Modern Wisdom - #820 - Bridget Phetasy - “Sleep Your Way To Empowerment” Has Failed Women

Episode Date: August 3, 2024

Bridget Phetasy is a writer, comedian and a podcast host. We all have moments in life we wish we could undo. But when an entire generation has been told that all life paths are acceptable and there is no judgement no matter how you spend your time, what happens when they grow up? Expect to learn why Bridget regrets her twenties, her controversial thoughts on divorce, why people have such a problem the word ‘regret’, why everyone still feels the need to manage emotionally immature boomers, if Bridget misses using cocaine, the current state of the culture war, what will happen to the anti-woke mob if there are fewer things to push back against and much more... Sponsors: See discounts for all the products I use and recommend: https://chriswillx.com/deals Get 10% discount on all Gymshark’s products at https://gym.sh/modernwisdom (use code MW10) Get a 20% discount & free shipping on your Lawnmower 5.0 at https://manscaped.com/modernwisdom (use code MODERNWISDOM) Get a Free Sample Pack of all LMNT Flavours with your first box at https://drinklmnt.com/modernwisdom (automatically applied at checkout) Extra Stuff: Get my free reading list of 100 books to read before you die: https://chriswillx.com/books Try my productivity energy drink Neutonic: https://neutonic.com/modernwisdom Episodes You Might Enjoy: #577 - David Goggins - This Is How To Master Your Life: https://tinyurl.com/43hv6y59 #712 - Dr Jordan Peterson - How To Destroy Your Negative Beliefs: https://tinyurl.com/2rtz7avf #700 - Dr Andrew Huberman - The Secret Tools To Hack Your Brain: https://tinyurl.com/3ccn5vkp - 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 Fettersy. She's a writer, comedian and a podcast host. We all have moments in life we wish we could undo, but when an entire generation has been told that all life paths are acceptable and there is no judgment, no matter how you spend your time, what happens when those people grow up? Expect to learn why Bridgette regrets her 20s, her controversial thoughts on divorce, why people have such a problem with the word regret, why everyone still feels the need to manage emotionally immature boomers, if Bridgette misses using cocaine,

the current state of the culture war, what will happen to the anti-woke mob if there are fewer things to push back against, and much more. This episode is brought to you by Gymshark. You want to look good and feel good when you're in the gym and Gymshark make the best men's and girls gym wear on the planet. Their studio shorts for men are the best pair of training shorts I've ever found in my entire life.

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slash modern wisdom to get a free sample pack of all eight flavors with any purchase. That's www.drinklmnt.com slash modern wisdom. But now, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Bridget Phetasy. You seem to be able to publish your way into chaos or some sort of furor. It's about an annual cadence, I think, that you're able to do this. It's not intentional for the record.

It is always surprising because I publish all the time. So it's always surprising when the pieces that take off are always somewhat surprising to me because it feels like when I write them, they always feel, I feel a little bit self-conscious about them because they're a little more personal and they're a little more navel gazey. And it's not, you know, journalism or looking outward

and analyzing the culture war in some kind of smart way. A lot of my, I don't know, they're not co-workers, the people who- Contemporaries, maybe. Contemporaries, thank you. They do. It's always wild to me. A year ago, I think almost exactly, it was the slut. I regret being a slut. a year ago, I think almost exactly. It was the slut. I regret being a slut. And then just recently, it was about how I just was like, divorce never ends. I didn't, again, these are two things that feel like very common sentiments and not, you know, statements that aren't, I don't think they're like, oh my God, but for some reason people go bonkers.

Your groundbreaking policy implications of divorce might not be great and you know, it might not be great. Yeah, it's not, these feel like statements normies make and then for some reason they don't, when you make them in public, they suddenly take on this weird life of their own, but I guess the different thing about the divorce piece in public, they suddenly take on this weird life of their own.

I guess the different thing about the divorce piece was that I was talking about how even as an adult, and it's something I didn't have to really, I don't think I had a child the last time we talked. So it's something that I never even had to consider until I had a child. I've seen my siblings deal with it, just how divorce reverberates into your life forever, even when you have children, because now there are all these different sets of grandparents, and you're trying to juggle, and they won't often be in the same room together, and you're still managing the emotions of your parents, even 20, 30 years after they got divorced. And again, I don't think this is something,

groundbreaking or revolutionary. All of my girlfriends and I in group chats are always like, the boomers, these effing boomers. So I don't think it's a, it was, but it really like struck a deep chord in the American psyche. What's your thesis on divorce? struck a deep chord in the American psyche. What's your thesis on divorce?

I basically was saying in this piece, it's forever and don't take it lightly because I think there's been, with the normalization of divorce, I'm Gen X, so my generation, I believe, has experienced the most divorce of any of the generations and the divorce rates actually going down I'm not exactly sure if that's because marriage rates are also going down, but I Think there was this idea that kids are resilient. They'll be fine

You don't need to stay in a loveless marriage. And I'm not talking about abuse. A lot of people were saying, oh, this is you saying you should stay with a psycho or an alcoholic, which I would never advocate for. And I say that in the piece and it's just a willful misinterpretation of what I'm writing about. I'm saying, okay, maybe you're having problems and you have kids. I don't care if you don't really have kids, particularly if you have kids. Try and make an effort because they've done a lot of studies on the intra-family conflict, particularly among parents.

If the parents are yelling and screaming, which is abuse, and they're telling each other they hate each other and they want them to die, obviously that's bad for a child. If the parents are in a somewhat loveless marriage, but they can coexist peacefully, even if it might not be better for the parents, it's still generally what they've found better for kids in the long run. A lot of people might argue that and people who have, a lot of people came out and said, I wish my parents had been divorced, but I think just from a practical, it's easy to say that if you've never had to experience

the actual practical, just logistics of dealing with parents who are divorced, which are a nightmare. I wonder if we're gonna see more of a pushback against divorce by the kids of Gen X, given that they're going to be the ones that will have experienced it firsthand more. The kids of Gen X? Yeah, so your generation's children.

Our generation, I don't know if our generation is the most divorced. I think we experienced the most divorce because, because the boomers are the highest generation of divorce and they actually keep going up because they're on marriages two, three, four. Um, so they seem to be increasing with time. I think our generation did experience a pushback, but mostly we were much more wary about getting into marriages in the first place or didn't really take marriages as... Look, I've been married before, so I'm not saying this is some, I'm on my second marriage.

My husband and I, my first husband and I never had kids. So when you get divorced and you don't have kids or property or anything, we shared nothing. I think we shared a bank account. It's very easy. It's like a more complicated breakup that you have to involve the state in. It's not, more complicated breakup that you have to involve the state in.

You can be like, all right, well, that didn't work. Bye. That was pretty much how that went. If you have children, it's a very different thing. Property and lots of extended family and friends, it's completely different. I think my generation, and what I realized even from my very simple first divorce was that I underestimated the seriousness of marriage because my parents got out of being married very quickly with five children.

It just seemed like they were like, all right, well, we tried. We went to one therapist and they had five kids under the, and I do think people try and it's tough because everyone's going to tell themself that they needed to get divorced. So my whole point in my piece was just don't lie to yourself. Like don't lie to yourself. Like don't lie to yourself that it's gonna be very hard for your kids.

And it's never going to end in terms of it being not necessarily challenging. It's not like I'm still crying about this at night, but it's still gonna have like a, even these adults who get divorced don't necessarily get over it in their lifetime or suffer consequences of it. It's not just their kids, but that's all.

I was just like, don't lie to yourself, but oh boy. What are the unforeseen consequences of divorce? Are the ones that might not be immediately apparent to people? or the ones that might not be immediately apparent to people? I think it really depends on how the divorce goes too, because some people can do this conscious uncoupling where they're still friends and they manage to pull it off. I would not say it's the norm. Normally when people are getting divorced, there's animosity between the two people

who are divorcing one another and it can get ugly. My generation was a generation that, you know, there was testifying in courts against one parent or another and I think that those are the kinds of consequences that you don't foresee in terms of how it's going to play out in the long run in terms of your relationship with your children and how that affects their view of marriage. If you enter other non-biological people into the equation, now you're talking

about exponentially raising the chances that you or your children in particular are going to suffer some kind of abuse, whether it's physical, emotional, sexual. That's another thing that a lot of people don't foresee or underestimate or downplay. A lot of people in my mentions were like, I had a great stepfather. It's like, cool. That's not necessarily the regular great. Good for you.

I'm glad that that was your experience. Statistically, it doesn't always go that way. And I think another unforeseen consequence is just how, I mean, maybe they do foresee it, but you spend so much, you get so much less time with your kids and your grandkids because now their time is split between, instead of coming home for Christmas to see everyone, you're choosing between a parent or you're going every other

or you're splitting between a parent or you're going every other or you're splitting the vacation in half or I mean some of the some of the arrangements for kids sound absolutely bonkers you know switching every other week to a parent's house and by the way the thing that people don't really take into consideration either is that when you're a family unit and the kids come home, if you're good parents, you're going to try and put aside whatever is going on for the sake of your children so that they're coming into a relatively stable emotional environment. If you're a kid going back and forth between two households, as the kids these days would

say, you're kind of code switching constantly depending on what you're walking into because you haven't been with that parent. You don't have that long daily knowledge that you have of their ups and downs and where they are. You just enter into wherever they are. Maybe dad had a bad week at work and he's fighting with his new girlfriend that you haven't met yet, but you sense that they're around because you're not an idiot.

And then you go back home and there's a lot of still jealousy that occurs between people when they break up and the other people start dating. It's tough on kids. It's just tough. I hope I will. It's something my husband and I both come, and then when you both come from divorce, when you're in a marriage, another unforeseen consequence,

you get divorced, you think, oh, my kids are resilient. They'll be fine, whatever. They marry someone who's also divorced. Now, again, exponentially, the time is split. Like my daughter has four sets of grandparents, you know? It's great for her in terms of toys, but it's crazy trying to juggle like, all right, what are we doing for Thanksgiving?

We want her to know these people. They're her blood relatives and they love her, but it would be a heck of a lot easier if it was just two households and not four all over America. And this is a very common situation for many, many people apparently. I mean, my comments were heartbreaking on that piece. What did you learn? were heartbreaking on that piece. What did you learn? I learned a lot. I mean, really what happens with these pieces

that go like this, the same thing happened with the slut piece. And I think I've been doing this long enough that I know the rhythm of it. It's like the first wave, the reason they go big is you kind of get this, it's just a wave of people going, thank you for saying this. get this, it's just a wave of people going, thank you for saying this.

Thank you, this was my experience. People were saying they, in my DM, saying that they were, that it made them cry, because I talked about what it was like as a child of divorce when my parents got divorced. And when I wrote this, I'm telling you, Chris, this is the fastest I've ever written anything in my life. I'm generally, I can bust out, I write all the time.

But this hoard threw me, like it was, like I was being channeled. I was like- It's like an open vessel. It was wild. I sat down, I looked at my husband, I'm like, I really could have written a book about this, an entire book.

For my column in Spectator Magazine, this was for the magazine and then they put it online, which is the kind of system. And I think something gets lost in that medium translation, which we can talk about later. But this, you have, I have 850 words, so it's not much space to cover every nuance and intricacy of divorce. I just wrote it and when I was writing it, I really felt like I was there, like that kid's... I could smell my grandmother's house where we used to like rummage around

and look for spaghetti, raw spaghetti that we would eat. And I think people really, it triggered all of those memories for other people for lack of a better word that's been destroyed. It really was something that, you know, I was kind of joking with my husband. I'm like, I would have put a trigger alert on it, but GenX doesn't mess with that kind of nonsense.

And I learned just how many people had a similar experience or worse. The other thing that's unforeseen that I really have heard stories of and so many people in my mentions were talking about how they never knew where their father was buried because they had a bad relationship with the stepmother and then when their father died they didn't even know it, nor do they even know where their father is buried.

I read some version of this story more than once. Can you imagine? I mean, it's like... This sort of weird stepmother is the gatekeeper to your relationship with your own biological father now. Yeah, yep, yep. And this is very common, very, very common with these weird dynamics with people.

And then a lot of people were just talking about this being shuffled around, being moved around, split places, always never really living kind of out of a suitcase or a bag, never. And then the other one that was really interesting was people whose parents were like the kind of multiple marrying people and half siblings, step siblings, you know, this is very, very common. And I think it, so that's always the first wave.

Same with the, I regret being a slut piece. It was just lots of people like, thank you for saying this. I've always felt this way and didn't know how to say it and it does last forever and I'm still dealing with my parents and how they won't get together. You have a recital for your child and you want the parents to be there but one of them won't come because they hate the other one's guts or whatever. And not to mention financially, resource-wise, how you're splitting resources that would just go down one bloodline. Now it does not go that way at all. I think it puts the kids at a disadvantage in so many ways. The other thing that happens then is you get the after the initial like, thank you for

saying this is the blowback. And it's funny because in an X now you can see it in the way you can respond to a tweet. So the original tweet, by the way, it's psycho that this went viral because it was during the post debate in Sanitary where we weren't sure if we were going to even have our president the day before the 4th of July when everyone's kind of checked out. I woke up didn't have coffee was like I wrote about divorce thinking nothing of it. And then my friends were like you're trending on Twitter your piece for like two days.

It was it was bonkers. So that that is just unexpected and weird. And people usually now I've noticed on ex formerly Twitter, they will comment if they kind of are like, thank you for writing this. I agree. Oh my gosh. The pylon comes in the quote tweets. That's where you start seeing the like blowback.

The blowback is on top. The quote tweets are people who are listening and don't know. You can take a tweet and basically quote tweet it so you would editorialize or write your own perspective on top of the tweet. It's like creating a whole new tweet out of, instead of being in the comments, you're essentially starting your own new conversation. It also pushes it to your audience specifically as opposed to the originator's audience. Exactly. Lining that up.

So you, you, uh, compartmentalize it off and you go, Hey, people that like me, here's a person that maybe we don't like. you should all talk about it, but their audience that might support them won't see it. So it's a, it's a bit of a, it's a bit of a snide, uh, tactic in that way. So what did, what was the pushback? I'm sure there's lots of people who fucking whatever, more than 50% of marriages ended in divorce. More than 50% of people who've been married listening to this podcast

very well may have been divorced. So what, what was the criticism that you got? I mean, it was a lot. It's funny, this is when being married to a brilliant therapist is so helpful because Jaren, my husband, could just look at most of these comments. He's like, this is all projection. He's like, we live in the most narcissistic time when no one can just read something and say,

how is my experience? It's okay that my experience wasn't reflected. And everyone looks at it and they say, they have to be like, well, my experience wasn't reflected in this piece. This wasn't written about me. Yeah, exactly. You didn't address my nuanced experience

of decoupling my marriage. Cause now there's this thing like nesting where you keep the house and the kids don't have to shuffle back and forth. But the parents have like crash pads elsewhere essentially. So one parent, it sounds insane to me. I don't know. I was talking to Luis.

Let me give you a step up from that. So Neil Strauss came on a couple of months ago. Neil had his first kid with his first or second wife, I think. Then they divorced after they had the kid. He tried a lot of things. He'd worked through the stuff, but still they just couldn't make it work. And he came to the conclusion that they are great co-parents, but terrible husband and wife.

So they are having a second child as a divorced couple. So they've divorced. Okay. One kid, they're no longer living together, but they know that they're good at co-parenting, so they decided to have a second child now. That's wild. No, I've never heard of that. I've heard a lot of the stories I did hear from writing this piece were parents who got

divorced and then got back together, which is also wild. This is something I've heard. They get divorced, they have other marriages in some cases, and then they end up back together later in life, which would be wild as an adult child. Especially if you have the kids. It's like, all right, so you managed to have me, leave my own for a decade,

and then just as I was sufficiently old, stuck after myself, you get back together and everything's hunky dory. Fuck you. Yeah, and then the kids are supposed to just be like, cool. Like mom and dad are back together. So I'll get rid of this trauma then. Yeah.

We'll just forget that happened. Yeah, that's another common story. Louise Perry and I were talking about this and she was saying, you know, if you can like co-parent like that, if you can, if you are cool and you know, okay enough to share a house and nest or whatever they call it,

it seems like you should be able to work the marriage out, but I don't know, maybe it is just like new sex. People just get bored and want new sex, wanna have new partners and stuff like that. Though the interesting thing about, go on, you were gonna say something. No, I was just more interested in, I was trying to think about all of the different types

of pushback, because I imagine there must have just been- So many. Endless. An endless listening of them, yeah. Well, because everybody, as I mentioned, you're gonna reverse engineer a justif... We all justify what we do, you know? Especially some... Yeah, especially you're gonna reverse engineer

the reason you got divorced, even if it was a minor kind of lame reason to get divorced. And people have really stuck it through. The other thing that was interesting was people who thought about getting divorced and saw through infidelity, all kinds of really gnarly things, addiction, stuff that people really hung in there in the marriage for the kids or for their own marriage. And on the other side of it, felt stronger, better than ever and grateful that they made

that effort, although it was extremely hard and painful to face infidelity and all of those things can be devastating. And I got a lot of pushback. It was interesting, there was a lot of women who I would say it felt like they were coping a bit. And statistically, women initiate the divorce. Now, more often than men. Now, I don't know if that's just because men,

I think, are oftentimes, they don't really realize how bad it is for a woman until it's too late, because by the time a woman's like, okay, fine, I'm done, I've been asking you for seven years to like do the XYZ, I've been saying to you, we need changes, you haven I'm done. I've been asking you for seven years to like do the XYZ. I've been saying to you, we need changes. You haven't heard me. And then a woman says, fine, I'm done.

And the guy says, no, no, no, no, no. I'm gonna change. But she's done. Like for a woman to even get to that point, I think it's hard for her to go back. So I feel like this is maybe just a difference in the way the sex is. That's definitely one of the things

that is kind of counterintuitive, being accused of being a part of the manosphere whilst being wholeheartedly rejected by it and me rejecting it. One of the common talking points is women are sort of so quick to move on, especially from marriage, and they'll happily take 50% of everything that you've got and all the rest of it. And just my real world, touch and grasp experience of chicks in relationships

is that they will put up with a lot of shit. Yeah. They are blindly bound to guys that are not worth, not in the first instance, you know, getting, getting through the door, uh, they may have quite high standards, but fucking hell, once that companionate system sets in and women are kind of attached, I've seen, I've seen women stick with friends and, and, and partners and stuff that I would have expected all, like a ton of reasons for them to have left, but both fair and unfair.

And yet, like a William Wallace soldier in a war, that just stood there with blue paint, face paint on going, hold, hold, and they're doing it. And I think, God, look at the resilience that these chicks have against a shitty relationship. How far, and again, some people are much more fickle than others, how far must these divorces have gone

to have broken that level of attachment? And I do, I agree, and I don't think that you can say in one argument they will say, women can't sleep like men, they get attached easier, and then say, oh, they're fickle and they'll just leave you and take 50%. It's like, it can't really be both guys. It can't.

Alex States like put a post out the other day talking about how there's an odd correlation between the people that deny the IQ is either real or useful, but also believe that EQ is real and useful. I love those. It's very true. I know I'm stupid because I don't care about IQ and the people who are,

the people who are, it's like the only time I ever hear about IQ, it's from super smart people and they're kind of obsessed with it. And then my husband and I were joking. We're like, we're idiots. Cause we, I was like, do you know your IQ? He's like, no, I've never cared about that.

I'm like, yeah, I don't know mine either. That's how I know I'm an idiot because everyone who's super smart knows their IQ. No one that's over 16% body fat knows their body fat percentage either. And it's only guys that are dialing in for this summer in Ibiza to wear a tiny pair of swim shorts that actually know their body fat.

To everyone else, it's just weight. It's the same with IQ. Yeah, I was thinking, I wonder, given the decreasing birth rate, the increasing number of, and the interesting insight about the decreasing birth rate, the increasing number of, and the interesting insight about the decreasing birth rate, it's not that mothers are having fewer children, it's that there are fewer mothers.

So the number of zeros is increasing. It's not, once you have one, you more than likely end up with two or three or four. It's the number of women who don't become mothers at all. That is the cohort that's growing at largest. So given that we have declining marriage, but not declining as quickly as the birth rate. So you have more married non-mothers than ever before.

Which means that a lot of the people that will be talking about this discussion with you will actually be stood on the sidelines talking about divorce as someone who isn't invested in the childhood portion. So they'll be saying, well, what's the problem with divorce, the relationship, we can break things out kind of like you and your first divorce. It seems to me that for you, pretty much the entire argument is not built around what it does to you and the partner outside of kids.

It's exclusively, how does this impact the relationship of your kids and then your grandkids going down? So I just wonder how many people that commented are not really players on the field of this particular type of the game. Does that make sense? Yes. I think a lot of the pushback came from women, as I was saying, who are coping, but I do think they had kids.

And I think it's again, this is where my husband was like, these, this is people who are feeling guilty or ashamed, or they feel like you're attacking them for making this decision, which I'm not because nobody knows a relationship other than the two people who are in the bed. You just don't. And I'm not gonna, people were like, oh, you're such a busybody telling people they can't get divorced.

It's the lack of reading comprehension for some reason that drives me the most bananas. I can handle the pushback, I can handle the criticism. I can handle all of that. It's the willful misrepresentation or complete lack of just reading something that's not even being stated that drives me bananas. My husband always has to talk me down off the ledge and be like, he's like, Bridget, this is also part of it. Like being- You married the right guy.

You married the guy with the skills. He's just so, he's so well adjusted. You know, he's like not impressed with fame, not impressed with, he's just not, he's malice, oh, he says this about him. He's like, he just doesn't, he's like, I know your husband does not suffer fools, online or off. He's very good at looking at something extremely rationally, even to

sometimes my own irritation, and kind of pointing out that this is a lot of projection. Everything online is projection. So much of it is just, we're just, we do it, but I, and I try to be very conscious of it, but so much, most of everything online is just people projecting their own stuff as a reaction to whatever they're taking in. I feel personally attacked by that particular thing that I just read. I need to defend my position.

This, I remember when I was first, first getting into personal development remember when I was first getting into personal development stuff and I was driving to some Northern town to go and run one of our club nights with a few thousand 18 year olds all fingering each other and drinking alcohol pops. And I was driving down and I was trying to,

I was trying to become an awakened individual. So I was listening to Eckhart Tolle's, The Power of Now. He got this really interesting insight stuck in me. This must be like maybe 10 years old or something. And he says, the reason that we don't like to admit that we're wrong is that it's tantamount to the ego being destroyed. Totally.

To kind of create this sphere, this very sort of neat round ball, and that's us. And as long as it's nice and neat and round, we don't need to worry about lots of other things. But if we, if one of the assumptions that we have about the world is proven to be untrue or misguided, well, what does that do for the rest of my world view? Right.

What if, what if my perspective on immigration and on birth control and on how to raise a child and on politics, what if all of that comes crumbling down too? And I always remember that the, to the ego, it is tantamount to destruction. And I think that, yeah, a lot of it is defensive. And how many times you see this, you feel this, like you read something and you go, ah, this visceral need to defend yourself against this unseen jury, which doesn't even exist. But you just want to not have your worldview besmirched or pushed back against because it's scary for what that means for the rest of you. I remember that this is essentially what happened to me and how I kind of got caught in the crossfire of the culture wars

and why I say that I was a libtard because I was never like an ideologue or an activist. I didn't go to college and have some worldview installed in my head. I just was like, I'm a Democrat because they're better the end. And I never had to think about it. So like I say, I kind of fell asleep in a self-driving car when I came to analyzing anything. And when I started writing for Playboy, and my audience was very red-blooded American male, I was mouthing off about a school shooting and the gun debate. And my audience, my new audience of red-blooded American males who are, you know, generally

armed or at least have more knowledge about this, they came at me so hard and I stopped and I was like, you know what? I know nothing about this. I actually know, I don't know how to hold a gun. Aside from knowing nothing about guns, I don't know. I couldn't identify a gun. If you put three guns in front of me, I couldn't tell you which was which. I don't know how hard it is to get a gun in California. I knew nothing. That was really the beginning of me recognizing.

It was like a house of cards. Wow, if I'm this uninformed and ignorant and spouting my mouth off about this, what else is there? Yeah. So that ego destruction thing, finally a little fissure crack appeared in the side of it and everything just fell apart. I mean, what a great, what a wonderful experience for you to go through and to do that through work as well though. You know, to have done this thing and then for it to have sort of cracked you open and you go,

fuck, on the other side of this is maybe a better version of my worldview. In many ways, I have grown up in public in a small way. It's not like I'm a child star. It's more like when I started, this is the story I want to write. It's the book I want to write because I don't think I'm alone in this happening either, just this idea of being quote unquote, red-pilled.

But I do think a lot of people have started questioning everything that they were kind of raised to assume or brought up to believe or right, left, center, whatever. We just live in that. I think it's actually good until you start going down rabbit holes and you become so open-minded your brain falls out. This was something that you see with hippies and liberals, but now you see it everywhere.

And in many ways, when I started this, I was writing at Playboy, I was single, I had just got sober, which I was saying to my husband, we talk about this a lot. I look at people who are really certain of their beliefs, their ideas, they come into the world with this sense of authority. I'm like, do you think that we aren't like that because we're addicts and recovery? And like, I just don't underestimate my ability to lie to myself. It's never, I've been, I'm always suspicious of it. You know, I'm suspicious of-

Me too. We are from the same camp and maybe I'm suspicious of it because I'm low key jealous that I don't have it. Yeah. But yeah, I mean, I think about this so much that fluency and certainty are a proxy for truthfulness and insight. So it's not that you necessarily need to know more. It's that you sound like you know more because you're not caveating. So for instance, good example of this Peter Zian geopolitics guide, you know who that is? I know the name.

It's like Zahan, Z-E-I-H-A-N. He's been on Rogan, he's been on my show, he's been on Sam Harris. Me, Sam, and Rogan, and maybe tons of other people that he's been on too, all said the same thing about him retrospectively, which is he's the most certain man that I've ever met, ever, ever. Nothing's caveated, it seems to be this way.

It appears as though projections would suggest that it's, we know what's going to happen with fertilizer rates in Russia by 2050 and, and this is what's happening with the Chinese, uh, military in and around the South China Sea and blah, blah, blah. I'm like, I'm fucking blown away by this guy. I think it might be, the level of knowledge that I would need to reach in order for me to be that certain about anything

would be so obscene. It would be so high that I think, well, he has to know what he's talking about. My inherent uncertainty and self-doubt is so strong that in order for me to speak with his degree of sort of certainty, I would have to know everything. So of course he knows everything. And it's the same for, but there is a bit of like, huh, I feel like there's reliability in caveating and in a little bit of sort of standoffishness too. So yeah, that was, that's a really interesting insight. Is he right?

Like is his track record of, of being correct about things? I would love someone to do an article comparing those because I can't be bothered to do the firsthand research myself, but a lot of the projections are a little bit further out ahead. Uh, so it's stuff to do the first-hand research myself, but a lot of the predictions are a little bit further out ahead. So it's stuff to do with like 2030, 2050. So they may bear fruit, but I mean, he's got a rabid, he was very, his candor was amazing. His insights are fantastic.

But when you're talking about predictions, you know, what is it about the retraction always gets less attention than the observation type thing. Right, right. I wonder, we had this idea the other day, how cool would it be if someone made a website where all of the biggest online commentators, whether it's independent media, mainstream media

or whatever, that all of their predictions and proclamations were held like on chain somehow. So you could go back and see what did, what did like fucking John Stewart actually say during COVID? What did he as Morgan actually think during BLM? Because so many people are trying to retro perspective. And, you know, I mean, Jason Calacanis from the All In podcast, if you know who that is, All In is kind of like fresh and fit for tech bros.

Kallakannis from the All In podcast, if you know who that is. All In is kind of like fresh and fit for tech bros. And he was so ardent. So like people that haven't got the vaccine need to lose their jobs. We need to lock them in their house, masks, masks, masks, masks. And now, so he got all of the sort of lib, empathetic social justice acclaim of being part of that when it was cool. And now that everyone retrospectively kind of sees that as really cringe and a bit stupid and anti-science.

He gets all of the acclaim of being like, yeah, you know, COVID absolutely overblown, it's not really where we need to be at. That Biden's stupid and Fauci and blah. You go, dude, you don't get to speak, like at least issue a fucking, like, I'm an idiot and I will always be an idiot for having done that thing if I want to now be on this side of the fence or I get to stick to my good. You don't get to do both things. Yeah.

Imagine how frustrating that is for people like myself who have been screaming that Biden is not fit and being told that I'm a right-wing bigot for it, and now the entire left-wing media apparatus is saying it, it's infuriating because there were real social costs for many of us pushing back against gender, pushing back against COVID, lockdowns, pushing, so for people to kind of be able to retroactively. We were just, I was talking about this with someone recently about how it's very strange the time we live in because the internet is forever and yet we live in this ever present now of the internet.

So even though there's records of everything that people have said, you can still just be as shameless as you want to be. Just blowing with the wind. Because it doesn't matter. Just blowing with the wind. It's so strange to me. It's so strange.

Many people are much more blowy than others. Yeah. I've always had such a, and I'm sure that I've been, I've fallen foul of it myself too, but I've always had such distaste for people that have been ardent about one position and then in retrospect have taken another one. If nothing else, because you took up my precious life, my mind share, reading that bullshit four years ago that you now don't agree with, like you should apologize to me, apologize to me and my sanity for my favorite one of this was,

you remember when those tanks were going through Miami South Beach and everyone was like, this is it, martial law is going to be enforced. People are going to be held in their homes at gunpoint. And it was just, it was like tanks going from one place to another place. Like it was just fucking in a military convoy of some kind. It was a photo in the UK of a single squaddy army guy walking down a street of London that was forwarded many times on WhatsApp. I've just got a message from my brother who says that the army are

going to be and they're going to hold people in the houses at gunpoint. None of this happened. Fucking global health passports, vaccine, all of that stuff. Like it was, it Klaus Schwab is coming tomorrow to insert this directly into your back passage. This, you're going to be boofing it for the rest of your life. This is exactly what's going to happen. And I go, well, what happened to all of that? Yeah. And I'm fine for that to be your position, but at least go, well, it was

because they knew that we knew so they couldn't do it because of how hard we pushed back, oh yeah, Klaus Schwab's really listening to your dad on Facebook. That's what that was the fucking vanguard of, of resistance was that in an Andrew Tate emergency meeting, that's really what calls Klaus Schwab to fucking stop doing this thing. If you're going to blow with the wind, that's fine, but admit the fact that you were wrong publicly and it's good for your soul. It's fucking good for your soul and it's good for your ego.

Cause it's not that scary to go, Hey, I, I held a position about hormonal birth control. I thought it was pro. I learned a bit of stuff. I said, no, I held a position about what I thought should be done for a gene embryo selection, uh, for polygenic risk scores. I didn't think that it was a good idea. Now I'm like, okay, I've changed my position on that too.

I thought epigenetics was bullshit. I learned a little bit more publicly. I was like, look, I'm fucking, and I'm not the savant of this. I also don't have that many interesting ideas. So I guess I don't need to apologize for that much. But if you're gonna be gregarious, you need to fucking say sorry every so often. Yeah, I wrote a piece of what I got wrong in 2020,

which was a lot. I like writing these. I like taking stock of this stuff. I was on Rogan when he said that there was gonna be a red wave like when the elevators open and the shining, which was not true. And so that clip went viral and I was very wrong about that.

I've publicly on Dumpster Fire many times said I was fine even though people were like, no, we shouldn't shut everything down. I was like, ah, what's two weeks? Really underestimating how you should never give the government that kind of power ever. And I was wrong and I've many times said I was wrong about this. I think it's important and good. I'm also in better practice of that because I'm in recovery. So getting sober again.

I'm wrong on a daily basis. Yeah. Admitting that you're admitting like having to do amends, having to go sit in front of people and having to take stock of all your resentments and having to look at that kind of self inventory is so powerful and important and liberating. And it's also good for me to do because I really thought Trump was going to win. I thought for sure in 2020. I thought for sure, I thought for sure in 2022, there would be a red wave because I thought people

would be pushing back against COVID. Turns out people kind of agreed with their governments and what they did and they were very focused on the now, which at that moment was Roe v. Wade being overturned. And I underestimated as I was joking on Dumpster Fire last week, how much bitches love abortions. No one watches Dumpster Fire, Chris. I know no one watches.

Everyone can go and subscribe to Dumpster Fire. Everybody should because it is actually amazing. The crap we've been getting away with for like five years. Oh, right. So you're flying, you're flying into the rain. We fly. I mean, look, going back to something that I've seen you talk about a good bit.

It's, this is something that I'm really, really bad at. I'm unbelievably bad at working out what the standard normie Western person knows. Or more specifically, what do I know and take as well, well-spread fact that most normal people that aren't terminally online don't? Right. And to say that Joe Biden's mental state is a revolutionary insight, worthy of

news to me, it was so, it was so old. It was cringe to bring it up. Yeah. Like I've, I've referred to people that do Biden has dementia jokes as it's like the boomer humor of the last three years. It's like, yeah, of course that's, but you know what I mean?

Like it's like, okay, we get it. Like, but it's easy. It's clap to, but it's kind of old hat, right? Like it's not fucking revolutionary. Biden's Biden's not been, but then you're like, oh, but it is on display for the whole world. You go, ah, maybe I was being a bit too judgmental about that. Maybe we did need to push the narrative a bit more.

So one of the things that I love about doing standup and why I'm so happy to be back doing it is you get that tangible normy feedback immediately. So I've been doing this joke about how I'm a geriatric mommy. I had a baby at 43. I'm like, they used to call these geriatric pregnancies. Obviously, that fell out of fashion because clearly women love that. No, they hated it. I'm like, it sounds like your uterus moved to a retirement Florida, whatever.

And then the next joke after that is essentially, I'm like, no, they've changed it to something less offensive, which is geriatric birthing person. And you get it, but normies don't get it. I'm like, oh, so now it's just me finding out who's terminally online and an audience. I don't even think I can do the joke anymore. There's one guy over the far side that's got a Reddit account. Yeah, exactly. I was like, I thought this was common knowledge. They've literally changed the language in like the White House has changed the language and in bills and shit to birthing

person. I thought this was something that was common, you know, like the common, the knowledge of the common. And it is absolutely not. I've done that joke in many different venues and it's like, I just have to abandon it or it's going to be something that I need in five years time. Exactly. Exactly. It's one of those things where I'm like, wow, people don't know that this is like a thing I'm too, I'm too online. I just spend too much time online.

I asked Mike Solano about this and I know that you've been tracking this too. I'm particularly interested in kind of what the main factions of the culture war are now, like what happens to the anti-woke, fewer woke things to push back against because most normies are kind of in agreement with your position in any case. And this sort of first mover advantage of having crazy social justice positions has sort of been lost quite a bit, I think. So how are you, how do you conceive of the troop positions on the map of the culture war?

Yeah, that's interesting. I've been talking to, there's a lot of journalists who have been asking me my opinion about this as well, who are trying to write articles and figure out, because Austin does seem to be in particular this, it's a weird, like very liberal, but also it's, you know, there's this kind of joke about Austin, keep Austin weird, but keep Austin surrounded. So it's, you know, there's this kind of joke about Austin, keep Austin weird,

but keep Austin surrounded. So it's still in Texas. It's still surrounded by red. There's a lot of people who I think are moving who are purple or red, you know, center right. I'm not sure because I do think in many ways, comedians held the line throughout a lot of this. There was a moment where it was like, oh, you know, you can't say anything. People, it was very strong. There was a strong push to silence people. I think Elon taking over X has, you know,

been another massive win for being, it's just opened things up a lot. They're in the past four years, there's a lot more infrastructure for that dissident left or whatever you wanna call it, anti-woke. They've created their own institutions. You see trigonometry in UK, you see Free Press in the United States,

Glenn Greenwald is pivot, all these people kind of perfectly timed their pivot out of Trump years into Biden years with the push back against the anti-woke. Now I think a lot of it depends on what happens in this upcoming election. I think as much as the normie view is better represented, Shane Gillis is massive. There's the Killtonys- Shane Gillis is the fucking pinnacle of the normies. Is that what you think? No, I think Killton mean, Kill Tony's huge

and I feel like that's a direct reaction to, people are like, I don't want it to be like, oh, you can still say retard and gay, but there is something kind of free speech about, I'm like, some of us never stopped. That was the, the word retard and gay, that was the like absolute water line. Yeah. And the Overton window has dipped below and back out of it a couple of times.

It's sort of been doing this for a little while. He said, okay, this week it's okay. Last week, next week it's not so good. So I think that seeing those trends, like there's definitely been a reaction. I also think that when you have things like Roe v. Wade being overturned, then you get this, I don't know, it's weird because I feel very much like this, in this politically homeless, like just, there's a recent study that somebody was posting online about how they're finding more and more independents are polarized

and that they hate both sides. It used to be that they would just be like, whatever, I don't belong in either place. And now they actively disdain both sides with the same kind of fervor that the right hates the left or vice versa, which is interesting to me. And I feel like sometimes I'm like a weathervane. Like I can sense which way. No, you're the dissident middle. Yeah, I can sense which way the vibe is shifting. And that's why I was so surprised when Trump didn't win.

But again, like I said in the piece I wrote about what I got wrong, that just speaks to my own bubble that I'm in and my own echo chamber. As much as I like to try and consume a lot of media from all sides, I'm still surrounded by a certain type of person. But now it feels like more and more, I'm shocked at how many people openly, you couldn't joke about voting for Trump

even like two years ago, and now comedians will come out on stage and announce that they are. It's definitely, you kind of had to hide being a Trump supporter, and I don't see that. I was at a barbecue and everyone was openly talking about how they're going to vote for Trump. And these are people who are not prior Republicans or MAGA.

Well, there's a big difference between saying that Biden's lame and saying that you'd vote for Trump. And there's a lot, there's a lot of people that are stuck in that middle ground at the moment, because you need to be a very sort of particular kind of person to be, I stand with Joe, but he's our guy to do this thing. Either one of them. You fucking introduced president of Vladimir Zelensky as president Putin, referred to Kamala Harris as vice president Trump.

You know, the guy, it's, it's almost like someone's writing these lines. Yeah. To, to purposefully do this. And yeah, I mean, conspiracy theories about what the democratic party is trying to do abound. There's lots of, it's very easy. It's a very easy position, a totally costless position to say Biden's not fit for duty. Absolutely costless position. And you can do that and then still end up voting for him. Yeah.

Which you can say, look, you know, he's better than the other guy because the other guy. Totally. Orange man bad. So total like dickless position to hold largely from that. Okay, well, what are you suggesting that happens? Ah, that's when the rubber meets the road. That's a really good point that it is like a totally dickless position

because I do think at least Trump supporters are supporters. You know, like they're at least like for something. Not, it's not like a negative. At least now, most of the Biden supporters are simply anti-Trump supporters. Right, right. Which fair enough, I mean, I kind of find it darkly amusing to watch everyone have to defend

either one of these people. And there's just such an irony to me that if they weren't running Biden, the nonstop thing they'd be harping on other than everything else about Trump would be his age. If they had somebody, that's what's so funny to me. Like you can't even go after Trump for his age because you have someone running who's older than him.

But if you had someone young, I guarantee this would be a large portion of your platform as you try and get persuadable voters on your side. It's one of those really strange things. Ageism is one of the few, uh, type of fucking, is it a type of bigotry? I don't know. Types of discrimination, uh, that kind of gets to slide under the radar. You can kind of talk about people's age. You can do it in a tactless way. That'll get a bit of pushback.

If you talk about a woman's age with regards to the way that she looks. Like that tactless way that will get a bit of pushback. If you talk about a woman's age with regards to the way that she looks, like that'll get you a bit of pushback. But if you talk about somebody being old or being past it or whatever, it seems to kind of just be like, yeah, we know that that's the way that entropy works and I'm slowly declining toward the grave and it'll happen to all of us.

And it's kind of like a weird type of equality in a way that everybody is going to be, it would be like if everybody started off white and was going to end up black. You're like, well, you know, you were racist when you were younger, but everybody's gonna be black when they get old.

So you know what I mean? You just reminded me of this guy came up to me after my set and he was really drunk, I think on drugs. And he's like, I'm moving back to Japan. He was this Asian guy. And on drugs. He's like, I'm moving back to Japan. He was this Asian guy. We were talking to my comedy friend and I were like, oh, why? He's like, I don't know. I've been in Texas and it's so racist here and I just don't know if I can do it anymore. Then he's like, but I'm like white when I go to Japan, so it's great.

I was like, do you even? oh, so you like racism when it worked for you? Like it was, it was the I couldn't stop laughing. I'm like, this is amazing. No concept of what he said at all. Like in the same breath, I was like, this is unbelievable and amazing. So yeah. So all right. So round out for me your position or whatever your predictions are on what do people who have made a career out of being anti-woke do when there's no more, or there's a less woke to push back against? Um, like me? No, I've always, it's funny, I talk about politics, but I really consider myself

more of like a lifestyle brand because I just want people to get out of their own way and laugh while the world is burning and not take themselves so seriously. My little Buddha quote today, my daily reading was all about reducing self-importance and I just love that. It's like that there's something so humbling about having to constantly do that. And I do think putting yourself out there in the way that you do and I do, I don't know, maybe you're not,

but I'm constantly humbled by something dumb I said, something dumb I find that I used to believe or say. I mean, you're in the arena. I'm not- I'm regularly humbled by how much smarter all of the guests are than me. Yeah, me too. I'm permanently the most stupid person in the room, which is nice.

That's good. So your ego hasn't been able to get out of the way too much. I don't know actually, because again, I think a lot of it is dependent on, like I guess what happens if Trump wins, you know, they can kind of go back to, that would be the best case scenario for the anti-Woke, because the left will go back to being completely insane. So I actually think it's been a worse time for people pushing back against the woke during Biden because

they, it's like people forget, I don't forget cause we documented it all on dumpster fire. People forget how bonkers everybody went during that time. And- Well, so is your insight that people on the left don't need to throw Hail Marys if they're the ones that are in power, but if they aren't need to throw Hail Marys if they're the ones that are in power, but if they aren't the ones that are in power, they sort of scrabble around and they try to get footholds in places where previously they wouldn't have needed to.

Yeah, and I think they're really, they really went, it really broke a lot of people's brains. It really just, they, and it will be, I don't, I'm not sure people are quite prepared for that if he does win, just how crazy the left will go. My question is, do they still hold, they still hold a lot of institutional power. So will they try to exercise that power in terms of, will censorship get worse? Will all these things that the anti-woke people

had to kind of fight against. Again, I don't know because now we have institutions that there's things are a lot more open this time around than they were previously. So I would hope that they would just hold the line and actually try and hold both parties accountable. You know, be calling out Trump for all of his insanity, calling out the left for their insanity,

create an actual institutional movement and power around the 70% of people who are fed up with all of this, which is like the exhausted majority. I think there's room for that if they can look to the future of what America needs, which is I do believe some of these institutions that haven't been completely captured. You just need someone who can call balls and strikes. Like, anyone, please. That's what I would hope for the anti-woke.

And I think the anti-woke did a pretty good job of pushing back against Trump. It's like we always got accused of going after the left more than the right. And they're like, why don't you go after Trump? It's like, oh, well there's, thank God. Yeah, cause no one's going after Trump. Like not every late night show, every news. That lane was very occupied,

but I would hope that they would, that's what I would hope is that you would kind of go, it wouldn't just be anti-woke. I think Constantine has written about the woke right, this kind of rise of the woke right. And I think we are just seeing that those forces of, totalitarianism and authoritarianism and wanting to control everything and everyone.

That's just human nature. That's, I think you have to, I would hope that people would just be gathering around free market, free speech, comedy, bettering ourself, find some ideals that we can kind of collectively get behind, try and find, there's not even like a, it's not really easy to even have a third party

run in America. I would love to see that. I would love to see the anti-woke people in institutions try and make it easier for somebody who's like a reasonable third party to really run and stand a chance because they don't really have, but there are a lot of forces working against that.

So. My Lord and savior RFK didn't manage to get on the debate ticket. Did you have him on? No, I haven't. I've been to a few dinners with him and stuff and he seems like a nice guy. I wonder how different that debate would have been if RFK had been on stage, the only guy with the worst voice than Biden.

That that's interesting. I'm glad he wasn't though, because we can actually down pretty much everything that was exposed from that. Yes. I think people needed to really see. I don't know. I still think he's going to run and I have been wrong about everything.

And so now I just assume that whatever I assume is going to be wrong. And I assume Trump will probably win just based on the vibes. But I'm guessing Biden's going to be our next president. The most hilarious situation is if Joe Biden's president come November. Like that's- Hilarious. Most fucking absurd situation for everybody to go through. Sunny bunch actually said the most absurd situation will be if Trump wins the popular vote and loses the electoral college. Dancing through the final days.

We all right. We never got to talk about your slut piece. We never got to talk about that article for the people that didn't get to read it. Can you explain what that was? I mean, it's a piece I had been trying to write for a long time, probably since 2017 and I posted it last August of 2023. So it was quite some years in the making, just trying to express it.

But when Louise Perry wrote her book about the case against the sexual revolution, it really put a frame around what I'd been trying to express. And a lot of people were having this very academic conversation. And it felt a little bit to me like, those sluts over there, those sluts over there, they regret it. A little detached, that academic detachment from something that they were all discussing. And I was like, slut here, reform slut here.

And I regret it. Looking back, I think that this is something I've been thinking a lot about. You don't know something's a cope until it's no longer a cope. Like there's no way out of it. You can't get out of the matrix of that. So I couldn't know that I was coping in many ways,

just trying to bolster up my ego and tape up my broken soul and demoralizing experiences by telling myself that I was empowered and I was this boss bitch and I was bad, a badass, taking the word slut and using it to be powerful, sleeping my way to empowerment as I've talked about before. Until I was in a loving relationship with a man who respected me and truly I feel like loves me unconditionally in many ways and in a way like I've never really experienced and until I it's

like the so another recent experience of this was having a child and I couldn't I didn't realize how much of my, like, I'm childless, I'm free, I don't have to, I don't have the family, like, I don't have the trappings of a family. How much of that was just me coping with not having this experience of being a mother, because you can't know that experience until you're actually a parent. So it's weird because what you don't know you don't know. And I think the sad thing for me about telling women that they can kind of sleep their way to empowerment, I think the most upsetting thing in the wake, like the comments and what I heard from that piece

was there's a high body count. And I'm not talking about the body count the Manosphere talks about. I mean, there's a lot of dead women in that wake in terms of women who got addicted to drugs, women who lost themselves in ways that were irreparable. I heard really harrowing stories from people about their moms, about women who really got lost

and just kind of lost their self-esteem and their confidence. From sleeping around? From sleeping around and then, yeah, and it's risky as a woman, you know, it's still high risk behavior to just be, especially if you're drinking and it's, the thing again about that piece is that I learned very early on in essay writing, don't burn more than one topic.

I would want to write everything and my editor would be like, don't burn more than one. When I was writing a weekly column, he'd be like, don't burn more than one topic in one column. You write a weekly column, save it. That piece I wrote specifically about my own experience of being a slut, why I regretted certain things about it. And there was a lot of other stuff that I didn't cover. It's hard for me to extract how much of that behavior was tied up in drinking and drug addiction.

Because those two things, what I've slept with, a lot of the people that I slept with, had I not been drunk or drinking or whatever, probably not. Which direction is the arrow of causation going? Probably not. I probably wouldn't- Which direction is the arrow of causation going? Right. And then it's like you try and bury those feelings of shame and waking up and not knowing where I was.

So how much of it is, you know, people rightfully pointed out, like, I don't drink and do drugs and I love being a slut. And maybe it was just that you were a drug addict, drunk, and that was the real problem, not the sluttiness. But I would, yeah, this is kind of like a chicken or an egg. I was sexually, I was raped when I was like 18. So how much of that hyper promiscuity comes on the heels of sexual abuse?

How much of it is just like, I'm also just a sexual person and it was never really healthy. I had, I was raised Catholic. So there was like a lot of weird stuff put in my head about sex before I even had sex. And I felt ashamed of it before I even had it. It's like, how do you untie all these things?

But again, this was another thing where I wrote about it and just this, the reaction from women and often gay men actually, I heard from shit loads of gay men who that piece resonated with, of just saying like, thank you for writing this, this was my experience. And I think again, it gets to something like, don't lie to yourself. I was lying to myself for so many.

And like I think a part of me, I think you always kind of know when you're lying to yourself somewhere, somewhere. And I think that I would just smoke a bowl or drink or go. And was some of it fun? Absolutely. This was something, what's her name? Ayla, Ay-ay-ay-ay? Ayla. Ayla, thank you.

I always mispronounce her name. Ayla was kind of, we ran into each other at this event and she was like, how much of this was just you reverse kind of engine, like just remembering this differently now that you're a mom and you have a kid? I'm like, well, I started writing this essay long before I was even in a relationship and had a kid. So that's kind of a moot point, but there are some

that I don't regret. Like there are some, you know, like sexual dalliances that were fun and flings and I don't regret them, but the vast majority of them, yeah, I'm mad that they ever, you know what also pointed this out was going on Rogan When I went on Rogan the amount of men who reached out to me and were like I was like, oh I fucked that girl I was like, oh my god, this is fucking horrible This is a problem with our being a slut who goes on Rog. Suddenly every fucking dude you had a one night stand with crawls out of the woodwork.

I can be in there. The women in your DMs. Four and a half foot table away from being Eskimo brothers with Joe Rogan and fucking nearly did it. Oh God. It was, that was, that was really the worst part of going on that podcast. It was just the guys were like, yeah, I was like, said to my mate, I fucked her once, I'm like, I regret this.

You're like an island just above Antarctica that's been claimed in the mid 1800s or something. See that over there? Went there. So gross. The Aila thing's interesting. Obviously she did that post about her birthday. Did you read that one?

I heard about it at a Shabbat dinner of all things. For the people that don't know, Aila's a sex positive sex worker. I don't know whether you can have sex negative sex workers. That would be amazing though. I wanna write that sketch. Yeah. The sex negative sex worker.

I'm sure there's someone for, who has a kink for that out there. Yeah, yeah, I want you to hate it. And I think she had sex with maybe 50 guys on her birthday or something like that. And did this big flow chart, there's a big flow chart that got, that she put together that explained like who came in who and like how many people, oh, it was. So, you know, the question there is, it seems it would be very surprising to me

if she came up to you and said, do you know what it is? I really get it about the lots of casual sex thing. Like that would be so, but another interesting thing I, I remember there's two, um, two definitions of happiness, both done by Dan, so Daniel Kahneman and Daniel Gilbert. So Gilbert talks about how, um, if you spent the rest of your life in a pool with a cocktail in your hand on a, on a floaty, just enjoying your days, uh, even though when you look back on your life,

you might not be particularly proud of the things that you've done, and you might not say that it was time well spent. Each individual moment was quite pleasurable. So you've sort of optimized for the now. In retrospect, you haven't, but it doesn't matter because each individual time unit was enjoyable. Then Daniel Kahneman's point is that

he optimizes for the other thing. And the other thing is something that in the moment can be sort of either enjoyable or not enjoyable, but in retrospect, you're glad that you, you did. So he is much more living for sort of a reflective life. Whereas Daniel Gilbert is living for a little bit more of a hedonic side of a life. And I think about this a lot and I wonder whether it doesn't really matter if you enjoyed it at the time, if you regret it in the future, future you lives with the decisions of past you for way longer than present you gets to enjoy them.

Right. And it kind of almost like I have this, it's written on my fridge, it's written on the whiteboard in my fridge at home, which is what would you tomorrow want you today to do? And that just projecting a little bit out into your future self. I can't think of a single decision that you would make whilst optimizing for your future self that would be the wrong one. But I can think of many decisions where if you said, what would you tomorrow want you

today not to do, but you today is happy with doing it. That's like a fucking recipe for, that's what you did for 20 years. And look how that turned out. Right. The last chopper out of Saigon. It's not something I'm proud of.

You know, there's not something I'm proud of. There's not, even if it was fun at the time for me, whatever I was telling myself at the time, that wasn't the person I ever wanted to be when I was young. And that's not the person that I would be proud of, particularly now having a daughter. To, it's funny after that article went mega viral. I mean, it's got probably half a million reads now

and like Ben Shapiro read it on his platform and his voice, which is very strange experience for anyone to have. Imagine writing about what a slut you are and then having Ben Shapiro read it in his voice, it was traumatic. So then the thing about that going viral is publishers will reach out to you and say, oh, is there a book here? What kind of book? And one of the things we were tossing around an idea of was there's many more stories where that came from. There's a lot of the thing that people kept saying to me was,

I don't know if my daughter should read this. I want to share this with my daughter, but I don't know if she should read this. We were like, that's a great name for a book. I don't know if my daughter should read this. Then I wrote the whole proposal. I was pregnant while I was writing it for my daughter. And by the end of the proposal, I was like, yeah, I don't know if my daughter should read this.

It seemed like a good idea, but it feels now I'm not sure that I want it out there. What is it that's, oh, personally about you. Yeah, there's, because there's a lot, I mean, the thing about a lot of my stories out there, a lot of it, I've been, you know, there's a lot of, I've done a lot of self-disclosure publicly for reasons that are my own,

but Mary Harrington and I have had very interesting discussions about, you know, self-disclosure and when it's appropriate. A digital hijab. Yes, yes. She thinks I need to be under a burka, no, a digital burka. Put it on, Bridget. She's probably right.

But there's a lot of things that I could talk about, and people have offered me money to write about that I have not shared for many reasons. And those experiences would probably be things that people could relate to and would, you know, there's something, the thing that I get from writing those pieces when there is a big reaction is just,

it's obviously cathartic for people. And I really, it really was one of those moments with the divorce piece and the slap piece. I'm like, this truly is the power of writing. It is wild when you get that kind of like emails, emails, emails, people telling you their whole story, comments, it's humbling and inspiring and it really does reveal to me the power of sharing, how powerful sharing

your story can be. This is how 12-Step works. It's one alcoholic sharing their story with another alcoholic and it helps them say, I'm not alone, this person got better, I can get better. I think you and I are both in the same, I feel like we both really are passionate about helping people get out of their own way. It's like I say to Maggie all the time, my cousin, if I could do anything, it would be to help people laugh and get out of their own way. That's all I say to Maggie all the time, my cousin, if I could do anything, it would

be to help people laugh and get out of their own way. That's all I want to do in life. Sometimes in order to get out of your own way, you've got to be able to look at those painful, traumatic, horrible parts of your life and laugh at them and also process them. You can't just like, they say in sobriety when you get sober, getting sober is like going 90 miles down, 90 miles an hour down the freeway and then slamming on the brakes and all the garbage from your car comes flying forward. And it is that process of just like, oh man, all the wreckage from my past is here. And you kind of have to sift through it.

And then you can drive your car again. But it takes that sorting through all that wreckage and trauma and stuff you've been running from is very, it can be tough. This is why people, this is why I do think therapy is good. I know there's a big, like not all of it is good, but I think that it has its place. So it is sweating really hard and I don't know, I'm just, I do, that kind of reaction is always,

I don't know, I find it very, it's moving. It's like seeing, having people feel like they can share those dark memories and regrets. I mean, regret, the biggest thing that was interesting to me in the pushback against the slut piece was how it was like they rejected the premise of regret. And I don't know if this is an American thing, a modern Western thing. Have you talked to anybody on your podcast about this kind of concept of regret? People seemed

offended by the idea of regret on just like a, you know, like a philosophical level. So I've had, uh, uh, there's an entire book, I think it was Daniel Pink wrote a book about regret. It wasn't about, um, it wasn't about the sort of social signal that it, it plays the role that it plays for people, uh, existentially kind of how it feels. Uh, it didn't talk about anything to do with that. So two, two questions. What was it that you regretted?

Like what was the regret or what were the regrets at the core of, of you in reflection? And then why did people have a problem with the word regret? What was their offense at the word regret? Well, I'll answer your second question first. I think we live in a like YOLO culture more than ever before and you and I addressed this even just this eternal now. I do believe shamelessness is a massive part of our culture and kind of everywhere. And there's tied into regret is this sense of shame. I think they're definitely interconnected and people really don't want to feel shame. They also are like,

I did that. It made me who I am. Yolo. Like we only live once. I'm not going to regret something I did because it was interesting. I think regret is like atonement. What I regret is how little I valued myself. I regret how little I valued my body and how little I valued my essence that I gave away so freely to these men. I regretted that they could say that I slept with them just so callously and crudely. And I regret that I really didn't, like the, I really underestimated the damage that that caught that I knew it was doing damage to me and I regret ignoring that I was damaging myself repeatedly. And you know, people get, I recoil and people are like, oh, she slept with a lot of people, she's damaged and I recoil. But I also understand like, I get, I don't think they're saying the same thing, but I

do think there's something that happens when you are on like a spiritual level. It felt like I was damaging myself. Like it was doing something to my soul. Now I'm not speaking for everyone. Go ho it up if that's what feeds your soul and makes you feel alive and then you feel like sharing your essence with the world is like, and you feel like sharing your essence with the world is like, you feel great about that. I'm not judging or anything. I think that that's where my sense of regret came from was really looking at that girl and wishing that she loved herself more. I don't know that there's much

I could have done to affect that because of my background and upbringing and things that had happened prior, but there were many times, I mean, I was in rehab at 19. I could have probably tried to stay sober. I mean, granted what happened after rehab was even more insane than anything that happened before. So it's kind of a miracle. I didn't do heroin again and kill myself. But again, like the other thing that drove

me crazy about the divorce piece is that I, people were coming at me and they were saying, you are saying stay in an abusive relationship. My husband was like, why are you getting so mad that people are misrepresenting this? Who cares? Something in you is being triggered by them saying this to you. And I said, you're right. And it's that my mother married a guy who I kind of allude to in the piece, who was mentally ill and crazy. And we went, we lived in a situation that was, I went from a marriage that probably shouldn't have broken up so quickly to a marriage that should have broken up and didn't. So I was, it was like, I paid the cost

of both of those decisions, and I didn't write about that decision. I don't know if the second half of my experience of my parents' divorce, and I don't know that I will fully, not probably until I'm in my 60s or something, but that, it was so bad that it almost made me feel,

I think that's why that piece felt so visceral, because it overshadowed even the divorce. It's like, oh, my parents got divorced and then it was an actual crazy shit show, the likes of which I can't even get my mind around and it made the divorce seem like no big deal. So that was why, that's where I think I get, it's always like the things you don't write. Some of the things I shared in the slut piece, there was one that I didn't want to share, but it was an anecdote that to me was so indicative of my slut rock bottom because it was in sobriety. I've had many rock bottoms, Chris, so many. My slut rock bottom was this text I received from a guy who is like,

I love you baby and then directly after it, wrong person. People read that and they were like, that was like a punch in the gut. I'm like, imagine getting that from someone that you're sleeping with. It was like, that was, it really was like my slot rock bottom. I really had to start a whole new recovery after that. Because even after getting sober, I was still sleeping with like guys that didn't really value me. Yeah.

Yeah. And I didn't necessarily wanna put that in there, but I was like, no, this is the crux of it right here. I know I'm not alone. Why did other mothers say that they didn't want their daughters to read? It was often fathers, but I think because they weren't sure if they were old enough, you know, they were like, their daughters were generally late teens, early twenties.

I'm like, look, if they're in college, they should read this. If they're late teens, they've seen way worse online than anything that you're going to share with them. If they're middle school, yeah, that would be something that I don't know, depending on how mature they are or how some, you know, me at 13 was different than like a kid who had good parents at 13. So there was a certain level of wholesomeness that got lost in the divorce. This is another thing that people were like,

they were like, get over it, you're an adult, stop being mad. And it's like, regret is very powerful if you use it to motivate. But when you get sober, one of the reasons people have such a hard time staying sober is because of the massive amount of regret that they have to face when they get sober. The truth about what they did to their life, their body, their money, their family, the

list is fucking endless. And it is much easier to just drink again than have to face any of the damage that you cause to yourself and everyone around you in society. And God forbid if you're one of those people who killed someone when you were drunk driving or even the very extreme versions of that. It's a miracle anyone gets sober truly in order to face a lot of that stuff. The hardest thing for me to face was the loss of potential, just years spent drinking at a bar and not finishing college when I wanted to go to

an Ivy League. A lot of that was my own decision which I can completely take responsibility for. A lot of it is like, well, what could have been because my husband and I do say the moment both of our lives changed and we became, my husband and I met in recovery for people who don't know, which is probably everyone, because why would they know that? So we both talk about how the moment our lives, we were both like kind of shy, good kids who got straight A's and then became drug addicts. And it was when our parents got divorced that that shift happened.

We can, if you said, point to the moment in your life that everything changed. So, you know, a lot of parents who read that piece, they don't want to hear that, rightfully. I wouldn't want to hear that either because you get divorced. You're telling me I'm going to condemn my child to being a future drug addict?

Yeah, they're like, a lot of people were like, these are just neglectful, bad parents. I'm like, the other thing that really struck a chord with people was becoming like a third wheel in both your parents new relationships because your parents get, you know, some parents are good and they'll be like, I'm not going to introduce new people. I also don't think that's the majority.

People get lonely. People are, people hate being alone. And if you've been in a marriage, you're not used to being alone. And it's like they start dating. And my first book that I ever wanted to write that I still want to write was when I was writing for Playboy. It was like this whole round of men were getting divorced but they got married pre social media and dating apps and they were like baby seals being entered into the like shark infested waters. These guys had no idea.

None. The game's changed, boys. Guys, she doesn't love you. She wants your bank account information. She's got an OnlyFans. Like they just had no idea. It was wild. They'd be sending me these things.

So yeah, I don't know. It's been like, that's, I think regret. I'm suddenly kind of very fascinated with regret and why there's this weird aversion to it. You know, that reaction to something, whenever there's a reaction to it, you know, the, the, the, that reaction to something, whenever there's a reaction to a piece like that, where I'm like, Oh, I didn't know that this it's interesting. It's like throwing sand on, you know, some strings, tripwires you didn't know

existed. I wonder, so certainly one thing that comes to mind is in an era of psychological fragility, because, especially for women, the role models for young women say that the world is, the world should fold around you and you are already as perfect as you are, that any challenge that you come up against is because of the men that don't believe in you or some sort of structural problem that's going on. And you are immutable. You are already formed brilliantly and the world is mutable

and it should fold around you. That's in contrast to male self-development that says the person is mutable and the world is immutable. The world's not going to change. Pick yourself up by your fucking bootstraps. Like David Goggins and Jocker Willink, your way through it. I think that what that causes is a bunch of fragile and sometimes narcissistic women, because it's literally like the source code to

narcissism, because it says, if there is ever a challenge in your life, it is not your fault or your responsibility. It is because of something and someone out there externalizing that sense of that locus of control. So if you're to say to someone, something that you did that you can no longer change was something that you shouldn't have done, you shouldn't have done, not because of the structural inequity, not because of Trump's America, not because of fucking whatever, uh, that was you, you did a thing, how, like that's

uncomfortable to deal with. That's a really, really uncomfortable realization because you can't go back and change it. You have to, like, you have to transcend and include that. You have to integrate that into your being. Okay. Who am I now that there's this bit of me? And if you've not gotten used to disagreements and, and overcoming challenges, this is a big challenge because you can't unfriend yourself. Right.

It is you, it is a part of your story. You have some friend and they went out with someone else or they slept with your ex-boyfriend or whatever it is. It's like they're out of your life. That's you to you now, you have to deal with that. And the only other alternative is to fingers in ears, no, no, no, that wasn't me. You don't understand. I'm, I'm allowed to, there is never anything that I should be responsible for in that way. And, um, I wonder, I wonder what the equivalent male response, if there was a,

an equivalent piece that could be written about men, I wonder what difference we would see in terms of regret and how guys and girls weave that into their stories in different ways and how they integrate it. Well, what do you regret? What do I regret? I regret not being a better boyfriend to a lot of the previous girlfriends that I was with. So, just a classic party boy, these had these girls that just worshiped the ground

that I walked on and were so loyal and great to me. I just didn't, I wasn't me, I didn't do anything like fucking horrendous to them, but I did not treat them at all with the level of sort of respect that I would want to, and that I'm proud of, and I wasn't proud of that. I wasn't proud of the person that I was when I was behaving in that way,

disregarding and not playing games, but understanding, being able to play games in a way that didn't seem like I was playing games. Just all of this sort of like manipulation, much of which was me wanting to have my cake and eat it too, wanting to have the sort of validation and the support of a woman whilst not needing to give necessarily the type of commitment that they wanted from me

so I could keep my options open, so on and so forth. Like a good bit of that was in the not being more open-minded to differing points of view, you know, very sort of working class, Northern, Northeast England mentality. People born, work, live and die in the same 50 mile radius. And that's kind of all that it is. And I always knew that I was a little bit of a square peg in a round hole, but I just accepted that as like the buy-in to life. I'd been an outcast in school.

I'd been an outcast in the sport that I'd played to a very high standard. And then I'd gone to university and I'd made myself into an outcast because I ran the events that other people went to. So even though I was no longer outside of the hierarchy, I was on top of it, I was still not in the middle of it. Right. middle of it. So I was very much an observer and I never used that, like that being an observer and extracting yourself from those sort of social trends and the ebb and flow that happens when you're kind of in a scene is a really beautiful opportunity because it gives you distance, it gives you enough distance to be able to go, okay, so what's going on over there? Do I want to be like that? And maybe I moved super, maybe I moved even more quickly in a thousand universes.

This is the quickest moving Chris that you could have found. And that would have been, and maybe that's true, but I still, I look back and those are two things that I think about. Like I wish that I'd become, uh, I'd been a better guy to the girls that I was dating in my twenties, cause they deserved it. And I can be that. And I much prefer myself when I am that.

So I've got like, I regret not being a gentleman. I don't know whether I could have been a gentleman, but like gentlemen's regret rather than such regret. And yeah, and then moving on. Yeah. That's interesting. It reminds me of like why I think men's

and women's meetings in recovery are so important. A lot of, and why I really loved women's meetings, particularly when you're talking about like the sex stuff that comes up in recovery, which there's a lot. Someone, I was thinking about this because I was talking to a man about what it's like in the men's meetings. And it seems from what I can tell that men's sexual regrets and recovery are often more aligned with what you were just talking about, what they did to women or didn't do or how they treat it. And with women, it's more of what happened to them.

And with women, it's more of what happened to them. You know, it's like- Reflects that sort of typical protagonist versus gatekeeper relationship that happens with much of sex. It is typically men that are the ones that are being forthcoming and the women that are being the recipients. Even the women that are very open in a party or whatever,

that dynamic is still the way that it goes. But it puts a different kind of onus on each participant, right? It's a different kind of regret in that way. Shame, yeah. Yep, it is. It's completely different. And there is, it's like Camille Paglia,

like there's just something about being, you're literally being penetrated by, as a woman. There's just something inherent, you're inherently the one who is being submissive, you know, in many and most always. And I think that dynamic automatically, like you said, puts the onus and the shame in different places when you're like a lot of men are like, oh, you know, we were both really drunk and like,

did she really want to sleep with me? And it's and you know, we were both hammered and consenting, but I don't know if she was like even into it or whatever. It's just, I think men have, yeah, there's a lot of different stuff that comes up for men, I feel. And- This is the problem with trying to, the difference between trying to make men and women equal and trying to make men and women the same,

because in this situation, the challenges that men and women face on average for like everything except for the super outlier cases aren't the same. And the regrets aren't the same and the risks aren't the same. You know, for a woman it's her like her health and her body and for a man it's his reputation and his livelihood in that way. Um, and how many bodies is worth, how many livelihoods and people trying to do this equation transaction thing about who's got it better or who's got it worse, and I think fundamentally it's, it's just a misguided way to try and

do social arithmetic, you can't balance this equation. It's two separate conversations. And ultimately if, if the conversation is who has it worst in dot, dot, dot, you're entering the frame of this discussion in a zero sum mentality. You're trying to work out who has the upper hand in this regard so that we can rebalance the scales because you've assumed that there is a finite amount of empathy available and it's not, it's not is a finite amount of empathy available. And it's not, it's not a zero sum view of empathy. There is empathy available for both groups.

We can have empathy for fucking everybody that's gone through difficult things. You can just bestow it in a targeted manner. And the empathy that you give to women that have regrets from what they did earlier on in their life and men who have regrets for what they did earlier on in their life is different and it's done in different ways. Yeah. This is the reaction to like the long house. I never learned what that was.

It's essentially like the, as it's been explained to me, it's like the HRification, the feminization of the culture. And the idea that, kind of what you were mentioning, just about how the world has become more attuned to the shaped around the female, and the males are being told that they're toxically masculine

and that all of the rejection of these masculine energies and tropes and whatnot. But what I think is the most damaging thing that's come out of that is the whiny bitchiness of men in reaction to it. It's like, Don't just like hearing a guy complain about how women have it so easy. It's so unattractive. It's like, okay, well, are you playing any role in this? Are you the kind of partner a woman would want to be with? Are you improving your life? Guys who are out there killing it are generally not whining about women.

At you know, they're just not. They're it's fundamentally something I never hear from men who are killing it in their life. They're I don't hear them whining about women having too much of a share of the culture. having too much of a share of the culture. It's a very weird unsettling thing to hear. And I see a lot of men in the manuscript kind of capitalize on this new victimhood mentality amongst males. And it's so much, I'm sorry. And again, this is very sexist of me,

but it is so much uglier in men than women. It's just like, we're used to the damsel in distress. Women, that's been a trope forever. Like the women being a victim rescue her or whatever. I'm not saying the feminization of the culture. Believe me, I've written for Playboy. You know where I stand on this.

If you're listening, I have pushed back against the excesses of Me Too. I've been just absolutely demolished by the left for often not being on the right side of this conversation. But I will say, as I've seen it progress, it really is creating this ugly victim culture in men that I find so unappealing. I like men. It's, it's, it just the, it's the same in some ways as right wing snowflakes, Constantine's gripe in a way.

You're the ones that posited yourself as the capable mastery. I'm going to go and get after the conquer thing. And that's fine. Like if you want to go for that, if you wanna do the Andrew Tate, Stan, cosplay thing, sweet. But you don't also get to have the other side. Or if you want to be more like George from the Tin Men, who says, it's okay to talk isn't enough for men

to improve their sort of psychological barriers around opening up around emotions We need to be more integrated and holistic and all the rest of the stuff That's also fine like both of these positions are fine. But right the trying to have both There's this really cool quote from Timothy Leary. I've never had chance to use it because I always got I always got scared I was gonna get shouted at I'm gonna use it to use it with you He says women who seek to be equal with men lack ambition. And I think the reason I was scared about that is that it obviously, obviously

posits men as below women, which doesn't redress the problem of fucking making men and women equal. But I certainly think that women who seek to be equal with men lack ambition. If you replace that to be the same as men. Absolutely. There are so many fucking things that both guys and girls can do that are better than each other. Yeah.

You want to play, I came up with this idea, the, the, um, soft bigotry of male expectations, which was after, um, that article came out saying that women did just as much big game hunting as men did ancestrally bullshit. The way that the analysis was done was wrong. The way that the categorization was done was wrong. These people basically fucking created a fantasy and then re-posted it into a journal. And it's not, it's not right.

But why, what is it like, how fucking un-feminist of you to say that the things that women did of the collection of berries, nuts, the gathering and the child rearing, you've just baked into your subconscious that because that wasn't done by men, that's not the thing that's most important. You've put on a pedestal, like, built into your world frame is this assumption that the thing that men do is better. Right. This is so much of the stuff when you hear this talk about whiteness. It's like, you guys sound more like white supremacists

than white supremacists do. Baked into so much of these assumptions is like, you're putting whiteness on this pedestal and it's bizarre because it's just not true. That whole thing about, I think I was very, I was always like the girl, maybe it's just a contrarian in me, but when I was learning about feminism from my English teacher in high school, I was very much like, why don't like this seems like a trick.

Why do we want to leave the kitchen? Why can't guys open the doors for us? This feels like a trap. She would be like, you're going to set women back hundreds of years. But I don't know why it's so bad to, like, why is it bad that we're different? That's the weird, it's like a weird thing. And by the way, from what I can see from all of my cousins and friends and everyone I know of my age, younger who has children,

the amount of hands-on-ness of this generation of men in the house with the kids is so completely different than what I was, even I was raised with. The guys are so, it's so like a beautiful ballet with most of the families I know where it's working, where both people are kind of working families I know where it's working, where both people are kind of working. Even if she's not working, he's still around with the kids and wants to be around with

the kids and knows how to- Fucking baby books in advance. Yeah. They're not... When I hear these things, it's either from men who are probably rightfully bitter because they come from a bad divorce and that happens. I think a lot of the women in reaction to my divorce piece were probably the women who took everything from those guys because they wanted to fuck their yoga instructor. That happens a lot, a lot more than we probably know or think.

But for the majority of people that I hear talking about these, when I go enter into the online discourse about this stuff, I'm like, none of these people have kids. None of these people are married. None of these people are in relationships. None of these people have kids. They don't know anyone who has kids. They're not hanging out at barbecues. They're not doing normie things with normal people. They're talking about whatever it is,

the second shift that women do. And it's like, well, have you seen this? So I wonder how much of this is the emotionally broken, disattached, anxious and fucking avoidant guys just going, oh, I have to be able to do better, surely, than the previous generation. The bar was set so fucking low and I have access to all of this content and all of these books and these podcasts. And I imagine, I haven't delved into this yet, but I imagine that there's

just an endless subset of parenting podcasts that you can listen to about child rearing and about the best ways to let them cry it out or not and what the rest of this research is on fucking milk formula. I don't think you need it though. Like most of the parents, I don't know. there's, I just, I think, yeah,

you could really easily become a neurotic parent, but I think parenting is actually much more intuitive than you know. I actually think we're reverting back to, I don't know how normal that like 1950s, the man doesn't change the diaper, he goes to work, he kisses his kid, he reads his paper. There might have been a time that that was normal and perhaps because men had to just

do more physical labor all the time. But generally, prior in America, there was a large portion of time where many people were working on farms together as families, huge percentages of the country, and you saw your kids all the time. They went to a schoolhouse where it was all intergenerational, not just separated by age. This was something I was talking to Dr. Camille Ortiz about,

who is just on my podcast, just how the kids now play with kids their age and it's less like intergenerationally. We all grew up with our cousins and like we were all playing with different age groups and learned how to take care of the little ones and get beat up by the big ones. Everything is now like these club sports instead of just pickup games in the neighborhood. So you're again, just with the same age instead of random age groups playing. And I see a lot more normal life here in Texas than I, you know, there's a lot more just

kids playing out and out at all ages and they're running around and, and the parents are all getting together at the pool and having like a barbecue. And it feels like that, I don't know if it's like the dad's trying to do better or if it's just a function of the fact that so many, it requires two people to work now just because life is so expensive. You often need two incomes

that the division of labor is just naturally, it's going to require two people to help around the house and help with the kids. But I don't know. I mean, the men just seem more involved. They just seem more hands on. All of my friends are. All of of them that I'm friends with, fucking sat in the gym with Chris Bumstead, and we're not talking about, this guy's a world champion bodybuilder five times over, we sat there on camera, and he doesn't wanna talk about anything to do

with his sport, all he wants to talk about are the weird baby books that he's reading, and we managed to find a way to make sure that there's no parabens in the bedding of the cot of the, this thing. And do you know how hard it is to get like genuinely well-sourced baby fucking lotion that doesn't come from whatever, whatever toxic thing? I'm like, I mean, it's great. Well, like congratulations, but it's not what I, when I look back at Arnold

doing pumping iron or Ronnie Coleman from like the late nineties, that's not what I when I look back at Arnold doing Pumping Iron or Ronnie Coleman from like the late 90s, that's not what I'm expecting. And there is definitely that kind of a pivot. Bridget Phetasy, ladies and gentlemen, Bridget, let's bring this sucker home. Where should people go? They wanna subscribe to your criminally undersubscribed podcast and follow you on everything else.

Yeah, go to my YouTube, just go to my YouTube channel and subscribe please. It's Bridget Phetasy, what is it? Phetasy, yeah, just Phetasy. The name is Bridget Phetasy. And go to Phetasy.com and that's my sub stack. That's where lots of writing comes up. Everything's there.

So if you want any of my writing and get, just get on my list and I post when I'm gonna be doing standup, I'm opening for Dave Landau and Colin Quinn soon. Yeah, it's just nuts. So keep up with me. It's all happening. I'll be coming to see you soon when I get back to Austin. Yeah.

Thank you so much for having me. My pleasure. I'll catch you later on. Yeah, thank you.