Chapo Trap House - Bonus: PMC Shopping feat. Catherine Liu

Episode Date: March 4, 2021

Amber and Will are joined by author Catherine Liu to discuss her new book Virtue Hoarders: The Case Against the Professional Managerial Class. Amber takes us through her shopping guide of “PMC products” and we see what they can teach us about this class and its ideology. Check out Catherine's book here: https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/virtue-hoarders

Hey there, it is your chapeau. This is Amber. I am here with Will and very special guest, Katherine Liu. Katherine has just written a book called Virtue Hoarders, the case against the professional managerial class. It is a short, quick, mean read, and we're going to do something a little bit different. We're going to do a little shopping. Do a little shopping for the PMC. So, Katherine, thanks very much for being on. Well, thank you. Would you like to give us just a brief rundown of what the professional managerial class is and why and how they are able to hoard something as ephemeral as virtue?

Okay, so the professional managerial class really comes out of John and Barbara Ehrenreich's idea in 1977 that the American Left was increasingly dominated by these like college-educated people who held certain like counter-cultural values, but mostly thought the working class of America was really retarded, like literally retarded and backwards. And so this class didn't use to always have this kind of contempt for the working class. If you look at a history of professionals, doctors, managers, white-collar workers, social workers, they were terrified of the working class. Like at the end of the 19th century, when there were all of this working class unrest, and they did want to come in and sort of provide solutions, they

were much smaller class then. They were much less powerful, huge working class, small white-collar salaried employees. And then its numbers exploded as capitalism became more complicated and there was more like division of labor. And today, it really dominates what we call content production, content consumption, the creative industries, what the Ehrenreich called the liberal industries. And I feel like their values are kind of like the air we breathe. And it's poisoning us. So I wrote this very polemical thing that was not going to be like part of the, I didn't want to add to the discourse of the PMC, which is very much like I told you so. Or you know, Mark says this, and Ehrenreich said this, and this happened here. My premise

in writing this was like, all of you know what this class is. Most of you are reading it, have imbibed its poisonous toxic values. Let's try to undo it together. Like there's a lot of debate right now online about the book and then people are calming it fascist. But also be like, well, Mark said, well, Mark said, I'm like, you know what, Mark doesn't live in 2021. Okay, little know it all. Yeah, lecture me on Mark's. This is a new class formation and it is dominating our world. It dominates you. It alienates you at work. I can't, there are also like people who are emailing me from all over the world, from doctors, union organizers in New Zealand who are like, Oh my God, I really recognize this

like this one person in New Zealand. I'm not, you know, they're all anonymous because they're terrified of their bosses and their workplaces. And they're like, you know, union organizing is just completely paralyzed in New Zealand. Our housing costs are going through the roof. But as long as we treat the majorities like their magic, we're actually okay. I'm the progressive thing. So I was thinking like, professional managerial class people actually treat minorities like they're magic. And that magic has to do with actually suppressing class. Okay, so that that's my very political introduction. Sorry guys, I just decided to refer to it. Can I just say one other thing about them though? And this is very much about

the part product review. So I've been thinking about how the PMC hates materialism, historical materialism, like a history of its own role in creating the economic disaster that is capitalism. They also hate like just being materialistic because they're so virtuous and they're so rich, they can curate their items commodities. It's like working class louts like consume with, you know, without impulse control, but they're all because you're going to talk about a Marie Honda like giving joy, you know, looking at things giving joy, they consume even with virtue, which is why I actually hate ad busters, because ad busters made working class people feel like they were just horrible people because they bought brands.

And they were because they're cheap. If you buy a knockoff Nike shirt, it's fucking cheap. So but the virtuous PMC will not do that. They don't want brands. And so this is right. They hate materialism of all sorts, both of the left wing kind and of the sort of common sensical kind. Can I can I can hear it? It's Will here. I have a question about the other title. It's it's it's the phrase virtue hoarding. And I'm just wondering here if you if you talk about how does one hoard virtue? I mean, I like to I like to hoard all things, but virtue above all, because it's the most price thing one can have. Do you hold pets? Actually, yes, actually. Okay, well, you only have one. On camera, on camera. Oh, you have three cats.

He's a cat lady. Okay, sorry. But okay, you are hoarding. You heard virtue by actually making you the notion of this restrained relationship to language, politics, consumption, everything else, like a special quality that you and your friends possess and that you control. It's like perfectly ideological. But it also and it's a veil of actually them hoarding opportunity, vaccines, money. But they they whore the the surface level of this is they hoard this idea of like an American pro it's actually very Protestant. I notion of restraint of open mindedness of tolerance of, you know, being like a good Christian person, it's very crypto Christian, they're very secular, but it's actually very, very crypto Christian. And

it has to do with like having restraint with regard to the other. So you know, what other people who like if you curse or if you just like, act like, I don't know, I'm going to know it out here, like, revelation or carnivalesque, if you eat too much, if you do any this all like, it offends the PMC somehow. So they manage their own appetites and virtue for them is very much about management of themselves of impulses and management of inequality right now. That's how they see inequality, like something to manage the other something to manage work something to manage. It's a full on explosion of the managerial ethos that governs all aspects of relations and has killed liberal politics in the United States. So

much as you'd say, you know, Donald Trump, whatever, he's a fascist, whatever, I don't think so, he's clown. He was like the pure id of hatred of the PMC. Yeah, well, he refused kind of respectable liberal obsdemiousness, which is what we want from our elites is people who pretend like they don't have a ton of money and they aren't enjoying it. Right. And on that note, I thought one of the ways we could sort of tease out the ways in which the PMC hordes virtue is we could do, I made a little shopping list, I made a little PMC shopping list, and we could go through all these little PMC products and sort of maybe talk about why they exist, why they appeal to the people they appeal

to. So I put the first one, you really, you really collected some very weird, we're very weird shit. I'm sorry. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Well, as a, as a, God, as, as an outsider of the PMC who neither manages nor uses any professional skills, I have a lot of time to look at weird sponsored ads for what they think I, I do want. So first thing I put up on here thinks the period underwear, which is this very like, if you go there, of course, the coloring of the website is millennial pink. So it's very much kind of a millennial bent to it. There's all kinds of different bodies of different shapes and sizes. Some are more athletic. Some are more curvaceous. There's different races. They all look very vibrant. They're

not doing anything real. But the, the subtext is that all of them are menstruating into this expensive underwear. Now, this product to me was always interesting and reminded me of when I first went to college. And, and I did a final semester, not at the satellite urban campus for quote unquote, non-traditional students, but at the, the main campus at, at IU Bloomington. And I did that for one semester. So I was around all these children of the middle class and they were talking once at an internship that I was doing, which of course, because that's what I figured you do as a, that's how you become PMC. And they were saying, you know, you really don't have to bathe that much. And they were all

going through this period of no pun intended of the idea that cleaning yourself is actually like, you know, if you wash your hair too much, you strip the oils. There's some truth to that. But by the end of it, I was like, Oh my God, you people are dirty. And when I look at things, I see it as such a retrograde thing with all the advances we've made in general cleanliness with disposable products, with tampons that you could just fucking throw away. And they're like, no, no, no, no, you're going to be wearing a garment. We're going back to washing your menstrual rags on a river rock. That is the epistemius pure thing to do. This is somehow actually better than just having a tampon or a pad that you could just

throw away. That's very base that stuff contains, you know, that's bad for the environment. Unlike these polyester panties, their slogan is what does a more sustainable period look like? That's literally the slogan. I mean, does a more sustainable period look like I'd say like just bleeding down your leg then, you know, that's yeah, yeah, why, why clean ourselves at all. But like, given like the general like PMC sort of trajectory of the professionals to be very clean, what is with this weird pivot to like, walking around in a pile of your own period blood? And how is that suddenly like the thing to do? Like every once in a while, the PMC seems to eschew their kind of Protestant antiseptic idea of how

to live rightly. And they're just fucking nasty. Why do they do that? So here's the thing about the PMC is that because they inherited their ethers from the counterculture, they actually kind of hate modernity. And they want to live like, but they want to live with the convenience of modernity without like taking responsibility for any of the damages. So they want to have the sustainable period, they want to recycle, they think it's all about this kind of individual virtue of not harming the environment by throwing your tampons in the trash or something like that. And, and there's this very strong strain of anti-modern, anti-modernity ethos in them. It's like they're embrace of, you

know, alternative healing is also part of that. But, you know, part and wellness programs and stuff like that, they want to commodify. This is weird, though, these panties are just weird. I don't even know if they sell very much, but didn't that CEO of this company like harass and like abuse her employees a couple of years ago, this was like the, this was also the controversy about things too that I remember, which was that she was basically like a horrible bitch. But, but she's like super virtuous. She's having I'm shocked. Sustainable periods. She's having super sustainable periods. No, she had all these employees

sue her. I can't even believe this company is really even viable. So my, my thing about this is that I don't think she's sold that many pairs, but we have so much excess capital running around in the world and these Silicon Valley people are just like ready to disrupt anything. And if it's your period, they're going to give you money for that. They, right now there is so much excess capital in the hands of total fuckheads and they will just give money to these startups, which never have to make any money, but have this beautiful like millennial pink website and these weird, you know, $34 for one pair of hip huggers that frankly look kind of dowdy and they're not like, they're

not erotic. They're not like sleazy, cheap lingerie that like is tacky, but obviously hot. They're very like, they look like a, I don't know, church lady underwear, but also you can leave. What are you going to, how are you going to wash this? Like you're going to have like your, all of your washing machine is going to be filled with blood. Sorry. Well, this is like a very real, well, we're getting very real here. Don't worry. In the interest of full disclosure, I should probably confess to the fact that I am currently

wearing right now what I think are the male equivalent of things. Underwear, the Mack Weldon podcast underwear was silver and I'm microbial technology to make my balls and dick not smell. Are they, are they diapers too? Unfortunately, I cannot just soil them openly, but I got it. I got to say, they're, they're, they're quite nice underwear to wear. You know, are they sustainable? Are they sustainable? Are they made from bottles? God, no. You're not, you're not at the level, especially cause Will just wears one pair and they just throws it out the window after a day. No, but think of the name Amber. Amber, think

of the name. Thanks. T-I-N-X. Like what the hell is that? You're thinking, your pussy is thinking, you're having, it's a thoughtful menopause. I mean, it's a thoughtful menstruation. Yeah. My, my pussy is not contemplative. My, my pussy is dumb as hell. It just needs cotton. Uh, so, I didn't find the way to make your pussy actually be reflective, like mindful, the mindful put, the mindful pussy. This is, this is the PMC pussy, very mindful. Um, I did, by the way, look up the, the, um, the she-e-o is what she called herself. See?

No. Mickey Agrawal and she, uh, allegedly wanted to break taboos about the female body, like you know, cleanliness. Um, and, uh, yeah, she, her boundary-baking workplace behavior, she would like video conference naked. She would like, it like, and the idea that it's like a cult leader that's like, actually, I'm in direct, uh, commune with, um, you know, the, the sacred spirits and they say, uh, I get to fuck you. It's the same kind of like, right. No, no, she would comment on her, um, like, uh, female employees boobs and she would grab them. She was like the first pussy grabber, I think, and, uh, the she-e-o. Yeah.

Very transgressive. Uh, Katherine, I want to ask, uh, some of you said earlier about how the, uh, the, this kind of ideology is, is, is sort of like a mutated form of Protestantism and like, it's just kind of a sort of a perverted Calvinism here where it's just sort of like only the elect can enter heaven, but no one can really know who the elect are and it's already decided even before you're born, it's predestined, but your behavior in this life, you know, why not just say, fuck it, I'll do whatever I want. Doesn't matter anyway. Uh, but your behavior in this life is like those that were elect will act in a way that is, uh, you know,

that is associated with the values of, you know, being chosen by God. Are these products sort of a way of demonstrating that one is one of, of an elect even though you could be as damned as everyone else is? Oh yeah. Oh yeah. These products are very much like niche product. The PMC loves niche. You know, they remind me the entire class these days reminds me of like that nine days you guys were too young then, but like that Harpal 90s boyfriend who always had like, um, a mixtape that nobody else knew about. And then they were like really proud of their life mixtape. It was all, it's all about this secret knowledge.

It's fashion in the, in the traditional and like the phantasycla or whatever I pronounce it, like it's fashion. It's about keeping up with what is the latest like progress that's step on our Kekevich with his, uh, liberal newspaper. But at least the fashionistas were dandies and they were like, you know, really mean and, you know, mean campy bitches. But, um, the, like one of the reasons why I feel like I'm so immersed in this culture is because I had a kid in the year 2000 and like I actually had friends who were, had enrolled their kids in something called the infant education program because optimizing your, your, your experience and your children. And, um, the infant education

program was for me, like the baseline of, um, PMC notions of consent around sex because you had to tell your baby what you were doing to it at all times. Like, hi little three months old, I'm going to pick you up now or little darling boo boo. I'm going to change your diaper now or I'm going to move your penis this way so I can clean you with this little anti-microbial cloth. And it was like, that was a notion of consent. Like your baby was consenting to being, you know, handled and because that was respecting the agency of the baby. Babies have no agency. Babies are dumb as hell. They're little tyrants. And if they

had their way, uh, they rolled the world with an iron, iron fist. They want the, they want the boob. They want to, you know, they want to pee. They want to poop wherever they want to, but like you have to have this like, um, respectful relation. Oh yeah. And you can't like, um, encourage your baby to do anything like sit or walk because that's like, about what you want. So you have to make the baby, um, understand that he or she can, you know, do whatever they want. Like I'm telling you, I refuse to ever, I refuse to ever respect a baby. I will never respect a baby.

That's one thing. This was huge in Silver Lake. This was huge in Los Feliz. Like this was huge in that like whole creative industries, Hollywood gentrifying neighborhood where, um, I learned about this and was humiliated by the fact that I did not do this to my baby. Okay. Well, on that note, because we don't want to like get to in the weeds here, let's move on to babies. I have two more products in the chat. One is the Nanit plus. Again, there's a lot of pink, everything, everything was pink. And the other is the Owlet smart sock. Okay. So the Nanit is called one of the best inventions of 2018 by Time magazine.

It's a baby monitor. Um, that kind of looks like a little bit like Hal, um, from 2001. It looks like a shower head. It looks like a shower head you put in a crib. I was thinking like, is this an automatic baby washer when I first saw it? And it's actually a camera. And, uh, it is, it is, it's a camera. It's just your, it's advertised as your baby's personal sleep trainer, sensor free breathing motion monitoring and your baby book on autopilot. It says it keeps babies connected or keeps families connected, uh, measures temperature and humidity, uh, safety cable. So you don't set your baby on fire with an electrical fire. Um,

I'm trying Velcro thing that you have to put on your baby. It's a, it's got a Velcro eye sensor you put on your baby and then that camera looks at your baby. Yes. The camera monitors your baby because your baby wears a kind of motion tracking swaddle. Yeah, that's what it is. That's what it is. The other one, the Owlet smart sock is similar. Uh, just as men, men is saying also a bit, um, also Bluetooth enabled connect to your phone has an app. This one is just a sock. The website is actually the, um, the thing that came after millennial pink, like enlightenment

green or whatever this wash judge, a green was, by the way, $300. Yeah. This was more green. Yeah. It's got that more energy. It's $300. I, I did little research on this product when I published this piece on Jacobin on children and socialism. So it kind of wraps around your baby's foot and has all this sensors and it keeps like emitting all this data into your smartphone. So you can fit back your baby. It's a foot, foot bit. It's a foot bit for your baby, but um, the really, really depressing thing about this company is that it got startup funding

from the Obama administration. Oh my God. Yeah. It got a million dollars of funding. Like it was part of like the American recovery actor. You know what? He's not. He's still not done babies. He's still not done extending the, uh, the surveillance state. Now he's surveilling babies. No, no. Like that's a million dollars down the toilet. Like, uh, you know, all of these like people like welfare moms or humanities professors are accused of wasting public dollars.

Like what happened to those public dollars? Are they, and is this a successful item? That's the other thing I want to know. Like, are they, are they making me, I don't know if any of these things, you could never know that everything's really opaque about this economy too, where especially with startup stuff, it's like, Oh, this product could exist for years and years and years with no one buying it based just on speculation and hype. This thing, by the way, uh, the outlet, uh, so it says, uh, tracks babies, oxygen and a heart rate, uh, measures sleep trends. And my favorite tells you when baby needs you as if the baby does not, right? Baby can't tell you that baby doesn't scream. You just

got like an update on your phone when it's like your baby has fallen into the pool. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. This is, this baby has no more oxygen. There's no oxygen in the room. Yeah. The room front out of oxygen. Yeah. I mean like, whether it's usually these baby monitoring products or like what you were saying about, um, do you consent to have your your your butt wiped. It just it does seem like a lot of like the energies of these people are very much you know like first of all a lot of their jobs are in education and it seems like most of their energy is focused at like like children or like raising better more conscientious individuals and it just it's all part of this kind of like meritocratic arms race where everyone's

kid is this sort of like individual node of competition just not not just against every other kid in their play group but like against like a billion Chinese babies right like they were you know they're good at math and right no no that's the like this is for like your inarticulate baby but then you've got to be optimizing after they can like get up and walk yeah I you know it does have this there is a kind of anxiety that moves from my baby doesn't get enough oxygen and I don't know how to tell this getting enough oxygen to my child is failing you know third grade or my child my child did not get into the most exclusive New York kindergarten so what am I gonna do it's like this is just the beginning of the anxiety and then parents have

a lot of anxiety it's like very anxious making to have a kid especially in this neoliberal hell world but all of these things including meritocracy just exploit like parental anxiety so think about like working class parents they don't even like they can't they're not even on the field at this point you know the meritocracy is like this supposed even playing field like you can't even get your kid on this field anymore and because the PMC parental anxiety is just so extreme and they keep coming up with these new techniques new schools that cost a lot of money new specialized you know curricula to um enhance your child's creativity and critical thinking like I I even think like the way that progressive schools in New York City have been completely colonized

by these wall street types it's just another example of this like all these like funky leftist schools like the little red school house in the west village I don't know you guys my dad went you know what yeah yeah well the diaper babies used to go there right red diaper babies literally went to the little red school house now it's like a 60 bajillion dollars a year and you have to compete with like you and you know top flight you know butrus butro golly's grandchild and then like um Felix warhattans you know great grandson or whatever it's like all of the masters of the universe want progressive education too for their kids because they think like that's also like optimizing that's also enhancing so anything that you other people that

most people can't get like specialized treatment these kinds of luxuries gadgets they want to monopolize for their own kids and unfortunately leftist child children's education little red and the chicago lab school were um all super wealthy PMC people and it's interesting because like that style that style of education makes a market contrast with um like the new york city's charter schools which are you know offered as like a solution to the problems of uh like low-income families and their education in the public school system which is this like highly disciplined like regimented like you can't open your mouth in class you can't talk or chew gum you can't like you know look uh you know another way or at a talk to a classmate or anything whereas like

you know like these very progressive private schools are all about like you know nurturing and creativity and things and the charter schools which are these same people are promoting for like yeah low low-income children is this like you know military school style discipline being imposed on these kids right but for their kids progressive education for the kids want a story yeah high stakes for for the poor and uh you get a giraffe in spelling for the the wealthy and yeah and I I also think like the whole rate discipline regime and high stakes testing is also about disciplining the teachers so like if you're a public school teacher you're completely fucked because you have to do this um really really highly controlled regime and you can't

be creative but in these really specialized you know what used to be left-wing schools the teachers are given a lot of space for freedom circle you can do you can you can felt clothes you can felt clothes if you're teaching them about production and you know my um I was really amazed you know that Little Red was populated by all celebrities kids they do this whole year-long curriculum about the triangle waste fire the triangle fire the waste whatever fire that killed like 200 women in the little girls too yeah it killed children too yeah in the um sweatshops of the early 19th century like they have all this social conscience and it's almost like they the PMC the upper levels of the PMC especially want to monopolize social conscience

because they don't want okay well I've got a good anecdote about Little Red's schoolhouse that I have to get in here okay you know they got in trouble two years ago for uh their classroom uh coordination do you know about this no uh well they decided to segregate their black students into the same class specifically because they thought that was the woke thing to do because they they said that like they had to um uh you know have shared experiences would in fact obviously the the most significant experience as a student of the Little Red schoolhouse is that you got to go to the Little Red schoolhouse so there were parents being like why isn't my kid in the the same class as her friends as last year and they're like well we thought she'd

like to be around other black kids so we're gonna have a black kid class that's insane I I know they've fallen so far um yeah so that's uh it's uh apparently I don't they love homework and they love turning their children into homework which just seems like such a but like why would you have a baby if you're gonna look at it on an app like just play Candy Crush well no the other thing is that they they turn their bait like these gadgets have turned your baby into like the producers of data yes and so and that actually happens like to us from the very beginning like I'm really proud that I had a son whose foot length was in the 90th percentile like they tell you that the moment they're born you're just surrounded by data yeah oh yeah he's got really big feet oh that's fantastic

this is very early on a lot of that stuff is too is they're just like well I don't know anything about this person so I'm just grasping at straws it's like when people are like oh like what don't ask a pregnant woman what the sex is and it's like look I don't know anything about this person there's one thing we could know from looking through a sonogram I'm just trying to make conversation I don't actually care I'm trying to be polite well when your baby becomes a source of data for you like I feel like that's really the most that's like you reached a star but you reached PMC dystopia like and and and they tell you that and they give you all this data from every doctor's office visit so it's not like you can ever escape it like you can't escape it it's the regime right well the

weird thing about it is that I do feel like just to uh sort of defend some semblance of what the PMC was um or has been historically you had I mean the Dr. Spock baby book is a really interesting cultural and social phenomenon because all of the sudden like Nixon hated it class of women yeah oh of course yeah all of a sudden you had this class of women who um who uh like they didn't have they weren't rich enough to have like nannies or help but also they live isolated in the suburbs so they didn't have their mother or even their grandmother to learn how to parent intergenerationally they didn't have you know like uh an extended family so all this and they're like oh shit what do I do with this baby and he wrote actually this very groundbreaking book that was just very basic

things that if you arrange your mother or grandmother you would know we're just like sometimes the baby cries and that's okay and sometimes you could pick it up or sometimes you can let it cry a lot of it is just like you're fine the baby's fine it's stressful and that completely went out out of the way like it was this amazing like just relax kind of guidebook and it was incredibly popular even among like working class women too um because because it just sort of like gave it filled a void of like what should have been like intergenerational family atomization and I and it's amazing now because nixon hated it thought it made hippies because it's like sometimes babies cry and that's okay and now people hate doctor the pmc hates dr spock because they think he's too

much of a disciplinarian oh really is that yes that's the mo oh um yeah well so so the whole thing is like I think what's really interesting is that we all call him doctor spot yeah yes it's still the expert like without the family to help you or without like the agricultural whatever to um sustain you the village hrc's village you need the doctor yeah doctor not everyone has my mom you need doctor spot like the moniker doctor spot just like to tell you you need a doctor tell you you know best because that's what doctor spot was really good at it was yeah all of his stuff was he's like you know best it was like a very nice read it in a book you need to read a book this is the evolution of the pmc for me it's like yeah expert advice and all this other

stuff is all about like telling you you're okay and that is really sad that's really sad yeah well all the books that you buy because you don't have any relationship with other people what they can tell you that yeah these betty drapers that were that would have been buying the book would of course like you know they're like well i want i want uh i want a doctor i want a professional okay so moving away from vaginas and babies um and towards uh towards uh some high t stuff i put some uh stuff in here so i have two things here in contrast i've got hymns which is pmc blutue and then i've got blutue and i think it's worth bringing up both of these websites because hymns hymns first of all an entire lifestyle brand uh you you're depressed so you get your antidepressants

you're aging so you get your skincare but your antidepressants no they make your dick not work and so do the so does the hair loss thing i sell you so then they also sell you dick pills and tons of millennial pink that font the same font as things um you all the the like you know the it really features the smartphone though things had like women's crutches i mean this is like why don't they show some pain you know this is like yes well uh where's that i'm looking at i'm looking at i'm like well here's the answer if you if you scroll down and under under sex it's like it's like a woman with her arms around a man but then if you put the cursor over it it just goes to a picture of a cactus straight in the air that's their stand in for the uh

the palace they have to euphemize it sit on this pair that i want that penis in their pussy it's a cactus yeah that's the worst cactus that's not for the mindful pussy that's like really bad pr for penises cactus is a really bad pr for penises can we just i know we okay we can we get some can we get the uh we need better pr people in the uh in the penis department we got it we got to move these units yeah the dick image is uh is not doing well right now it's so anesthetized it's so sanitized it's so weird and the microphone but compare this to luchu the working class hymns okay i don't know what this is a website after this it's the same thing totally different aesthetic it's the same fucking dick pills minus the skincare minus the uh uh minus the

at depressants it's just what is this it's the most my dick doesn't work i do not want to talk to anyone about it the website is black it's got a big made in the usa thing the guy is just holding like a chewable it looks like a condom packet it's all it's all black and blue and it's like here's what's included it's chewable it works really quickly here's a plan it's like really utilitarian like oh so you think this is the this is the working class class yes of penis um therapy because it's not a lifestyle masculinity brand it's just like i have a problem i need to fix it made in the usa baby i don't know that looks very groomed that guy looks very groomed in in in lieu of a like a euphemistic like uh you know cactus or eggplant or something i mean it just yeah

it's a guy who's very groomed but you know he you know he needs a dick pill because he's got some salt and pepper in his beard well he's got some pepper yeah yeah he looked he looks a little faked and but what happened to viagra and cealis well because like because those are marketed only for like your parents right it was like the elderly couple and matching bathtubs looking at a wheat field and then like bob yeah bob was the original pitchman for viagra so it was very much associated with like yeah like yeah your retired parents who were gonna like sort of rediscover their sex life or have a kind of these things are the exact same like as they advertise the exact active ingredients and viagra cealis like it's these are generics

and like that's one of the things that they figured out is they can brand the generics brand with a path into that and and make it to like a birch box for dicks okay okay so chews blue chew is for like the blue collar yeah erectile dysfunction and blue four is for the p m c erectile dysfunction i mean i just think it's it's the exact same drug as viagra and cealis but just in the way okay got it got it it's it's marketed to uh people like you know like not not your parents to you directly and i think it's just basically like even if you're you know don't actually have a rectile dysfunction i think it's just sort of like you don't need to talk to a doctor like i mean you'll just like fill out a form and they'll start sending you these pills and it is

basically just a recreational drug now you know like you know like you don't even need that okay yeah you don't even need to have big problems like take the drug and then like your dick will be even better because you know if you don't have problems you have to optimize those have like a you'll have a super dick basically okay can we go back to the cealis ad word you had like the people in life and uh side by side um yeah yeah um victoria and tubs like how do you have sex with like you yeah your partner if you're lying and side by side like i always was wondering about that it's like that looks more fun like for the morphine drip like if you have a morphine drip and really old then you want to be side by side but if you want to have sex it's really not good to be inside by

side bath tubs like i i just totally it was very like very prudish right because there's actually no like genital contact and these websites are also extremely prudish yeah well and the hymns is is like not just prudish i think the bluetooth is sort of like protestant uh salt of the earth uh sort of stoic um or the bluetooth is and the hymns is almost kind of a feat they have a mission statement on the website that says create an open and empowered male culture that results in more pro activity around health and preventative self-care okay this all these people hate pleasure they actually hate funking all these drugs are supposed to facilitate the act of love but all the stuff hates pleasure including cealis because if you were a complete idiot and you

took cealis and you were trying to find your side by side bathtubs and you had a big boner and your wife is sitting beside you like that like actually defeats the purpose of the coital act that's what i'm gonna say i just love that there's like a bougie version of of mail order dick pills okay i do not know that like all this stuff it got you know you're opening up new new new rounds of marketing of pmc marketing like when you said that these you said that these people hate pleasure and like uh like that to me gets back to this whole sort of mutated calvinism thing is it the esteem is this but just yeah like just sort of uh uh joy um uh the baser uh joys of life um seem to be issued and then there's like a whole ideology to sort of manage the these baser human

instincts and sort of through performance through performance sexual performance it doesn't become coy this has become sexual performance it's also so like individualized monadic it's not about like pleasing your partner like none of these things are like your woman will love it if your dick is hard for you know 12 hours whatever she won't but uh psa she won't but you know this there's no um there's no evocation of the person you were pleasuring it's all about some weird like optimization of self-administered wellness for the pm for hymns and for chewy i don't know it's like performance right like your i i would think like this was a workout pill or something i mean it's it's not about the the restoration of function like even though dysfunction is the original

like diagnosis it was meant to treat it's not like my dick don't work i gotta make my dick work here's pill it's like you can be a better you your dick can be harder it can be so hard that's right it occurs to me that the uh the the the hokum medicine show products and sawdust pills that are you know hawked in the back of hustler magazine like are probably technically more woke because all of those products advertise themselves is like guaranteed to get your girl off right right yeah she'll love it she'll love it as opposed to blue shoe which at half the time advertises like hey and maybe you just want to pop one for the weekend by yourself but speaking of pleasure and pleasure i put another link in here to uh one of the pmc's favorite oh my god yeah i couldn't even open that one but

i saw that i was like i can't even read that i need like help to read this i need so to witty this with me together unlike uh we debase sensualists who like e in half sex and do drugs because they're fun and we want to have a good time um the pmc has figured out how to turn doing drugs into homework uh so i had an article here about micro dosing or as they put it um um was it performance enhancing psychedelics uh they're bio hackers and for their bio hackers to their hacking biology this is the darkest thing to me it's like we accidentally discovered acid probably did all kinds of horrible cia things with it but now i thought we figured out what it was it was a thing you do every few months uh and uh when you're on the beach with your buddies

and you think for a minute that you see god and then the next day you feel all right and it's like oh that was a fun time it's a little roller coaster ride no it's for work it is for work for work yeah i mean i thought like i'm from the older generation where i thought like psychedelics was supposed to take you out of time take you out of the work leisure dichotomy and just put you in another time and this is just like everything for work that is also the best thing about acid is when you're like oh i can't believe i can't believe uh you know it's we've been i like this the sense of loss of time like you you lose your internal clock so you're like oh i can't i can't believe this is almost over and you're like oh it's only been 20 minutes awesome we got a whole new

day of this you have no sense of that stuff it's something most people in with a regular job or any sense of a schedule can't ever enjoy is like the loss of time and now they're saying no use it to like code all fucking day yep gross i mean it's just this idea that like you know like like like a like a drug like a drug experience will just sort of like you know flush out whatever gunk is in your brain and it like could be a you know a positive experience for your overall uh mental health and well-being but now it's like you just do it's like it's sort of like a like vaccine you just do like a little bit of lsd they just keep the gears in your head turning with maximum efficiency right right no they love that um homeopathic thing where you know you turn they acknowledge

that it's like a toxin but it's like homeopathy it's like a micro dose so you get the benefits without the pleasure you get the mental acuity without the pleasure i just i just feel like like all of these people and the fetish that the culture has for them um they just actually hate life don't they they just kind of hate life they certainly eat without tasting i would say but i also think that it's a way of um punishing people who actually do drugs by advertising this way of doing drugs that's all about self control there's that virtue oh i i do drugs but in the right way you're doing them wrong oh yeah oh yeah you guys you losers do drugs this way like we're winning and we do drugs this way everyone who does drugs just for fun you're a bunch of fucking losers i mean

this is also about um barba erin reich's book for fear falling it's all about fear of falling into pleasure fear falling into hedonism fear falling into the other fear falling in love it's all about um managing your um psycho your psyche and i'm afraid that you know generations of people have been damaged by this i mean if you go to see a therapist now in order to get any kind of care with our managed care you have to fill out like are you depressed from a scale of one to ten or how are you how often do you feel um like suicidal three times a day two times a day once a day once a month it's like everything has become um quantified but in this really stupid way and then and then the the algorithmic world and this micro dosing world are all like actually

fitted together in this one view of like the life force as actually something that has to be quantified readable through an algorithm and then optimized maximized made efficient there's no like human being there when you are having to fill out in order to get some mental health if you're really in distress if you have to fill out a hundred of these questions in order to even get it to see a clinician like how sad do you feel on a scale of one to ten so that's like one example of like a real world effectiveness but i guess i just like a larger question where like you said earlier that like uh these people are are are killing you know forget any sort of class-based like socialist politics you said they've largely killed the liberal project overall and i guess just like

outside of these various strategies and technologies these people used to manage and cope with their own base instincts and decaying you know bodies uh like what what are the like effects of this like politically like like how is it killed like the liberal project like as a whole so um that's a really good question will and you know um since i've been called a fascist recently on twitter you will want to take this with a grain of salt but um the universalist principles of liberalism high liberalism was based on the fact that baseline human beings have something in common of scientific reason was um a moment that does create progress um we can be in a field of disagreement and contradiction because we are baseline the same or we share like some kind of social um platform

by which we have to and we struggle over the proper use of resources the um correct political line in order to achieve like maximum social um benefits for all the the PMC in its late in this most vanguard form right now denies universalism it deny like if you talk about universalism they they'll call you you know um you know you're you're a dipshit because everyone is there they've maximized the potential of american pluralism to create this idea that everyone is different in this like micro dosed way and therefore our identities um have to be recognized or centered and there's this like kind of weird inhuman centering and recognition and visualization of the other but basically we have nothing in common we have shit all in common and um modernity as i've

said before that you know created all these toxins for the planet so we have to find these different ways of living and being consuming that create the lowest footprint but as as you as we all know the environmental disaster that we live in is not going to be adjudicated individually but in this like but for the PMC and it's like really really extreme neoliberal vanguard um ideological production we are all like super special individuals and all we do all we have to do is optimize our relationship to ourselves our relationship to our particular difference and that's like the political that's all the political hope that we can have and it's just so demobilizing and even in left circles we see this happen all the time like you know i'm really

offended by what you said or i don't feel seen like we make fun of this but when someone says that like you're really offending me you know as little moaned out node in this um depoliticized field it sucks all the air out of the room because everyone's terrified of that it's like everyone can be a little stallion in our hyper pluralist micro dose society everyone gets to be the the baby in the little outlet monitor everyone gets to be the baby well it's interesting too like again with you talk about like a blurring the liberal project the little red school house is a perfect example of that like they horseshoe theory themselves back into segregating their class at room five race and i remember you know growing up with the sort of like it was sort of like

peak like self-esteem like uh your special your different thing which is actually a terrible thing to tell a child a child needs to know that you're not different they need to know that there actually there's a place for you in society that uh that uh you are made of the same stuff as everyone else it's not that everyone is special it's that everyone is important and when you go towards the idea that everyone is special you actually end up with this weirdly rigid kind of counterintuitively like a hegemonic idea of individuality that erases all factors of use in individual it's like everyone is all of these people who think of themselves as you know creative individuals like they're still all wearing the same things they're all you know getting

their mattress from tufted needle or whatever it is they're all you know because the only way they have to distinguish themselves is through consumption which they abhor but they don't have anything else but the the whole thing about the self-esteem thing um is really interesting because it really was the the neoliberal turn towards this hyper individualization because what you expect then as an individual is the world to reflect back to you like positive reaffirming self-esteem issues you know under high liberalism and you know in the socialist utopia you the individual has to earn confidence which is much more powerful than self-esteem because in self-esteem you're just in this like biofeedback loop and you would just give it to people to like tell you

it's not social at all everything is really good it's totally anti-social and i feel like what was taken away from um children who were brought with up with the self-esteem thing is the actual ability to build confidence based on your um your aspirations towards these universal ideals so you have all of these very very fragile people who are expecting the world to give them feedback on something they don't feel like they really deserve and i saw that happening in my students when i first started teaching i taught like you know the first generation of self-esteem um raised children and i realized like even if they didn't have the ability i was supposed to encourage them and that was like exactly the opposite of how i was taught by these hardcore

hard-ass you know public school teachers in new york who i loved mm-hmm yeah that's the other thing is actually it isn't um damaging to fail like it's uh there's we needed to and i think christopher last was really good about this when he talked about sports and games where he's like actually people should fail more often it should just be low stakes yeah like or no stakes ideally it's just like failure should be uh a part of life that doesn't influence your ability to survive which is why sports are great because you're like i was i just got destroyed but also i'm literally fine yeah okay so uh speaking of being destroyed i got i've got another one here more related to the health stuff this is a uh an odd choice but i noticed this because i encountered this particular

product um when i was doing uh like the uh they had like the the covid vaccination volunteer intake thing and then they vaccinate oh yes horrible traffic it's a all go into it at some point because like what like whatever they need they need volunteers and like you know the whole thing but it's like no one has a job this is a perfect time for a public works program why don't you fucking hire people to do this why are you running off volunteers but anyway uh so one of the things i i did was take people's temperature and i did it using this thing uh which is a it's it's called the eye health um and it's a it's a no touch uh thermometer there are tons of no touch thermometers now all of them are better than this one first of all the display you cannot see in the sunlight

and because you had to do this whole thing in a like a stadium parking lot through a line of cars uh in the middle of like the california desert in fucking pamona uh like you can't see it you can't read the reading second of all it's very sensitive to outdoor weather so we were getting people uh who showed like you know they are actually like 35 degrees or uh or 107 degrees and we would have to take it's a faulty product it's poorly designed but it looks not even like currently like a like a like a contemporary apple product but maybe like a 2012 iphone and it's called an eye health no no association with it it's just kind of trying to jump on the brand uh like aesthetic but i was going through the product reviews for it on amazon and there was this one guy who's so

sweet he said i love the design of this thermometer it's also super easy to use unfortunately i just don't feel ours is accurate i texted i tested it against several others and the others were within 0.02 degrees and this one was always at least a whole degree off one way or another i can't rely on it as our main thermometer which is disappointing it's like but however he still gave it three stars even though it's giving inaccurate readings people's temperature it just looks good but it looks great it looks great look at it and you can't even read it it's horrible we were like bitching about these things the entire time this is this is the official thermometer looks clean and sleek yeah i don't know why they had so many of these they had other ones too

but i wonder if there was like a contract or something i'm sure there's something super dark about it but it looks very futuristic it looks very steve jobs but it doesn't fucking work and in the middle of like i'm like taking the temperature of really really old people it needs to be accurate they could die if you sneeze on them like so you just think this is part of the the pmc love of um um packaging the the iphone thing like for him is actually featured a smartphone so there really is this like question of the sleekness and i also feel like you know one of the things that um this class loves is to pretend that nothing takes any nothing needs work right so all of the iphone products and everything just look like they were birthed by some giant robot in the

sky no one put it together it's like there's no casing it's all about making the labor invisible it's about hiding the labor it's about hiding the labor and so even like even as you're you know taking people's temperatures i'm working and volunteering because they're not going to pay people to actually do this like public health service which is really important you have this faulty thermometer which is beautifully packaged which makes you feel like you're not at work you're just playing with your iphone and it's beautifully sleek like no one even made it because it just dropped out of the sky out of the you know um the the generosity of the eye giver whatever that is the vagina of the giant eye giver gives us these big these beautifully packaged products

that's really good from right the big jobs in the sky never mind that it doesn't work because it looks like it no it looks really good and when you're working you don't feel like you're working because you've got this really good-looking gadget thing that's happening yeah i did not understand why you put that on there but now i realize it's the official temperature taker of the california vaccination program so yeah and the nurses don't fucking like them so i don't know why i i they got a bad batch uh have some sort of contract or whatever but they're they're very smooth maybe when your um boyfriend's peen doesn't work because he didn't take his blue chew you can use it as a it does have a sex toy kind of look to it yeah you can use it as a sex toy and take the temperature

of your vagina before you put on your things well there are there are p m c sex toys but i i had to i had to leave something to to the imagination uh so i'm putting uh two more leaks and links in here um re condo um one is just her container store and two is that she sells a decorative tuning fork crystal uh rose quartz sets so to me the anti clutter person selling you new age woo is very strange i don't fault the girl for selling containers you got to put shit in shit um but i'm also pro stuff uh i like things and objects and i like um i like clutter are you hoarding like will your what do you hoard i i have too many books uh i have uh too many like uh sort of chalky knick knack things i've picked up on my travels things that are um uh precious to me uh

uh you know but uh ultimately not very uh expensive or useful um but she's you know does this spark joy thing which is a very like whether or not isn't your ability to experience joy kind of um dependent on your state of mind and condition of surviving or thriving at the moment like if you're actually depressed like maybe you would be during a pandemic or or in the midst of poverty does anything spark joy like um it's all about this restraint you know consumerism right you don't want to buy the um big golden whatever that the golden cap that trump enjoys this this particular thing which is a tuning fork and a crystal rose set is something that allegedly Marie condo um um she tunes herself every day she strikes the rose quartz with the tuning fork

and she says like she tunes herself and this is supposed to be really good for everyone like we should all be tuning ourselves with a seventy five dollar rose quartz thing and a tuning fork because Marie condo is very centered she doesn't just center other people or black and brown bodies or yellow bodies she centers herself first and i'm like this is insane like i i wouldn't mind having a tuning fork and a um rose quartz whatever but the idea that i would have to tune myself with it that was like the thing that you know i guess that sells it too but that that was the thing that was like freaking me out like actually kind of tempted to like i probably need to tune myself i am extremely stressed out and angry i'm a very angry person and maybe if i tune myself with a

rose quartz tuning fork like i would be more centered and less angry i prefer to be tuned by others um i just don't trust my own uh my own abilities with this she tunes herself every day this is part of the um part the thing the um selling point and i feel like this is how you we treat our the PMC loves to treat itself like it's some like the self is something that needs to be managed and tuned and all of its anti-bias training now that it's sticking down our throats and universities and everywhere else as the world is going to shit and you know more more children are falling into poverty is they give us anti-bias training so we can be more centered less biased and i feel like with the tuning fork it's probably like they just as effective like

please take the bias out of your body's moon sit there and the bias leaves your body guys has one like one final question and this could be a quick one like you just talked about like you know like the sort of this it's a very secular ideology but it has a very religious tenor to it and i'm just wondering how one can if one is an apostate or a heretic against this vanguard class what are some of the what are some of the ways in which we can sort of blaspheme or rebel against this uh this this new religion i think chopper was a very good blasphemer because you admit to just being gamers who are interested in um in politics chopper is blasphemous i and you know i would be wrong we're also all we're also all failed failed uh p m c we failed to integrate

right uh into any professional or managerial setting that's right that's right so i kind of think that's what people like they're like oh i also uh graduated after 2008 and was screwed right no but will the thing is that if i answered you then i would be like just participating the advice industry thing like here here's how to undo the p m c in you when you meet the p m c buddha in the path kill the p m c buddha there's like no there's no way out like even the questions are um are phrased in this like p m c ether i just feel like um it is it is so um pervasive this and ubiquitous and now finally we are able to talk about it just to identify it it's like a microbe that's in us and now we can finally actually say like this is what it is because it used to be like this is what

really oppresses us what is it you know um and now we can say that it is a class a hegemonic class that tries to monopolize knowledge expertise virtue um and teach us how to experience pleasure it doesn't want to monopolize pleasure it actually wants to extirpate any kind of pleasure or immediate sensuous experience that it does not mediate and that's what's really terrifying about it right uh the restoring uh restoring some kind of imaginary balance through managing maybe with the with the crystal tuning fork thing or people are terrorized i mean you guys don't realize like how much people who are employed in p m c dominated industries right now are just full of fear yeah well they should have uh failed like us and started a podcast you know i'm telling you not everyone

can be as funny as you guys know that's like the exceptional um horatio algor failed p m c the story no yeah where the formula not a formula and people should be paid to be ragged dick pills yeah ragged ragged no okay yeah dick pills sell them raggedy dick pills so yeah uh yeah no i mean it's again like i i don't want to people to come out of this big like oh i own the period panties am i part of the problem it's like no look you gotta buy panties whatever it's like not about the panties it's about the fact that it's not about the panties it's about the fact that we have to start thinking of a of a of a universalist um you know material politics which precludes um like putting any uh virtuous um sort of lifestyleism of liberalism at the fore

right that's right that's absolutely right all right well kathryn lewitt thank you very much the book is virtue quarters the case against the professional managerial class we will put a link to it it's very short it's really fun everyone should read it and uh start your own um p mc shopping list because what the fuck else is there to do right now besides i wrote it like a punch in the gut so if you like that just like get ready and get punched in the gut that yeah the book is like all right thank you so much guys bye thanks kathryn hi i did acid with caroline and we both had a real good time we talked out too in the morning playing records and i showed her some drawings i did acid with caroline and we were one we were one we climbed up top of the building

and looked out over the city the night was cool the wind was blowing there were dead crickets everywhere