something?

Yeah. Which is, I mean, they quoted her, I don't even think she weighed in, but they quoted her, yeah, a tweet of hers about sardines. Yeah. It's, it is really, you know, there's a Dasha shaped hole in that article. I have to pee. Yeah. Sorry.

Oh, God. No, no, no. He came at me. No. He came at me though. Okay, I'm debating, we're back of leaving this like, uh, the whole, well, I mean, maybe if you can hear my screams, that could be fun for them. I had just had a terrifying encounter with a cockroach in his bathroom.

It's been, I don't have roaches in my apartment, surprisingly, because I live above two restaurants. Oh. And you would think, I mean, not that I've seen it. Well, no, because they don't ever go up there because they're like feeding on the rush. Right. Right. They never need to make the trip upstairs. So it's been a while since I've.

Been besieged by Merlin. Yeah. So yeah. Though that's one of my big, one of my major fears. What? To have like a, to bear witness to some kind of horrifying infestation, you know, like opening a drawer and it's full of bugs or yeah, pretty common fear, but I think like this apartment actually is pretty low on the vermin and pests, but since it's gotten really

muggy and hot, they like migrate upward. Yeah. And I was like literally breastfeeding the other day in this like giant water book style cockroach, like the one we just saw in the back and floop, like buzzed past my head and I was like, what is that? Like a hummingbird. It was like so huge and it like landed on the baby's bassinet. I felt like such a bad mother.

I was just like, oh, I can't believe I can't provide a, a roach to like a small, small person to pay to live in the New York city on the Lower East side. God, I feel like it's, I feel like it's on me. Yeah. It's not, it's not. Oh, anyway, where are we talking about? I don't know. Top us.

You like peel back the tin and then just a bunch of cockroaches and oil. I will say, actually they, they try to bill sardines as like some kind of like effortless sensuous food, but you have to have good motor skills if you're eating those things. Cause it's very hard to peel back. It can be. Yeah. Some are easier than others. Yeah.

The Riga Gold's obviously are made of like superlative brand and those are kind of easy to open. Yeah. But you can't eat a whole, you can't slam a whole tin of those, you get heartburn. So then you have to transport them into Tupperware or put it on a cracker. Remember when I got into vegan caviar? Yeah. I remember we had a little taste testing the Coke and Pepsi thing and it was like

not immediately, like the vegan caviar, you could tell it wasn't the real deal, but it was very close. But yeah, especially if you're drunk, shoveling that down, it's basically just as good. I remember when somebody was mad at you because you posted a picture of yourself eating caviar and they were like, this rich elitist bitch and I was like, no, no, no, you don't understand. It's like dirt cheap and bright and beach. Yeah. It was like row.

It was like red caviar. Yeah. It was like dry bread called like a class trader. Yeah. Like that German bread with the chick riding a bike on the cover or whatever on the cover. Anyway, so basically anything can be hot girl food as long as it's slightly perverted. And yeah. And it's a little, yeah, kinky or whatever.

I mean, it's also like, it's the perfect food for people who kind of want the perks of having an eating disorder, but lack the discipline to fully commit the perks being skinny, but not too skinny. I feel, I feel so policed by the eating disorder stuff. I feel like I can't even speak freely. Yeah. Because I'm always being accused of being pro-Anna, even though I'm not. I don't, I never, to tell you the truth, I never understood like the, what the big deal

was, but I don't understand why everybody's so triggered and sensitive about like eating disorders, which are such like a sliver of the population that it barely counts. Especially in the extremes where they result in, you know, fatality or hospitalization. It's like, I think most women have some form of disorder eating and just being honest about that. That's what the article really should have been about. But I guess that's not how you sell the, the fish wife branded tins. I mean, yeah, most women just like, yeah, they, they probably like restrict on some level,

like shuffle their own food around on their plate. You know, it's definitely not hot girl food. What's that? Like a huge sandwich. Yeah. I find that. Like a triple duck. I find women do, do not enjoy like a big, big sandwich.

Well, cause it's too much commitment. Yeah. I'm like to like graze noncommittally. Exactly. And they hate, I noticed nuts and berries. Like a fucked up thing I noticed is that, you know, since I've had the baby every time I see one of my girlfriends or my female relatives, like, why don't you eat and I'll hold the baby?

And it's like a game of hot potato because a baby is a perfect excuse to like, you know, shuffle food around your plate and never eat. Interesting. Yeah. It's like such a thing. And I'm just like, no, let me hold him. He's my son. You eat.

Yeah. You have a nice big bite. And there have been several occasions where like I went to like a dinner with a kid and like one of my girlfriends heaped a ton of food on my plate. Interesting. I see you bitch. I see what you're trying to do. Well, you need it.

You got to get the cows for your breast milk to replenish. Yeah. I mean, I'm like, for the next year, I have a great life because I can eat whatever the fuck I want. It just like goes in one end and out the other. Out your tits. It's like super chill. I actually probably think like eating canned fish is not the best thing to do because there's

probably like high levels of mercury. No, you keep spreading this misinformation. Is it not true? About canned fish. No, no, no. It's not. Okay. Very low compared to like sushi and stuff.

Okay. Like actually. Okay. Cool. Tinned fish has very low levels of mercury. Yeah. But I'm not a medical professional, so. It's actually a great therapy for COVID.

Just crack open that. That's how I've saved it off for, did you hear about this gay cold? No, I have no idea what that is. I think it's just COVID. Okay. But. It's like a hybrid AIDS and COVID that you need PrEP and ivermectin for. It's, I think I missed, I think it happened while I was abroad, but a lot of people in

our extended front group fell ill with something they called gay cold. Okay. That apparently was transmitted at Pride or something. That's why they call it that. Uh, I think it really is probably just some weird variant of COVID that's annoying, but the Delta variant, the Delta variant, who knows highly infectious, not, but less fatal. Yeah. Something like that.

But I feel pretty good. Could I have some wine? I'm. Oh yeah. Totally. Just a little splash. Um, can't, can't fish and wine. Great combo.

Um, yeah. But I think, I mean, I think all of this food is like basically just like low effort food also. It's beyond the eating disorder thing. It's like for young women who no longer know how to take care of themselves and are single and live like, yeah, shambolic lives and never wash their hair or whatever. Well, yeah, you're not going to like, which is, yeah, archetypally hot girl style behavior. Yeah.

So hot girl doesn't like prepare an elaborate meal, you know, exactly because they have better things to do. A slice of bread, smear some hummus on it, do a line of cocaine, choke down some fucking kale, just to keep going one more day. I've been going to Joe and the juice a lot. That's like a Jamba juice type situation, but like, it's like a juice tree that has these little paninis for some reason or one of the few things I can, I can stomach these days.

Yeah. And there's one by my apartment, a lot of great restaurants over there, so I find myself going to Joe and the juice a lot, which I used to feel averse to and something switched and now I'm there every day. Wait, you felt averse in this particular situation? I just thought the branding was gross and it's very similar to like Dr. Smoot, which I also find a little alienating, like the menu is very similar and the branding though Joe and the juice is like, it's kind of like urban, I guess it's the branding is very weird

and bad. Yeah. It's like a guy. It's like a guy. A guy with like maybe a fedora, but maybe that's I'm misremembering, but it feels like yeah, like a silhouette of the 2009. The namesake Joe and the juice and that's, yeah, that's how you stay alive. One more day or smoothies, hot girl food.

For sure. Acai bowls, smoothies, any broth, broth is major, iced coffee, spaghetti, yeah. Actually like it's hot to be like a model like slurping down like some spaghetti for a photo op. I love those like Instagram Explorer images of like a really hot girl with an even tan and like Letitia Costa hair wearing some sort of bustier top, you know, and, and sucking down. Like a big plate of pasta.

Yeah. Sucking down like one strand of pasta. Yeah. I'm just like, you know, you cook to this entire like Bolognese for this particular photo. You're usually well, okay, hot girl food, definitely at a restaurant. Yeah. If you're branching out of like your tinned fishes and kind of like easy to prepare. Yeah.

I don't think it's hot to make spaghetti. I think it's hot to like go to a spaghetti. Yeah. Yeah. It's literally not figuratively hot to make spaghetti. Yeah. It's sticky and annoying. It's actually quite easy though.

It's never as good as I finally had a really good bowl of spaghetti in Rome my last night. Believe the hype, I guess. Yeah. Yeah. I'm not really, I've never been a fan of pasta per se. Really? Yeah. I like like the, I like pasta as a vehicle for like the sauces and the other fixings.

That's what it is. Yeah. I don't like, or new, like Asian noodles either. I don't like anything that's like, um, flavorless carbs. Well, that's why you'd flavor them. Yeah. Well, no, I know, but you can just avoid. You can just eat the sauce.

Yeah. With a spoon, gazpacho style, chew and spit, no, no, baby's, um, anyway, bulimics love spaghetti because it comes up easily. Not that I would know anything about that, I actually didn't know that. Um, anyway, yeah, shall we move on to from hot girl discourse? I'm also like not really a fan of the hot girl, hot girl, some are hot girl walk, yeah. Yeah. I find it to be annoying.

Like it's, there's something like, um, simultaneously entitled and needy about it. And it's like a half joke that girls on the internet do and they're like, haha, I'm just joking. And it's like, it's fine and mean it and it's not up to you to decide whether or not you're hot. If you're being upfront about your narcissism and pretending like it's like one big joke, people will find it less repulsive and it'll give you like plausible cover for posting photos of yourself.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, I remember hot girl, hot girl summer. That was the Megan, the stallion thing. Yeah. Yeah. And then since then it's proliferated in all these, all these little ways, really spiraled out of control to the pages of nylon and vice, um, yeah.

Should we talk about the tick tock dissociative identity disorder community speaking of spreading like wildfire, um, the real gay cold, the real gay cold is the personality disorder tick talkers have. Tick tock makes me feel a thousand years old. Yeah. Me too. You've, have you ever, you've downloaded it, but you've downloaded it was okay. First of all, wasn't Trump supposed to ban tick tock?

I thought that was one of his. Yeah. And that's just, we've just forgot about that's not happening. I guess. Totally. Um, yeah. I've downloaded it. I've like looked, I look at like tick tock compilation Instagram accounts.

Uh-huh. Like cause I'm 30, like, yeah, or like, yeah, various meme accounts. I follow. Well, sometimes they'll come across a tick tock. We are apparently pretty popular on tick tock. I wouldn't even know how to look into, look into that, but sometimes people send me kind of like red scare centric or like sailor socialism centric tick tocks. And some of them are pretty funny.

Some of the stuff on tick tock seems like legitimately very creative and funny. Um, but it makes, it makes me feel schizophrenic just looking at it and like autistic and over stimulated. Yeah. If you want to transition, no, it's legitimately, you know, I never like cause I'm so old that I can like where, whereas I can understand kind of an argument, sometimes intellectually I can't really feel it kind of intuitively. And there's this idea right that like just the mere fact, the existence of these apps

really amplifies people's mental illness. Right. And like, I understand that, like I understand how that works, but I can't really imagine the process by which like, I feel like it's a really chicken or the egg thing. Did you have DID before you started the tick tock or did it in or did the tick tock inflame kind of a preexisting tendency within you? Well, so DID dissociative identity disorder, basically having like multiple personalities is a very rare actual, actually like diagnosis to get.

But the DID community on, on tick tock is like proliferating wildly because people use their, their altars. There's all this weird language about it. Like it gives them an opportunity to showcase kind of their alternate personalities, which is clearly, yeah, which is clearly highly performative and rehearsed. Yeah. And it seems like, you know, I was reading, like these people call themselves a system. So it'll be like, you know, like 12 or 29 identities living within the body of a single

person. Meet the Dasha system. Meet the Red Scare system. That's mine. Meet Anna. The reveal is this whole podcast is just one person. It's one extremely fat woman who sits in a tub. Meet Anna.

I'm 35 years old and reactionary. Meet Dasha. I'm 30 and delusional. This one's racist. This one's. It's just like a balding man. Uh, yeah, so these, every kind of tick tock, DID tick tock user comprises a system that is made up of their alternate personalities that they switch into.

Yeah. Oh God. I hate being on compassionate and ununderstanding and, you know, I'm already confused by the gender identity stuff, like it's just confusing cause I'm like an old hag and it's like over my head. But this is like an infinitely expansible like matrix or like Punnett square of different identities mixed with different gender, like they all have also different gender presentations and ages and ages.

There's like so many variables. It's just so medically psychologically not what I understand to have to pertain to the real kind of disorder in any way. Yeah. And like back in my day, we just called it multiple personality disorder. Now it has like a new kind of rebranded name. And it all screams to me just like you were molested as a child. Like it's clearly childhood trauma, molestation trauma.

There's definitely a sickness there. Yeah. Regardless of whether or not you're like legitimately dissociating and entering into like another alter or another like state of mind or another little character that you're doing on your TikTok. It's like, even if you're doing that performatively under the guise of like mental health awareness, it's still, yeah, there's clearly some early childhood trauma. Yeah.

And I find it very difficult. Like there was like some quote, there's a quote from one of these girls who has one of these systems talking about- I tried to watch like a compilation video on YouTube and I found them also just, I couldn't get through like 30 seconds of it. It made me sick. Yeah. I wonder what the audience-

I can't imagine why you, I mean, I'm, I know I sound like I'm 100 years old, but I just, I gotta go to Joe and the Juice. I don't have time to watch all these sick people having outbursts on TikTok. The fact that these people are so kind of articulate and self aware about the nature of their disorder seems like a red flag for me too. Well, it's the same thing with Tourette's, there's a big Tourette's kind of TikTok community as there is like autistic women showcasing their various like tics. And whether or not it's authentic doesn't really concern me as much as the behavior

itself does. I guess it's literally there in the name TikTok, it's literally just like an online asylum for people with mental tics. But it's so funny that they're so obsessed with like this concept of like fake claiming, which is claiming you have a certain mental illness or mood disorder for clout, I guess. Right. Because you could argue not, and you wouldn't be entirely wrong that everybody there is sort of faking for clout.

Even if they have the diagnosis, many of them are exaggerating for their audience. I mean, there's something perverted about not only normalizing, but promoting mental illness. Yeah. Yeah. And it's funny, there was a... Right. Because it is, it's like celebrating their quirky personality disorder.

Yeah. And it would seem like this would be kind of counter to the clinical recommendations for treating or mitigating these sort of disorders. There's this professor of clinical psychology that they quoted in the article. I would never want to impose a version of self upon somebody that they don't themselves actually endorse. He says, just because I've never seen it doesn't make it untrue. And it's like, you know, with shrinks like this, who needs enemies?

This is like a licensed professional, trained professional. And it's funny because they spend basically the entire article portraying him in kind of subtly portraying him as like an oppressive white male expert, which is like exactly what he's not because he's like a total like cock and ally. He's explicitly giving them free reign. Yeah. Because he's like so scared to put his foot down and act as an authority figure. But this...

And so then there's this 25 year old host of something called the cloud, which is a system of eight that has 52,000 followers. She feels the stance presented by this guy is an outdated one. Formerly, it was very common that the treatment for DID was to progress toward what we call final fusion, where all the identity states become one. She explains nowadays, a lot of therapists are embracing functional multiplicity, functional multiplicity as either a portion of their treatment process or the final goal. And it's like, you know, well, as long as everybody's making money, like you're making

money on your tick tock system, your shrink is making money on... Leading you astray, yeah. And it's like, you know, this is like a boon for the psychology industry, which loves like an interminable patient that you can't treat. Who doesn't want to be treated? Who doesn't want to be treated? Who wants their disorder kind of like creatively managed? I mean, and this is all also to me just feels like kind of the logical conclusion of the

ableism industrial complex, if you want to call it that where it's like any kind of clinical approach or therapeutic attempt is misconstrued as ableist intervention. And therefore, everyone must be given not only free reign to be as like mentally ill as possible, but they are rewarded for it. Yeah, and yeah, they're basically because it makes money for everyone and when in fact, these people are all desperately crying out for an authority figure, it's a giant cry for help. I mean, it's very like I saw somebody on Twitter was was talking about Eric Frome's escape

from freedom, which is like a book that I also highly recommend that I read like a very long time ago that I'm going to revisit now because it was up there with like lashes culture of narcissism and kind of like, you know, be articulating my instincts about what was going on in the culture. And you know, he's right that people primarily spend their entire lives trying to kind of slaw off their responsibility and literally escape from freedom because it's scary. And this is I mean, this feels like the complete the total like logical conclusion. Yeah.

Like having multiple identities, some of which are underage, like 10 year olds, you know, lock them up. Yeah. Seriously. But it's like, you know, if you're on TikTok, you need to be in a sanatorium. Yeah. Well, I mean, you, you are effective. Like that's literally what it is.

Like TikTok is like the Foucauldian panopticon and outsourced mental hospital. Yeah. So there's, um, it's crazy because it's also like, this is going to be like a huge, you know, boon for pedophiles on the left who will be like, well, you know, what's so bad about a child having consensual sex with an adult who has an identity that's also a child. Like all of this is so, you know, perverted and I was thinking, I like wrote down this um, Poglia quote that I saw on, on my Poglia quote Instagram from sexual persona, um, where she talks about mutilation and reduction of the body are ritual aschises of the overexpanded

modern imagination. And this is what all these mental disorders are. They are the kind of overexpanded modern imagination, i.e. your internal monologue, your self-awareness, your self-consciousness run amok. Like they're ultimately solipsistic, you know, but do you think they're delusional? Well, yeah, in, in, to the degree that like thinking about yourself so much is delusional. But in terms of actually, I think, are you, you're asking me like if you think these people have real kind of dissociative identity episodes where they believe that they're, yeah, I mean,

I don't know. My instinct is hell no, I think they fully have a cognitive understanding of the fact that they are like lying and performing. Yeah. And my instinct and they've created like a rigid culture where you can't, uh, where any sort of critique of that is, is ableist. Yeah. I mean, I just how the most retarded people don't want you to call the, to say the R the

R word anymore. I mean, I think like, yeah. And now they're coming for like stupid and idiot and stuff too. They want to like, I mean, you know, like you, yeah, um, no, I mean, the, I think like the frontier of like ableism, social justice on, on Twitter seems to want to eradicate any kind of like reference to, uh, not just cognitive impairment, but like low intelligence low IQ. Cool, yeah, and they want to eradicate any mention of kind of what they would call natural

hierarchies so that, um, even more perverted and coercive and unofficial and unnatural hierarchies can emerge, you know, like, um, but my kid was on tick tock, making, I would slap that phone out of his hand. What the fuck is with my parents found me making little disassociated identity disorder tick tocks, they would have whooped my ass and thrown my phone in the fucking ocean where it belongs. Well, it's like, you know, again, who am I to say whether or not people genuinely have certain disorders?

I mean, they're definitely mentally ill in some way for sure, but I don't know, I mean, it's like the autistic girls on, on tick tock thing. It's like, yeah, I'm sure there are autistic to the degree that a lot, you know, most people, most zoomers are a little on the spectrum from machine learning. But are they kind of enhancing dramatizing their autism for attention? Sure. Is that a horrible blasphemous sin? I don't know.

Again, I'm very charitable about this because they're young people. They literally don't know any other way. It's like people who've been obese their whole lives. They don't know any, they don't know what it's like. I don't think it's a sin. I just think that there is like a cognitive dissonance between their purported diagnosis and their behavior. Yeah.

And I think like it's not very autistic to kind of perform your ticks for attention. Right. Well, because the old, I mean, I guess the old view of mental illness, illness was that because it was something that was like so stigmatized, people were ashamed of it. Yeah. But yeah, I mean, Re-stigmatize it. Yeah.

But they're really, really freaky about normalizing mental illness in, in the name of giving people like a forum or a community because it's actually counterproductive to like helping them and healing them. Of course. Yeah. It requires like all of these tick-tock communities require the ongoing existence of like mental illness. I wonder if it'll kind of turn a corner where you'll see people self-diagnosing and kind

of proudly associating with like Munchausen. Oh yeah. Yeah, I'm faking all my diseases, but that's because I have this like umbrella disease called Munchausen. Yeah. Totally. And like don't stigmatize my, my mental disorder because it's integral to my identity and thus valid.

Yeah. I mean, I think like nothing, I can totally see that happening. I think there's like, you know, nothing. It's like a jameela, jameela on the phone. Yeah. She's like the queen. Yeah. I mean, because it's, um, I saw, I saw also like, um, this other tweet from the sky where

he was like, well, you know, being misgendered sucks, but being correctly gendered and still knowing that people experience me as a man sucks even more. Right. And I was just like, what do you want? Like what more do you want? Like if people, you know, you can't, this person is asking that people literally police their own inner thoughts, you know, and he has like an intuition that people kind of, he wants to be absolved from she or I'm confused, but they want to be sort of absolved of the,

the burden of identity. And this is probably also what's happening with these, um, dissociated tick talkers is like they, they've taken individualism to such an extreme that they've like fragmented into multiple individuals, sincerely or not. Yeah. Um, because the, the burden of being like one identity or one person is unbearable. Yeah. I think it, that's true.

I mean, I think the idea of having a fixed identity is something that they crave, but that they are profoundly afraid of committing to because to have a fixed identity, um, implies to be responsible and accountable and that's what they can't bear. You know, it feels like Peter Pan syndrome, um, and they, whenever they're, they're asked to have any sort of responsibility, they react and panic and stress. I mean, this is basically anxiety, anxiety disorder disorder. This is all just giant anxiety disorder. And I was thinking about this in terms of like the Poglia quote and like, um, that

the kind of trans thing, the rise of, of like transgenderism and, you know, setting aside the question of like gender or any of that beat being transgender requires a lot of, you know, ritualism in a way because not only are you forever kind of on a hormonal regimen and not only are you dealing with like the, you know, your post surgical wounds, but like it as far as like male to female or transgender people are concerned, they have to constantly maintain their like neo vaginas that literally structures your day, you know, that's another it creates kind of like a routine, a schedule for you to follow in the absence of one. Like I definitely think that's an element of it too.

Well, I mean, I think that speaks also to how we're, you're seeing more of a rise in like non binary identity rather than like, I think fewer people are willing to commit to like an actual like transgender identity than are willing to like co-opt some kind of ambiguous queer, non binary expression where like, where in anything and everything is kind of valid. My question is like, how much, like what role does, does the internet particularly social media play in the rise of like, I mean, massive, yeah, which is scary because it is of a linguistic like, like discursive medium that is primarily about, about language.

Yeah. And a memetic medium. Yeah. And it's crazy that there's like literally a cottage industry of like therapists who are more than happy to encourage DID tick talkers to let their freak flag fly. Yeah. Like at what cost? Yeah.

And you have to think about like, who are these people? I mean, clinical psychology has been fraught from the get go. Yeah. Really? It comes as no, no surprise. Yeah. Yeah. It's not like there was ever like a standard.

No, that's true. And it's all it's ever done was like reinforce dominant ideology and it used to dominant ideology used to be more about kind of like stigma and well, it was the norm reinforcing kind of like a homogenous culture and norm and now that norm has become yeah, this like neoliberal free for all. Yeah. I mean, it was the kind of old image of clinical psychology, right? It was molding, sculpting the individual to conform to society and as such it dealt

with neurotic and repressive disorders. Right. And if you have, yeah, anxiety, we will attempt to eradicate it so that you can be a more productive, da, da, da, member of society. Yeah. And now I think clinical psychology. Again, I think I said this actually in the last episode or something, it encourages people to self actualize, i.e. it encourages, it wants society to bend to the subjectivity of the

individual where you can see how that can go wrong. Tiktok. Yeah. But it, but it creates a really scary problem because what you have like what emerges as this Tiktok article illustrates is these people who have like very subjective criteria for what counts as mental illness or childhood trauma. And if you attempt to question them or dissent from their opinion, you are a monster because again, these claims are fundamentally unfalsifiable, they're unprovable.

Right. Damn. Yeah. It's like our, our usual be the docket, the docket runneth over with, I mean, it's yeah, it's also just, it's very hard for me to tell because I do feel so old and don't actually feel like I have a real understanding of like the Tiktok landscape or culture. So I can only really understand it by proxy through these kind of like think pieces trend reports about kind of what's going on.

But my suspicion is that yeah, just younger, it's there's something more nuanced even happening that is escapes me because I'm not a zoomer. Yeah, probably. Again, I mean, it's like what I was saying, I can intellectually understand Tiktok, but I can't intuitively understand it, which is a big problem. Right. Because you have no lived experience with it. And I never will.

What's also interesting is that all of these people seem to have spouses, like they're married. Very interesting. And I was confused for a moment. I was like, are they, are their spouses also like an alternate personality? And then I was like, Oh, no, no, they're referring to like real people. And I was thinking like, Oh, these people are crazy. Imagine how crazy their spouses are.

Who would sign up to be married to a system of 29 people, some of which are 10 year olds like to help them make their Tiktok content? I mean, and I think this is going to go both ways. On one hand, it's going to like normalize pedophilia, but on the other hand, it's going to open people up to well, say more about the pedophilia angle I'm missing because you're an adult pretending to be. If you're like a system and three of your alters are like under the age of 10 or something, you can make the claim.

And you seem to be able to switch it, switch into them kind of at their whims. Yeah. You could be like, well, why shouldn't my 10 year old alter know the joys of that's, that's a little, I don't know, maybe you're right. On the flip side, I think like it'll, in this like whole like fake claiming economy, I think it'll open people up to allegations of pedophilia, like cancel campaigns, you know, like there's a lot of, I don't know, all of this stuff really freaks me out because I think that it's like the, the mode seems to be like infantilizing adults and responsibleizing children.

Like I said, I think also on, I don't know, last episode or two episodes ago, all of the major debates that we're having on the internet about children are scary because they are led by people who are completely indifferent to the well-being of children, right? Even though they don't have any stake. Yeah. They have no stake. Their view, their image of the future is the fundamentally perverted one because it doesn't involve future generations because everything is so self-sustic for them.

It's giving me a really, really bad feeling and I got to be honest, as does TikTok. Yeah. Well, the other thing is like, I guess that's just aging is when you start experiencing the fear. Yeah, you can make an even bigger, bigger libtard than you were before and start like railing against like imaginary foes or whatever, but isn't TikTok also like a Chinese owned company? I think so.

I think that's why Trump was going to ban it. Yeah. So it's like the Chinese also now have like a, a blooming database of like American mental illness. What was this, the percentage that they gave, like 48% of adults under 29? Yeah. Are you using TikTok? Yeah.

Are you using TikTok? Couldn't be me. Yeah. That's like. Yeah. I mean, clearly one could make the case that it was created by China to undermine the fabric of our society, but maybe that's a little, maybe that's a little extreme. I don't know.

I think there probably is, there are aspects of it that are worth examining and like would give one of an interesting impression of a kind of zeitgeist and in that way it's also reflecting back like the pathologies of our time to us and then that way it's just, it is what it is. Yeah. But I don't know. I just noticed your very cool L.O. bean socks. Thank you.

Yeah. They're not really summery, but. Yeah. I love L.O. bean. I love me too. That's another thing that probably ages us. Nice classic American heritage brand. I'll just stick to my L.O. bean catalogs.

None of those TikTokers are wearing L.O. bean. God. Anyway, do you have any closing remarks? No, I don't think so. I guess I would just reiterate my initial point, which is that there's definitely a sickness. I just don't know if it conforms to traditional diagnostics. Yeah. Well, I mean, I think all of this again, like all of this obsession, like fixation on mental

illness does have like an authentic, genuine core in that people are literally issuing a collective cry for help. Right. And there's. Yeah. And a cry for discipline. Yeah. Well, I mean that.

Yeah. They're begging to be, to be stomped down by a, by a strong man. Good God. All right. Anyway, we'll see you in hell.