Modern Wisdom - #431 - Bridget Phetasy - Are Women Being Lied To By Modern Culture?

Episode Date: February 5, 2022

Bridget Phetasy is a comedian, writer and a podcast host. When California isn't on fire it's having Amazon trains looted and stores robbed without prosecution. Bridget and her new baby bump has managed to survive, but aside from the dangers of LA, what dangers does the culture hold for men's and women's roles in modern society? Expect to learn whether Bridget looks back on her 20's and 30's differently now she's a mother, her thoughts on slut shaming, whether we need to have an opinion on everything, why American homeless people are so scary, why motherhood is so uncelebrated in modern culture, whether there's such a thing as too much freedom from norms for men & women and much more... Sponsors: Join the Modern Wisdom Community to connect with me & other listeners - https://modernwisdom.locals.com/ Get 20% discount on Mission’s high performance teas at https://missionuk.com (use code MW20) Get perfect teeth 70% cheaper than other invisible aligners from DW Aligners at http://dwaligners.co.uk/modernwisdom Extra Stuff: Follow Bridget on Twitter - https://twitter.com/BridgetPhetasy  Subscribe to Bridget on YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/user/phetasy  Get my free Reading List of 100 books to read before you die → https://chriswillx.com/books/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch. Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello friends, welcome back to the show. My guest today is Bridget Fettisie, she's a comedian, writer and a podcast host. When California isn't on fire, it's having Amazon trains looted and stores robbed without prosecution. Bridget and her new baby bump has managed to survive. But aside from the dangers of LA, what dangers does the culture hold for men's and women's roles in modern society? Expect to learn whether Bridget looks back on her 20s and 30s differently now that she's

a mother, her thoughts on shut, shut slamming. Slut shaming, whether we need to have an opinion on everything, why American homeless people are so scary, why motherhood is so unsalibrated in modern culture, whether there's such a thing as too much freedom from norms, and much more. I have to say that I've really enjoyed both conversations this week with Nina Power and Bridgett about men's and women's roles in modern society. I think that when you're talking about evolutionary psychology and quasi-red-pilly-manus-feree-ating, dynamic stuff, that it can often feel like you are pointing the finger at one particular sex and saying, well, this is all your fault. And a lot of

the time that happens to be pointing the finger at women. And I don't think that that is a productive, effective or correct solution to this problem. So I really, really enjoyed both conversations this week. And this one with Bridget is good I also like that she pushes back against a bunch of my ideas. So yeah, it was it was very very fun. I hope that you enjoy this one But now please give it up for Bridget, Fetisie We were just talking about California and the state of everything at the moment. Aren't they just about to increase the taxes again? Yes, I believe there is some kind of proposal on the board to double the taxes because they're trying to do the first

like single payer healthcare system on a statewide level for everyone, no matter your immigration status, no matter, I mean, everyone basically, anyone. You'll get health care and you get health care. And look, I think our health care system in America is, it is a disaster of epic proportions in many ways. And if you don't have help navigating it or you're not rich,

it's challenging. And it's bankrupted people. And there's no transparency. You just, you know, something costs, there's no like clear cut costs. It's like if you have insurance that costs this, if you have cash, maybe you can get it for this. And it feels very crazy to me. So in terms of like, and then like mental health care, you know, just you can't get, if you move states, you can't see the therapist, you're seeing in the other state, if they're not licensed, and all this occupational licensing, which is insane. And it just, it seems very overly complicated.

One of the things that I noticed while I was out in Austin was the homeless people that were there. American homeless people have another level of crazy to them. We have homeless here in the UK, but I've been around a lot of homeless people. I work in nightlife, so I've been the only people out at 2 a.m. Club promoters, people in parties and the homeless. They've been around them an awful lot unsupervised on the street, maybe when they've had a bit to drink or whatever else.

But walking just down the street in Austin, near and underpass. And these guys will be talking to themselves, they're pushing something along that really sort of jittery and forthcoming and aggressive. It made me, I don't get nervous around people very much, but there's another level of crazy. Now that you're being a pregnant woman walking around a city like that, and it's everywhere.

Yeah, there's another, it certainly seems to me like that's been aggravated as well. I don't know if it's the drugs, I don't know if it's the society, a combination of all those factors. But the number, there is not a single day that goes by that I don't walk my dog and or go out and do errands and have to kind of, you know, evade someone. Evade or across the street or completely reroute from someone who's clearly talking to themselves. You're like, I don't know. I just, I don't know. And does it matter where you go? Is this pretty much across most neighborhoods now in LA?

Yeah, it's everywhere. I mean, some better than others, obviously. I'm not living in a gay community. And even those communities are being affected by armed robberies and things that we're kind of unheard of. So they're getting more, I think, like, robberies, car break ins and a violent crime that's happening. Perfect time for double taxis. Yes. I know. I know. So yeah, it seems

kind of crazy to me. We were talking about this on dumpster fire, my dumb little, like, whatever it is, show. And we were saying saying like, is this just a way to punish the people who are staying in California? You didn't heed the signs, idiots. Hey, Eddie, Ed, if you need another reason, I know and it's so hard as, you know, I'm a small business owner now, technically. And it's hard. I just, with payroll taxes and the actual taxes, and then yesterday we got a letter from LEDWP, which is our water and power. And these companies operate like mafia's

because they have no accountability and no competition. So they get to just do whatever they want. And they're like, oh, your water was in like this category for one month out of 12 months. And we're just letting you know that water is going up if you're in this category. And they don't have any resources devoted to collecting water.

Like, they've caused this problem. And they pass it off to the people who are using water and they should be it's craziness yeah and and there's nothing again no transparency you don't know like what where that water is coming from or what it's just it's craziness it's and the yeah I mean don't even get me started on like the grids burning all the, the forest down and literally nobody is accountable for that ever. We were saying about how crazy it is that certain people leave and you realize there's people

that have been in certain cities for their entire life, malice leaving New York. For me, that was the biggest red flag that anyone could have waved because that guy was in love with that city. Oh, that's like, um, Carol Markowitz as well. I don't know that. She's another person. She's a writer and, um, she was at the New York Post and she, she was like, the diehard New Yorker.

I mean, she really, again, like, comes from a Russian family, very much like Mallas. I think they know each other. And she was just in love with Brooklyn and New York. And when I would see her there, she would take me to all these cool spots. And she just absolutely loved that city. And they left for Florida. And I was like, I'm, you know, if you have stock in New York, you should be selling it right now.

So bad. Yeah. I mean, like for Michael to leave, that said pretty much everything that I needed to know. But it's everything that I see, I'm not in these cities, right? I haven't been to LA in a couple of years, I haven't been to New York in a couple of years,

although I'm gonna be there in a couple of weeks actually. So I guess I'll get to see a little bit of it on the ground. I think why would you let the city get to this stage? If it's people that like podcasters and normal people tweeting on the streets, if they have a problem with it, let them the public policy people that are supposed to actually have aspirations for these cities. Why?

Why is it they don't care? Do they not know what they're doing? Is it negligent? Is it malignant? Is it malicious? I don't actually know because I would have an answer. And then a lot of other people would have a different answer. They would say, I would say, I think it's a combination of incompetence,

overcompensation. In California, New York, these are single rule, you know, single party, ruled states where they there dominantly is no balance or competition. So there's very little, it's all just progressive policies. And Michael Schellenberger does a really great job, I think, of recently looking at how these progressive policies, however well intentioned they might be, are destroying these cities. And I prefer to try and give people the benefit of the doubt

and say these come from good intentions, although if you're on the right wing and uncertain factions of it, you'll say this is part of it. In an attempt to achieve some kind of utopia, you've got to let some cities burn and some people die, and that's just part of the process. So it's like this from a right wing kind of perhaps hyperbolic, perhaps not perspective. This is what communism does. Got time, globalist, man. Got time, fucking globalist. I guess, comies. It's those comies. And you know, we joke in collocomm forna. And it's funny because it's kind of true. So, and I don't know enough about these things.

I just don't, I can only observe it from like a working class perspective man on the street. And you know, the idea that people can just move is also one that I brisk that sometimes when people are like just move, just move. And like, it's not that easy for everyone to just up and move. If you have family in this town, if you're not wealthy, it costs a lot of money to move. These other places where you might move to are now,

like Austin's not cheap anymore. It's certainly not as cheap as it was many years ago. And do you wanna pay exorbitant amounts to move and be away from your family and you're moving to a place usually that has, you know, not as great weather. I mean, there's always a cost benefit analysis you're moving to a place usually that has, you know, not as great weather. I mean, there's always a cost benefit analysis you're making, but I also think that's kind of like an upper class solution and the working class doesn't always have that mobility or

ability or just disposable income. So when people are like, oh, you're in California, just move. I'm like, well, okay, I'm not a millionaire. You know, I'm not, I'm not in that. We were about to have a child, my mother-in-law lives here. If I move somewhere, do I diss, diss lodge myself from like my whole system of support, which is invaluable? Would you be able to take your stuff with you as well?

They would come. Yeah, I mean, it's really just my cousin. It's not like I have this ginormous staff, either like some of these other companies that have left LA. And so yeah, I think that's not really a problem. We're still pretty like lean and mean, but it's more just the things that you can't really put money on. You know, if I move to like Texas, for instance, which we are thinking about, I now have no

family support, no, I'm now needing to pay for healthcare. I'm paying for a move. I'm not a huge fan of the weather down there. I know people are like, oh, it's fine. I just always joke. I'm like, don't ever take advice from rich people about this stuff. When they're like, it's fine. You won't even notice.

I'm like, you have a pool. You have a central air conditioned pool house like with boats and you know, I'm not I'm not in that same league. I'm going to be in just like some freaking house on the flat lands and the outskirts. I don't have the same resources available to me to make like my my neighborhood to probably be the neighborhood where the the grid goes down in the ice storm. Yeah, yeah. Fuck people have some mad stories about that while I was out there. Talk to me about talking about being pregnant. Are you super duper pregnant now? Is this like I'm 27 weeks. So we're approaching the third trimester. Pretty big pregnant then. Yeah, we're in it. We're deep in the woods,

but not quite in the third trimester. It's a trip, man. As somebody who's a drug addict, I was joking the other day that it's a good thing I didn't do this when I was younger because I probably would have gotten addicted to it just because it's such a trip. Especially now that I can feel her and she's like, it's just so wild. And the thing that I've been tripping out about a lot, probably because I've been listening to so much Alan Watts is how effortless it is.

Like I'm not doing anything. I'm not doing anything. There are things I'm not doing to, you know, like not drinking, not smoking, trying to drink enough water, making sure that I take my multivitamins, but aside from that, this... You're just along for the ride as much as she is. And you read about what's going on and it's like, what the fuck? Like how...

She's down there just like learning her motor skills and her eyes are starting to blink and her hair is turning a color and I mean it's it's really wild. The whole process every week where it's like this is the week the blah blah happens. And at first my husband was just like, I don't want to hear. I don't want to hear about how she's like, got a tail in the early days. And now it's wild. You know, I feel like tickling me from the inside and kicking and punching and it feels very, it's just wild. It's really a crazy. It does all, it does, and then it reminds me like we all started out this way and we were these helpless little babies and just seeing how dangerous pregnancy is and you know, I've been thinking a lot too just about how I was never really that interested and like I wasn't the kind of woman that fund over is that God was like,

would see a pregnant woman and be like, oh my God, and feel so longing. And I would be like, that looks uncomfortable as heck. And wouldn't really listen when my siblings and sister and laws and friends would talk about their pregnancies and they'd all get together and they have a shared experience. And I'd be like, ah, like two now.

Even now last night, the girls in my virtual mommy, mommy support group that just kind of happened organically from my fantasy community actually, which was amazing. They were talking about diapers and I was like, I really can't express to you how much. I hate shopping. Like I just, I really can't express to you how much I hate shopping. Like I just, I hate it so much. Thank God my husband is the consumer in the family

but I hate it. I've hated it for myself. I hate it for, it's not something I can. So when people are like, what do you think about Huggies versus Pampers? Well, we like this but I'm like, my eyes just checking out. And then I regret not listening,

because I know that that information. You're gonna be asking for it in six months time. Guys, we've got these cookies and this pump is discussion going on here. Yeah, I mean, of all of the drugs that you've taken, estrogen and oxytocin, and fucking up there. And progesterone, yeah.

And you have swimming in it. So lines and progesterone in the morning. It's so wild. It's definitely. And it was such a surprise. And I think I'm still a little bit in shock. And a lot of stuff comes up just emotionally, because of your hormonal, but also just fears and wanting. I really also been just focusing on how scary it is to allow yourself to want something. I just don't generally, I'm so superstitious of joy and good things. That's a hippie in you. It's also just my upbringing, it was kind of dysfunctional. You don't get too comfortable

because the rug is always getting pulled out from underneath you. And I think this is a very common experience of people who grew up in like fight or flight constantly and a lot of uncertainty and stability and dysfunction. And you just are like people who grew up with alcoholic parent, you're always kind of waiting for the other shoe to drop because inevitably it And you just are like people who grow up with alcoholic parent. You're always kind of waiting for the other shoe to drop because inevitably it always would. And in some ways that has prepared me exceptionally for being on platforms like YouTube for example, and saying things that might be beyond the fail. Like pulled up on, yeah.

Like this is like my upbringing any minute now. Somebody might kick me out. And in other ways, it kind of robs me of allowing myself to experience joy in the present moment because I'm so worried that, you know, this bad thing's going to happen or like, I don't deserve it or I don't. Yeah, that's been like a constant struggle is trying to be like,

because there's all this also talk. We're like, you need to like do a meditation and just like envision the baby in your arms and that seems kind of like magical thinking to me a bit where it's like something happens that somehow. And meditate the medical problem away. Being hard enough. Yeah. Yeah.

That's the brutal thing about one of my friends calls it negative personal development that you often put problems that you have at the feet of you not trying hard enough. It's like the, it's the other side of agency. So we don't want people to have a victim mentality, right? We want them to believe that they can do things that are going to impact their life. Like you have control over some of the outcomes, but also if the people who succeed are worthy of their successes, what does that mean about the people who didn't succeed? Are they worthy of their losses?

Is somebody that gets into a car accident when someone else hits them and they're disabled for the rest of the... Was that like their fault? So there's this brutal sort of double-sided thing to a meritocracy. Talking about fears as well, Aubrey Marcus, I've spent a good bit of time with him while I was in Austin. He's got this awesome video to clip from when he released his first book and he's stood up there talking in front of a big crowd and he's saying, people ask me if I could go back what would I change and the only thing that I would change, I would do nothing different but I would feel less. He said, I spent so much of my time when I should have been eating a sandwich or playing fuzzball or kissing a girl worried that I wasn't

going to get here. The place that I was coming anyway, how many hours and days and months did I waste worrying that I wasn't going to get right here right now, the place that I was going to arrive at in any case. And that's the weird thing. The neuroses and your fears, they take you out of the present moment, but I don't think they're really contribute to where you're going. Look, I'm probably going to get the outcomes that I get in life, no matter how I think about them. My programming and talent or lack thereof is going to probably get me to the place that I end up at. And all that I get, the only difference about me fearing is that I make myself miserable in the interim between now and then.

Yeah, and I think too there's so much kind of magical thinking in this in the new age, like love attraction, um, because to a certain extent your thoughts do create the world. It is, there is a balance of making sure, you know, there making sure that idea of what you focus on, what you feed lives and what you starve to eyes. I am a big believer in not invoking things. It's just funny how you'll be cruising along and then have, um, it's just funny how you can kind of invoke these things from your past that you might have put behind you just by like speaking about them and then suddenly that person appears and you're like, I'm never should have like had a conversation

with my sister about you because now here you are. Fuck off. Yeah, I just put back in the box. I'm always like put it in a box and smother it. I need to kill that. Those things that aren't necessarily healthy or toxic and but then there's this whole concept of like again, this magical thinking as if this thing that's happening so effortlessly inside of me with effort obviously, but truly kind of just in the way, in the way a flower would bloom. Like it's just this, you can't, I can't force it, I can't rush it.

There's very little I have to do with the process. Much of it is genetic. It's like when I first was pregnant, I was so nervous. I was five weeks and it was like a basically a non-viable sack. And I said to the OB, like, how do I make it stick? And she was like, how do you find me that? I'd be a billionaire in a private island. It's like, yeah, no shit. Of course you would be.

That's a dumb question. Because it's completely random and out of control. And to think that me, it's like my therapist says that that fear, that negative fear or that fear of like, I need to think positively about this. Or if I'm too excited about this, I'm somehow going to jinx it, is a way of me trying to control something I have no control over. And she's like it's magical thinking. And there's a lot of it in the kind of laws of positivity

and as if you could just think your way out of cancer or, you know, putt. And there, again, there's a lot to be said for the power of positive thinking But it's a very it's a very tricky Balance I think and it's trying to be in control of something that I'm not in control of it all and that's unsettling to me Well on top of that celebrating motherhood is a weird thing right now. It's quite rare You can't even say mother. Oh, yeah, rare. You can't even say mother. Oh yeah, shit.

You can't even say mother. Like that's the kind of weird time we're living in where mother is like a word that asserts. I mean, no, mothers, I haven't seen mother get canceled. Oh no, that's, they're trying to get rid of that word too. What are you saying said? Like a person, I don't even know. Mother has seen as like a, you know,

cis, hetero, way of viewing. Interesting, okay. But yeah, it's not celebrated. Motherhood doesn't seem to be like an admirable thing that girls pushed to go and do. I mean, do you look him back on your 20s and 30s now, you know, on the cusp of being a mom? Do you see that? 3 by the way, yeah, geriatric mom.

Technically, yeah. Do you see it as different? Do you see your 20s and 30s? I can a different way at all. Um, yes. I, although I was making choices that I was pretty aware of in my 20s and 30s. So I had, I'm the oldest of five and my siblings were all, and kind of smaller towns, they have families, they have kids, third, blue collar, kind of working class,

and very rewarding for filling lives. And I came to the city, I was very ambitious, I had a lot of goals and dreams and aspirations. And I think I knew I had to make these choices kind of a long way, where I really believed I had to choose between family or success. Like this was some, I don't think it was, I don't think, I think looking back for your to answer your question at my 20s and 30s, that was a false belief that I couldn't have a family and also be a successful creative artist. I dated a guy in my early 20s and he was like 20 years older than me, but I always called him my Picasso.

He was a brilliant artist and he was so self-disciplined and kind of would constantly reiterate to me that like family would get in the way of being a successful artist. And I think I really internalized that because he was so successful, but so solitary and alone. And I don't know if he internalized that from his father who wanted to be an artist and had a family and could, you know, it's like some, I'm sure it was passed down. And really just looking at a lot of the writers and artists that I admired, they seemed like they were insanely self-absorbed. It seemed like that's what it took.

And I didn't wanna be a mother or even a wife to and be taken, I would end up resenting the kid and my husband, so I thought I didn't think I thought I would take away from all of that. So looking back, I don't think there was any kind of like illusion even in my 20s and 30s. I just knew I was making that choice, but it's a false choice. That's what I've come to learn.

How'd you mean? Like I have a loving husband who's so supportive of what I do and in fact enables me to feel even braver going out into the world and helps me around the house in ways that make it possible for me to thrive and is a co-creator with me and not just like my creativity, my creativity, but also in our world, you know, like just in our house. And now we have a child and I thought that would overwhelm me and take away. But I think it's again, like when I was waiting tables all those years, I would have like two hours here and there to write. And there's a sense of urgency that I have been not devoid of the past three years because I'm still very busy.

But I certainly don't have that pressure of like, you only have two hours today to write. So I've just found myself already writing more and I think that having that and like she inspires me to want to do more to to work harder so I think I was looking at it as just like an all negative and it's really actually something that's added so much to my whole experience as an artist and create creative. It's rare to think that a woman would have chosen her career. You know, we do have had to have been for almost all of human history, a very particular

type of woman to have elected to go after a career as opposed to a family. And I wonder now we've been talking about this a lot in the show. I wonder now how many women are kind of sold a lie by whatever culture, dominant culture it is at the moment, that no, you can be a boss bitch and clap back, you don't need to settle for less. You can, you know, fulfill your life with money and status and education and cats and fucking three houses.

Yeah. And so then find out that they've missed out on getting a family or you're finding a partner or doing whatever. Yeah, that conversation is so vast. You know, there's so many, and I've been, I've thought so much about these things. And now being 43 and being, because I would bristle against this idea that like you're worthless without a child as a woman. And on the right wing, this is like a pervasive kind of mentality that seeps into a lot of

the stuff that I started reading when I fell into the culture wars and I was writing a playboy so You know when people are like oh, you don't why aren't you like fully on the right if you've left the left and it's like I saw the way they talked to me when I was a playboy like I don't I don't think these people who are Speaking out against speaking on behalf of women and saying like, oh, the women's experience is being co-opted by trans women, like they don't give a shit about women. Like they're not fighting for women's rights. They're using this because it's something that they can, that it's effective in the culture

wars, but like these are people who would happily say that women belong in the kitchen and having babies and jokingly will say some of us don't even shouldn't even be voting. So I'm not exactly buying that. This is out of some concern for women. And so I think it's complicated because I don't want women to feel like that should. Because for all of human history, women

didn't have a choice. They just did not have a choice. When you read and learn and like, historically being a woman was shit. And it just was forever. You had no choice. You couldn't get an education. You were property. You had no right in the public space. You were, had no right in the public space, you couldn't fight back if you were raped by your husband or anyone really with obvious circumstances that are generally racist and toned. Then there's that whole aspect. It's just been an absolute crap show for women. And only, which is why I do push back so hard against this idea that like trans women are women and can swim against us and swim me because I'm like, we just got these right. No, they swim against each other.

They don't swim against women. We just got them like 50 years ago. It's not even like we've had them that long. And by the way, only not only, like the whole world has an experience of this. I've been to India and Egypt and cultures where it's still very actually patriarchal. And so you're hiding under veils and you're not

allowed to dance in the streets with the men. I just like bananas. You're still getting stoned if you are guilty of adultery and like the stuff is still happening. And that's what it was actually like for most women. So I have a lot. I mean, the name that we're giving my daughter is Matilda. And we've been researching people are like, oh, you have to read about this Queen Matilda in England. And apparently she's like the first woman who ever challenged the patriarchal lineage

of the throne in England. And I've been reading her story and it's crazy. And she was, she was a race for mystery basically. And she's exactly. I've never heard of Queen Matilda. Exactly. And she's, and she had a son that she essentially like sacrificed herself. She fought these like war. I mean, it's crazy story.

And was raised basically and her son, in order to save the throne for her son, so that he was able to maintain it. And instead of fighting for it for herself and she was just a badass and there have been these women. And so I think that then motherhood, took on, we had this kind of idyllic, very brief time where women had rights. So it was like first wave feminism.

And then they were also having children, and they were starting to get work. But they had just more choice and more options. And during World War II, you saw so many of them participating in helping the country and working in factories and coming together and they really started seeing what they were capable of, getting more of an education. Then you have kind of second wave feminism where suddenly we're shaking off all of the shackles

of shame that come with generally being treated like a baby making piece of property for thousands of years. And there's an over-create correction, I think. You know, the third wave feminism is basically like throw out womanhood entirely. Being a, I remember I interviewed these three women when I was writing for Playboy and I never got to do anything with this interview and I always loved it. It was three generations of feminists. And the grandmother, the youngest one was like a woman who is all about free the nipple.

She was like 19 and she was third way feminist, intersectional feminists. And her mother was talking and she was talking about how she chose to be a mom. And this was during the whole like you know 80s like girlboss, shoulder pads, working girl. And all of the women were going to careers and they all got together with her favorite English professor who they all loved and looked up to. And when they were in a circle talking about what they were doing with their lives and she said she's chosen

to be a mother, they basically like skipped over her completely, like her role was just not relevant or important. And the pain in her voice when she was talking about this for making this choice was palpable. And the grandmother then was talking to and she said something. She was like, I just think there's something to be said for a little modesty, you know, in regards to her granddaughter who she supported, but she comes from a very modest, like greatest generation culture. And it was so interesting speaking to these women and seeing how quickly feminism evolves in the West. And really, women are doing well. We have more educate, more, seems like we're more of us

are educated than ever before, higher earnings. We're doing all right. And in that, I have a sister who's a stay at home mom and she's talked to me a lot about the struggle of not feeling like it's a valued role in society anymore and I think it's like the most selfless role and it's so hard. It's so hard to run a house and like raise children it is just so The day and day out monotony of being a parent is just so, the day in, day out, monotony of being a parent is so hardcore and terrifying

and such a long, it is a marathon. It's not like a sprint at all. And so I think that it's, I understand why there's this kind of reaction to never having a choice. One of the problems that a lot of women and feminists have is that we only just got the opportunity to be in the workplace and to be on a par with men if we allow motherhood to become too celebrated, maybe that's going to be taken away from us. Maybe the opportunity for us to be seen on a level playing field with men, almost as if, you know, how you said put it in the box and forget about it. That's kind of a little bit what, yeah,

well, motherhood's like, it's just a thing. It's that, that's a thing. It's kind of there, but that's like the, that's the fallback option. Let's see if you can go out. Let's see if we can make a career of it. And then if you can't, you can go. And yeah, it's trying to find a balance between women haven't had the number of rights that they should have done for quite a long time, and they've just got them, but has the baby and the bathwater and the motherhood all been thrown out together so that that's no longer celebrated, because if we're going to keep the population going, we need to have mothers and this yeah sorry go on just this huge concerns about population collapse at the moment that's

what Elon tweeted about not long ago and if you look at the numbers it's not that unlikely this is a fucking mad stat that one of my friends told me the other day we could be close to being on the planet with the largest number of humans that are ever going to exist. Ever. But that's that whole, have you ever heard of like the 12 billionth person or whatever? There's this video that some, I don't remember. I feel like it might be associated with some Bill Gates Foundation, but it was some kind

of study that it did where it's like the 12 billionth person will never be born. Because if you keep pulling people up out of poverty, generally, they stop having as many kids. So the more you raise people up and lift them up, the smaller their families get because there's lower infant mortality, there's more opportunity. People start caring about things like population control because they're worried about resources. They have more investment in sending two kids to college instead of, you know, Ford that need to work on the farm, etc. So there is this idea, then you see this trend pretty much everywhere across the world. And then yes, there is rapidly declining populations

in places like Japan and the West. And it is, I think in California, like the only reason the population is expanding is because of our immigrant population. Generally, that's the case in most of the Western cultures. And so it's obviously something that isn't problematic across the whole world yet. It seems like a particularly Western problem that people discuss at the moment. And I do think the idea that what worries me and what I've really been thinking a lot about obviously lately is the ways in which I felt I was lied to by the culture, by the

Western culture, because I want to be clear, I think this is a particularly Western ideal, and particularly Western feminist ideal where like I could sleep my way to kind of empowerment, which has not necessarily been my experience as someone coming from trauma, low self-esteem, and addiction. I don't think that that was the right pathway of promise security was not the path to peace, although I should write that book. And the idea that it seems reactive now to me this idea because. I felt that reaction when someone saying like you aren't you know like they're the Gavin again as of the world who are basically like your ovaries are going to dry up and you're going to be an angry 40 year old and you're going to be worthless and then you're going to be mad and you're going to go insane and one time I was talking to Gavin he's like women

who are 40 are going to say I'm like well, well, you've never met my mother then. Like, she has five kids and she's freaking crazy. Like, crazy isn't limited to a women, be women without children and see, like, 40-year-old women who have dried up ovaries or whatever the hell you're talking about. It's just, it's so reductive to say that this is, this is the case.

And I understand, like, people who I vehemently disagree with about a lot of things, I guess like Jill Filippovich would be a great example who's this kind of feminist writer on the left. And she pushes back against this idea that you need to have kids to be considered a woman. And you're somehow less of a woman if you don't have kids and you don't experience motherhood and you're not participating in this biological kind of

imperative. And so I understand the reaction to it but then I worry that you're robbing yourself of something because you're reacting. In my case, I think I was reacting to feeling like I had to choose between a career and a family, feeling like I was reacting to some of the more religious and right-wing rhetoric that I heard growing up around about women and motherhood that was very that felt very antiquated to me and backwater was sort of sleeping around and promiscuity your rebellion against that. Um and in many ways I mean I was also I think a reaction to being sexually assaulted so it was like a way to take power back and. sexually assaulted. So it was like a way to take power back and like a shame spiral that went on for decades. And I also have written about just how empowering it did feel to weaponize my sexuality, which is why I've always had

weird issues with me too, because I'm like, I'm definitely used my sexuality to manipulate men. This doesn't seem like powerful men. Men whose lives I could ruin. This doesn't seem like a one-way street. I'm not sure that maybe everyone is viewing this. I had some agency in these moments. this, like I had some agency in these moments. So that was always, yeah, it's complicated. Like I feel like I fall in the cracks of like a lot of these issues. And given my experiences, I'm able to view them from multiple perspectives, which is sometimes not to my benefit. I wish I could just be like, yeah, those feminists were wrong, but I'm like, they're not wrong. And I'm seeing this even in the way that women are being erased now with this new, I don't know, Derek. I think the word radical feminists uses

trans misogyny, where you're seeing this kind of, and I joke about this all the time, like the patriarchy is so crafty, they'll turn themselves into women so that they can stay on top. Women got to the top, and then men were like, yeah, no, that's not happening. We're gonna send again. And so they're, and then seeing how much like much women fought for and also just like the right to have some agency and their reproductive health and their health at all and still just the areas where black infant mortality rates are still disturbing maternal mortality rates. They're still huge discrepancies and and that kind of care all over the world so

It's not like women are just killing it Like all over the world. They're being sold into sex slavery COVID has exacerbated a lot of these problems domestic abuse We know there's how many women get killed every year by like a partner or somebody that they were with. It's all tragic. I know the UK is having a big problem with like violence against women.

And I just some like women have like born this, the like humanity on their backs and in their wounds for the entire span of our whole entire history. And I have a lot of compassion for people who fight for rights for women. And I worry that that baby will be thrown out with the bathwater as we react to the like feminists, you know, feminists. Because now I see the backlash swinging the other way where it's like, oh, all these feminists. And this is, this is the end of the world.

And I, you know, I loved what I, on her, Seattle, he said when she was on my podcast, you can tell how well a society is doing by how well their women are doing. And like the quality of a woman, do they have access to education, healthcare? Are they how free are the women in your culture? That is generally representative of how well your culture is doing.

And- Is this such a thing as too much freedom? I mean, in what we're talking about. When'm just thinking about freedom from norms, freedom from not expectation, but from pre-disposition. I don't know, like pre-disposition. I never had to answer that question. What I'm just thinking, like, you know, what one of the questions that I'm like, would you ask out of like a white dude? Well, yeah, I think so.

Like if you were to say- Have you ever been too free, bro? I think so. I think if you say, if you're not expected to go out and get a job, you're now the guy that smokes weed and plays Xbox on the couch. But is that true? Well, I think that one of the things

that you would say about the modern world is that masculinity doesn't really have a very firm place to stand at the moment. I think that there is a little bit of a crisis amongst men, not knowing what elements of their typical heroic masculine traits that I allowed to cling onto, and which ones of them have kind of been thrown out righteously, and which ones perhaps were baby and bathwater that went out with it as well. Okay, so hang on, what have we got left here? Between fucking in cells and migtow and red pill and black pill and simps and cooks and only fans and soy boys? Like, you know, there's a lot of

fucking moving parts for men as well. And the question wasn't, like, is there a limit that should be placed on the freedom that women have? It's trying to work out, can you push it to the point where women no longer see traditional roles as aspirational anymore because they're constantly looking to progress past them? And this is that, you know, motherhood not necessarily being held in high esteem very much anymore because what's new, what's more progressive, what's more recent is the thing that just inherently gets held as, oh, well, this must be the thing that all of the women are supposed to do. I think that, honestly, I honestly think that between sort of like in-sell culture,

MIGTOW and NOFAP, you've kind of got the men's area of the world with that as well. Like, look, we were promised a future that we're not going to get, so we're going to do something that is so different to typically what we would have done, starting a business, having a job, nine to five, finding a wife, starting a family, that sort of stuff. You get these sort of culture, counter-culture, and that's the dynamic that you're talking about, right? Swinging between left and right. Yeah, it seems more like a cop out to me, having experience with all those groups though.

It's like, oh, so things aren't going your way. Like the way I feel about that whole group that you just described, and I have a lot of compassion for them, because I really try to, even as cruel and horrific as they've been to me in the past is that welcome to the Thunderdome bitch like a lot of us have been fighting for scraps and having to compete in a meritocracy but still not having the same access. I've been around plenty of boys clubs in my life. They do exist.

It helps when you can go golf and talk about business. Like there are things that just get done and people want to deny that and act like that's not true. And I'm not really wanting to like throw, again, I think where it's like racism and sexism in this kind of world get thrown out. And now it's like, they still exist. These concepts do exist.

They're overused. And I think we have destroyed the meaning of those words. But it's not to say that people haven't been fighting against these things and rightfully had to fight against the fallout from that years and decades in generations later. And so suddenly this like crew of men is like, we don't, we're like, okay, you can still go start a job. I didn't get everything I wanted and I still had to like pick myself up and figure it out. You know,

I didn't start like murdering men. I just don't. It feels like a little bit of an excuse to me. Like, oh, these feminists, I aren't sleeping with us. So we're going to go shoot some women or like go whatever. Like it just feels like a that feels hyper reactive to me. I don't see like feminists There's a lot of issues. I have with modern feminism that I could that I have taken them to task war But I still don't see women being like well, I guess we're gonna give up and just sit on the couch and think about Self-adrester the day., because we don't have that option. I don't have that. And I also disagree that that's necessarily the case.

And I've only had to learn this because I've raged so hard against like trust fund babies, for example. And I'm always like, I fucking hate trust fund babies. Because I grew up around them and I find them intolerable often. But I've learned because I've had to have a lot of compassion. They didn't ask to be born into those circumstances anymore than somebody who is born into poverty, being born into immense wealth, and it comes with a lot of its own problems and dysfunction

and craziness. And now a lot of those kids are messed up, obviously, but so are a lot of poor kids and so are a lot of middle class kids. A lot of them take that opportunity and they grow and they do stuff with it and they don't have to work a day in their life. And they still do. I know so many people who have taken the opportunities of their inherited wealth and family names and they've built upon them for no reason.

So I think that's a really interesting point to make that the how unpopular of a viewpoint is it to say trust fund babies they're the ones that need our compassion but those are the ones that we really really need to think about how hard it is to be born in the hamptons and you know trust I have a lot of issues with trust, my babies. I come from Newport, Rhode Island. Like, this is the old, this is the original playground of the red. Yeah. And those people still exist. And so that, but that group of people having a conversation

where you can go, look, maybe they do face some challenges. Maybe this does suck for them. Being able to sit with that discomfort and not just have a reactionary response that appears on your Twitter feed or on YouTube comment. No, that does happen on my Twitter feed. I know. But being able to get past that, right, and to sit with that bit of discomfort is the same thing as the guys that are adamant that society is going to accept women and give them encouragement because their emotions matter and mind don't or the women that say men still have access to the workplace and fundamentally we are being held down. There is a glass ceiling above us. It just appears in a more subversive

and invisible way now. You know that all of this, there's obvious low resolution ways to look at an argument and say, here is the most extreme version of this situation that means that this conversation isn't going to happen. But the interesting stuff is when you go, okay, so let's play both sides here. Let's think about what the difficulties are of somebody that gets born into incredible wealth. Do they get drawn into drugs and over partying and stuff as much as somebody in poverty? I would probably guess almost exactly the same. Probably the same.

Well, they've done these studies on depression and they've found that the highest rates of depression are generally and are in the lower class and poverty, essentially. And it's usually undiagnosed because how do you even know you're depressed if your life is just shit? You know, so it's like they just think like, well, why would you be depressed? But the second highest rate is in the highest echelons because they feel like I have everything and I'm still depressed. And that's interesting to me because I think one of the things I've found from experiencing billionaires kids is that they'll never really have the opportunity to know

struggle, which sounds weird, but it's like even if they fight and they'll have their own kind of struggles, but they're not gonna know what it feels like ever to put like Build something from the ground up out of nothing or from very little and we all have help and I always think about this behavioral economics Napoli study that I'm so obsessed with and talk about all the time where they gave people They gave people lots of money and extra turns and other people less money and not as many turns and then they observed them playing monopoly and The and they put like bulls and pretzels in the middle of the table and the people who had less turns and less access and just were started off at a disadvantage. Their body language was reflecting it and the people who had more were eating the pretzels.

They were just more entitled. They were really cocky. They were kind of talk and smack even though they started with extra turns and more money and at the end of The Game when they would interview people the people who had extra turns and money always attributed their win to Decisions that they made not like any of the extra things that they got. And that really got me thinking about this idea of a meritocracy and how, yes, I do think in our culture, like in America, I was married to an immigrant my first marriage from Belarus. And seeing how much access, I was like, if this guy who speaks no English can like pay himself up and come here with nothing at 19 years old and figure it out, I've got to be able to freaking figure this

system out too. Come on. It's like sheer entitlement for me to think that I can't and laziness. And so observing that from his perspective and seeing how much he's built in the time that he's been here. And so many of the immigrants that I know, the restaurant I just worked at, these guys came and they were literally dishwashers and they started to do Sparrow now. They have like an amazing restaurant chain that's fantastic and they are the American dream.

They're just incredible. And came with nothing, with nothing. And you can't do that everywhere. That is something that is when people are like, it's not a meritocracy. I'm like, you really can't do what you can do in America and a lot of the places in the world. And people still would kill to come here.

But that being said, there does seem to be like a general lack of awareness about where people started. And having, you know, even with my background being fraught with difficulties and a lot of dysfunction. I still had access. I wasn't starving. You know, I'm aware that I had a roof over my head. There are certain things I didn't have to really think about. There were other things I did, but you just kind of are, you deal with the handier doubt, I guess. And that seems to be something. And then, you know, I love Sam Harris always talking about like moral luck. And this concept that you were kind of talking about in the beginning, well, does somebody who works super hard and gets in a free accident on their way home and now they're in a wheelchair and it totally changes your

life forever. That had nothing to do with how hard they worked or didn't work. You know, just sheer luck. There's so much of it that's a random and out of our control. And the problem I think I have with the culture right now, is that everything feels like a zero-sum game. Like, it's not like free markets or social safety nets. You know, we need balance. We need people need help. People aren't born into the same circumstances,

and we shouldn't punish them for that. That being said, I don't know that everyone deserves just handouts for. But this is it. For no, for nothing. You see this dialogue play out in conversations, like victim mentality and victim mentality and trying to find a balance between the two.

Like some people have had a rough ride of it and you need to pat them on the back and they deserve compassion and the compassion will help them be more effective and it's the right thing to do in a society that has more than it needs. Right. And on the flip side of that, you don't want to do this future of fitness article that was just put out by self magazine that I had some things to say about. There was basically providing high calorie chicken soup for the soul for people that didn't want to go to the gym and telling them that the gym was this scary place

that they didn't ever want to go. The reason that fat people aren't going to the gym is not their weight. It's in turn, it's fat phobia, the problem is with everybody else. You think, right, okay. So between total free market and molly coddle everybody from cradle to grave, there has to be something that's in the middle.

And I wonder, I know that you've been talking on your sub-stack recently about social media and as a communication tool, as a domain, what it does to the way that we think. I think that a big part of it is that it's such a low-resolution tool to be able to have a conversation. You know, Twitter's what, 280 fucking characters are something, and you can't get across nuance on there. You can't get across detail. You can't even get across caveats. You can get across the headline, and that's it.

Yeah, it's true. But I, but I also see like the, the explosive world of podcasts as a balance to that, you know, they're, they're, I always joke podcasts are going to save the world because we're having this conversation right now and trying to wrestle with these things. Like feminism is important. And I was the girl in high school who was like I You my my English teacher used to say you are gonna set us back like 50 years Women back like 50 years because she was she was the first you know You always have that like English teacher that exposes you to feminism when you're a young girl in the West and or someone and she exposed us to it and was really feminist

and kind of taught us all about it. And I was like, I don't see what the problem is. Like, why do I want to be in the rat race? I don't want to, like, why can't a guy hold a door open for me? I like it. I like a little chivalry. And I don't, I'm fine with just, I love cooking. Like, I'm fine with him going out there making money

and me being in the kitchen And she would just like roll her eyes because I just thought I'm just like why do we want to do this like why do we want to work? Why are we fighting to work? And I understand why because there's autonomy you have financial freedom is huge I see you know a lot of my female friends who are perhaps dependent on, I mean, I have like a deep fear of being dependent on anyone, particularly financially. So there's just a lot of reasons that you would want to be able to go out and make your own way that I don't think I fully understood, even as a hustler, a little 16-year-old.

And also just learning more about first-wave feminism, getting older, seeing even just in this mommy group chat just hearing the struggles of women now who are working and are breadwinners often trying to balance that and raising kids and the actual just craziness of childbirth and the danger and raising kids in the society that's so unstable and crazy right now and with in a pandemic. You know, we're all like I was thinking about this the other day and it's so sad to me what's happened with this pandemic in terms of the way it's absolutely got all of us at each other's throats and I've seen so many of my friends be just completely radicalized by this thing, which I understand the reasons for it. But I think about like, they're doing this whole thing about global literacy and how

it's, we, in the wet, it's so western focused. Like the conversation is so, so focused on the West. And I feel like so much of the big picture gets left out. And they were talking about just globally how take away like how this affected inner city kids in America or in the UK globally the poorest countries these kids lost years and they're never getting them back. Some of them lost opportunities to get education at a time when it meant get an education or be sold into sex slavery, you know, or start working and they're just

Dealing with different challenges. We went to South Africa for our honeymoon and February and seeing how Like if you're already on the brink and you're gonna get You're gonna get, you're gonna get. Fundamentally push you over the edge. It'll push you over the edge. And these countries don't have their government printing money and handing it out to all their citizens. It's just not, that's not happening. So you're already on the rails of poverty

and now tourism is done and you rely on tourism. And I saw this when I was in Egypt right after the revolution. And this is, I don't know, this is an area where I try to be so mindful of just how, and it drives me crazy about the conversation a lot of the time that we are all having is that it feels very, still feels very privileged for lack of a better word. You know, we're still, we're not even considering how this has affected like a large enormous population of the globe. And everybody's been affected by this.

Everybody, every single one of us, everyone is suffered. Somebody, some people didn't get to see their loved ones die. People in other countries haven't been able to see their family in other countries. People, the ways in which this is affected every single person on the globe is endless and will have reverberations for decades to come. And yet we still feel like it's just happening to us.

You know, like that's why the... Which, everything... That's the bad things. It was so fucking connected, right? We connected basically to everyone on the planet and yet still some myopic about what it is that we look at. It's only the thing that's directly in front of us. So I'm big into existential risk, right? The ways, the different ways that humanity could go extinct

and permanently could tell it's genetic lineage. I mean, it's a miracle we have in all right. It's about 50 years. I'm pretty sure it's genetic lineage. I mean, it's a miracle we haven't. Oh, but what's that? It gives us about 50 years. I'm pretty sure it's going to happen. But I was sure. I was sure. I hoped that a global pandemic would be, it would remind us of our common humanity, right?

There's this, I can't remember who it was. It's one of your presidents that said, imagine if there was an alien race that was going to come and destroy us all, imagine how quickly boundaries would be forgotten and all of humanity would pull together like that sort of one world thing that astronauts have gone out into space apparently have they look back and they realize that it is so fragile it's all one. And I thought there was a brief period. Whatever in March April 2020. period, whatever, in March, April, 2020, where I honestly thought that that might be the case, that this bizarrely, this pandemic could be one of the best things that had ever happened to us, because I knew what it was like to be in Austin, Texas, or to be in Ghana, or

to be in Wuhan, China, or to be in New Zealand, or whatever, right? Everybody didn't know what was going on. Everyone was fearing for their life, everyone's scared of this invisible virus that you can't see, that you don't know where it's come from, that you don't know what it's going to do. That's the most, there's never been a situation ever, ever in human history where every human on the planet has been impacted by something and had such a relatable experience. And then within fucking 60 days, it's Tiger King and fucking like arguments about whether to virus leak from Wuhan and completely forgotten. And maybe it's just, maybe it's not possible. Maybe it isn't possible to have seven billion people with nation-states and tribalism and individual identities and my own agenda.

Maybe it's impossible to have that. But briefly, and foolishly, I thought that maybe we were gonna be brought together by it. In what respect, what would that have looked like if we were brought together? Less and maintained it. So less tribalism, more of an understanding, like you said, less of a myopic view of justice, you know, more empathy for the person that is suffering that isn't directly in front of us.

This was hard. Well, hang on. If it's hard for me, then the person that's already in a shitty situation that's in poverty, fuck, it must be really hard for them. And the person that I think has it all sorted out, well, actually, maybe it's hard for them as well. And maybe it's hard for the person that is my racial opposition or my ideological opposition or my fucking commercial competitor, whatever, like all of these things. But it wasn't a big enough dose. You know, if you could see the virus like a vaccine, the dose of the vaccine was nowhere near high enough.

It was nowhere near a big enough catastrophe to bring us together. Right, I know I was joking. I always joke, I'm like, it was just enough to like shut down the economy, but not so much that it united us. I'm like, it's almost like it was created in a lab. Just to pace everybody off.

Just like do you say? Fuck life for a little bit. Yeah, exactly. I'm like between the woof-woo and like TikTok and like China's messing us up. Fucking ruin us. They don't need to go to war. Does this thing that you put on your sub stack that I thought was really interesting? China's messing us up. Fuck you, ruin us. They don't even need to go to war.

This thing that you put on your sub stack that I thought was really interesting. You said, we've been tricked into thinking we need to care about everything. Every birthday, every life event, every social movement. Social media has trained us to believe that we should not only care, we should have an opinion. It doesn't matter how far from our lane we drift. Suddenly we are experts in shipping, nuclear power, Iran or epidemiology, even if we had to Google what that word meant just 15 months ago, because we read a Wikipedia article and watched a few YouTube videos. The truth is most of us know a lot about a couple of things

and we, and next to nothing about everything else. It's so unpopular to not have an opinion on everything. I know. Fuck. I don't know. I'm very comfortable not knowing anything. And I feel like that's it people joke to I was joke. I'm like, I don't know anything. People like you still you're so short. I'm like, no, I don't I'm not an expert in anything. There are people who are actually experts. They devote their life to learning one thing. They know a lot about that thing. They have they they've, you know, focused intently on developing a skill or a practice or something. Like, I'm not one of those people.

I know, I was joking just yesterday. I'm like, well, I guess I'm going to start my mommy vlog because the only thing I'm really good at is like, naval gazing interior monologues. And I know me. I know myself. But I was talking to my husband and we were talking about this just how, and I've talked about this before, being an addict. I was

like, I wonder if it's because I'm an addict and I just fundamentally don't trust myself. Like I'm hyper aware. When you recover from addiction, you are hyper aware of your capacity to lie to yourself and others, others in pursuit of your addictive behavior, and myself, and just delusion. And he was talking about this quote that he was like, I'm going to butcher, but it was something about how, are we really learning anything newer? We just rearranging our prejudice as to like better suit us. And it's from some famous, like, you know, psychiatrist or something. And I was thinking a lot about that, you know, are we just kind of rearranging our biases

to be just to confirm what we're already kind of believing. And a lot of these, there's always these little things that pop up. And I think I'm also just very contrary to my nature. So I was very, like I made my t-shirt, you're not woke, you're annoying back in like 2018, and now I want to take it down because I'm like annoyed that what I feel like woke is being overused, you know, I was like, oh, this was funny, like when nobody knew what woke was, but now it feels like a right wing talking point. And I've, I'm always aware of how I'm being reactive, just being like an addict. And I was thinking a lot about, I've been really just on it about how a lot of these pandemic policies have affected the people thatensibly, particularly the left-clares, claims to care about, like poor kids who are losing years of their education and can't go to the playgrounds.

And like, all the rich kids I know had tutors in their backyards and Wi-Fi and iPads, you know, that not everybody has this access and generally these things hurt. The poorest always, disproportionately, they're always gonna suffer the most from anything. And so I've been raging against that for months and months and months. And I was, I definitely, my, like, left wing idealism in the beginning of the pandemic. And I think just fear, like nobody knew what this was.

I was definitely like, yeah, maybe we should shut it down for two weeks. And on the right, there were people who were like, this is insane, they're never gonna take, I was like, calm down, you guys, and now I've written about it. I'm like, I was so wrong. I take it back.

I did not realize that if you give control to these people, they don't ever give it back. And I will never make that mistake again. It was trauma- I think that's the lesson. Fuck, that is the biggest lesson that so many people have taken. So I've said this a lot.

I don't have like a conspiratorial bone in my body usually. I think that's very much a British thing. But I don't think about the globalist elite and their brand plan to take the NSA, well, they did this with Project Mockingbird and blah, blah, blah. I'm like, right, okay, okay, cool. But I just don't, I'm not usually there. I'm not usually in that mode of thinking, but holy shit, if the last two years hasn't eroded every last bit of trust that I have, not only that the people in power and the press are acting in good faith because they're not,

not only that they're not acting competently because they're not, but also that they don't care about being either malicious or negligent. It's this perfect, perfect fucking blend of idiocy and self-serving malice and just not a foot given. It's that all put together. Did you watch, I pulled this quote out the other day, did you watch, don't look up? The next thing. No, I haven't seen it yet. Okay, so this is quote in that, Kate Dibby-Aschi, one of the scientists and she says,

the truth is way more depressing. So this is someone's talking about conspiratorial thinking, this is asteroid coming. Oh, it's actually a plan for blah, blah, blah, blah, and other people are going to use it to take over control. The truth is way more depressing than not even smart enough to be as evil as you're giving them credit for. Right. Yeah, I mean, that that has been something I've really been thinking a lot about. And then this recent conversation about like this kind of idea, like, oh, I'm over the pandemic, you know,

that language that was popping off lately. And I don't know, I've, I've been lost who are nurses and stuff like that. And it just depends on where you're sitting. Like that to me, like, I'm't know. I have been lost who are nurses and stuff like that. It just depends on where you're sitting. That to me, I'm over it. I got mad when I was hearing that, not because I don't have similar feelings. In some respects, I'm like, well, I've always been over this on behalf of the working class because you're saying this as someone who had a choice about whether or not you could

work during the pandemic. Like, you do know many people worked and never stopped working and just like kept on working through the whole thing and didn't have a choice. Imagine how over it you'd be if you were a front line nurse. Yeah, exactly. And imagine, and I, and two years in and the numbers of people who are, you know, it's just like, I don't know what that's like. And you're watching people die and they're people who might not have to die, like how frustrating. I might be a radicalized TikTok nurse, you know, calling for Joe Rogan's banning. If I was on the front lines of a place that was experiencing this over and over and I had to personally witness like hundreds and thousands of people die.

I don't, I just don't, and I have as much as like the disdain I have for teachers unions and their decisions, particularly like LAUSD, which is one of the most ridiculous mafias in the world. I have a lot of compassion for teachers. That their job isn't easy. They're dealing with parents, administration, kids, they're generally underpaid. There's administrative bloat that's destroying public schools. They are unfric and go fund me,

raising money for supplies every year. Like, it doesn't seem, it seems like a thankless job that you do because you're called to it. And, and yeah, I mean, it's easy for me. It's easy for me to just sit in judgment. And I, I've been really like hyper aware of that lately. I feel like, and I also feel like hyper aware of that lately, I feel like. And I also feel like after years of getting caught in the crossfire of the culture wars, being somewhat radicalized by being rejected by what I thought were my friends.

You know, it's hard when your real life friends are rejecting you and following you and you're feeling consequences of maybe having wrong thing. And I was always aware of being kind of weaponized on the right as like, oh, see this like liberal who woke up from the comm comedy spell she was under. Why I left the left, yeah. Yeah, that. It's very, I get it.

It's so common. And I hear this story every day. Like we, our last episode of Dumbstifier, we asked people to tell us like, was there a moment you were red-pilled, or purple-pilled, or black-pilled? And why, when was it it or was it a process and the emails I'm getting are fascinating,

like their whole entire stories from people and this does seem to be something like Malice talks a lot about where it's just, he sees it as a positive that there's an overall just distrust in the institutions from top to bottom. And I worry though, because if there's nothing that people can grab onto, they grab onto conspiracy theories. You know, they're gonna reach for things that aren't necessarily serving them that are there to weaponize and manipulate them. And isn't even a conspiracy. Like every 2021 is here, everyone became

a conspiracy theorist in the whole world. There's a, so I got to tell you about this. I learned this last year. It's called Compensatory Control. So this is a psychological effect. Where are we? Matthew Siett came up with this and he put it in the time. So I read this last year. Psychologists have conducted experiments to shed light on why people lose or at least suspend rationality. One experiment asked people to imagine going to a doctor to hear an uncertain medical diagnosis, such people were significantly more likely to express the belief that God was in control of their lives. Another asked participants to imagine a time of deep uncertainty when they feared for their jobs or the health of their children, they were far more likely to see a pattern in meaningless

static or to infer that two random events were connected. This is such a common finding that the psychologists have given it a name, compensatory control. When we feel uncertain, when randomness intrudes into our lives, we respond by reintroducing order in some other way. Superstitions in conspiracy theories speak to this need. It is not easy to accept that important events are shaped by random forces. This is why, for some, it makes more sense to believe that we are threatened by the grand plans of malign scientists than the transmutation of some silly little microbe. Hmm.

I love that. I love this whole conversation. I mean, that's another rabbit hole. I Brunei Brown talks a lot about this actually about conspiracy theory and the role it plays in storytelling. Essentially, we as humans have

this need to make sense of the world and tell ourself a story. And in the absence of something that makes sense or uncertainty, we will we will turn to conspiracy because it helps us to complete the story. So the vacuum, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And just the human need for a story that makes sense to them, even as crazy as it might be.

And it's often just stupidity and competence. You know, this is where I love Michael Shermer's perspective is he's such a skeptic. It's like yeah, just straight narrow You know his and my husband's very much like this to work because I lean I think I'm I think I indulge in conspiracy theories because I think they're fun That's always been my relationship with conspiracy theories like Like I've said before, I believe in past lives because it's more interesting for me to believe. It's just a more, you can't prove to me that it isn't real and it's more interesting for me to believe that it is.

I'm gonna choose the more entertaining of the two options. It's just I'm a writer. I'm gonna choose what's more interesting to me. But my husband, when it comes to like conspiracies, he's like, like, how many people would have to be in on this and keep this a secret for it to be true? Just how what is it? He's like, how many people do you know can keep a secret? Like maybe one, you know, this, it's not, not many

people are great. It's globalist, people wearing those fucking long nose The beat things yeah from the beat well, I don't know because Because they're fucking slipknot fans maybe I don't know okay, I don't fucking know look Bridget Let's bring this home. I really appreciate you coming on. Where should people go? Where should people go? They want to check out what you do? You can go to my sub-stack, which is Beyond Parity, with Bridget Feticy, and it's BridgetFeticy.substack, or whatever.

You can go to my local community, which is where we have a tribe of tribalist people. It is very tribalist. It's a very wacky group. And we have workouts for the women and we do live streams and that's at Fedosy.com and I put a lot of stuff behind the paywall. It's more personal and also just more of my own life. And we also do the unedited dumpster fires there. You can find me on YouTube. We have a

show dumpster fire, now a podcast as well. I have a podcast walk-ins welcome, which you should come on for sure. And you can find me at Bridget Fettisie on all social media. Amazing. Thanks Bridget. Thank you.