Panic World - My friend's dad is a Holocaust denier now

Episode Date: April 2, 2025

Today, we’re doing something a little different. Grant asks Ryan to step back from being host, and instead to step in as a social worker for people who fall for conspiracy theories. The person in question is Grant’s friend’s dad, who read a recent “report” saying that the Holocaust “actually wasn’t as bad as they say,” and it’s tearing his family apart. We’ll get into what causes people — especially our Boomer family members — to fall for these theories, and whether we can help them. Want even more Panic World content? Like ad-free episodes, bonus episodes, and access to the Garbage Day Discord? Sign up for just five bucks at: https://www.patreon.com/PanicWorld. Sponsors Want to sponsor Panic World? Ad sales & marketing support by Multitude, hit them up here: ⁠http://multitude.productions⁠. Credits - Host: Ryan Broderick - Producer: Grant Irving - Engineer: Rebecca Seidel - Researcher: Adam Bumas - Business Manager: Josh Fjelstad Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey, Ryan. Hello, Grant. We're doing something a little different, so let me know if you can hear this. There's no question you can ask me that's going to make me feel comfortable right now. I'm going to put you at ease. Yeah, I'm hearing you talk to someone who's very nervous. That's right. You're hearing correctly. Let's keep listening. Which of the following options is going to be the reason why your wife leaves you?

All right, all right. Let's talk about your dad being a Holocaust denier. Yep, I heard that, and I have lots of follow-up question. So I interviewed my friend Matt, which is about his name. Today, he's a extremism researcher, but I've known him since I was 14, which means I've known his dad since I was 14. But I wasn't too surprised to find out that his dad has some questions about the Holocaust. Sure, many such cases right now, apparently.

I'm Grand Irving. This is Panic Road, a show about how the internet warps our minds, then our culture, and eventually reality. Joining me today, the host of the show, a guy who just has some questions, Ryan Broderick. Hi, Ryan. How are you? Are we sticking with that as the new tagline? I feel like I just memorized the last tagline. I like it.

We can talk about this later. We have other things to discuss. Our Patreon patrons can tell us if they like that new tagline. Hello. Thank you for having me on my show. So you just hinted at it, but how many dads do you personally know that now a question? In general, I know a lot of dads. That's because you're old.

I do, too. I'm a millennial. I don't know any millennial dads. I know three, I think. How many dads do you personally know that now have questions about how many of my ancestors were killed? How many Holocaust denying dads do I know? Probably none, actually. The type of conservative men that I'm familiar with, okay, I don't know how to like put this like delicately, their reactionary politics are not that traditional.

The guys that I know, like the Joe Rogan guys that I know are not there yet or maybe we'll ever be there. Sure. But as you said, this is the thing that is going around right now. Well, y'all, yes, it is going around, yes. This is personally the first, the first dad I know. and I know him really well. Who has the... Oh, this is the first ever dad you know.

Kind of. He kind of became my surrogate... Like, oh my dad. To be real, he kind of became my surrogate dad. And now he has some questions about the Holocaust. I'm going to assume here that he's not Jewish. No. He's not.

And... Where's he from? Can I ask that? The same suburb of Pennsylvania I grew up in. Sure. Pennsylvania, of course, yeah. I feel almost like a social worker for conspiracy theories. Like, if I have...

If I could sit down with his dad, I can figure out what's going on, I swear. Yeah, I had very similar questions. I wanted to sort out my thoughts about it. So I forced him to talk to me on microphone instead of just incessantly texting me when I'm trying to work. So today I want to play for you what happened to Matt and his dad and what theory that led us to about this problem in the world now. So does that sound fun? As fun as a podcast about Holocaust denial can be. Let's get into this family's slow motion implosion.

So my mom is currently reading a novel about three sisters who survived the Holocaust. And my dad says something to the tune of, well, you know, it might not have been as bad as they had originally reported. She hears this and it's like, what are you talking about? Do you want to guess what he says next? Yeah, please don't make me guess like Holocaust denial stuff. Just give me the cursed bullshit. Let me listen. He's like, yeah, there was some documents came out recently about how it was only one million Jews, not six million Jews.

And like the side note being like, so is one million an acceptable number? Like what's the, if we're going to talk about. They were exaggerating. Yeah. I think we have to, for my own protection, you have to say right now that you're Jewish. I am 100% the chosen people. Okay, fine. If we can start on the phrasing that Matt used, which I think is important, which is that he said a report came out recently, which is like such a Facebook dad thing where like they're receiving new information.

There's like an assumption around baby boomers that like there's going to be a new thing happening or kind of. coming out every day because there has been for their, like, their atomic age, right? Like they grew up in this world that has like never been the same ever from day to day. And I noticed like a pattern when they talk about the misinformation that they're consuming that a lot of the stuff they're falling for really heavily is like mimicking that and saying like, well, we've just discovered we've got a new take on the Holocaust. Like you'll never believe like what's like.

And they also, this is not inherently anti-Semitic, but they use this phrasing that they'll be like, They're saying that like the Holocaust wasn't as bad as we used to think it was. And I just very simply, you just go, who's they? Who is saying that? Growing up in peak TV, they just sort of assume that the media is this institution that's going to be delivering them safe information. And now that we no longer exist in that world, they still think that that's what's happening. So like if they see a post online, they assume it's part of the like apparatus that's been feeding them information their entire lives. That's absolutely right.

I asked Matt the other day if he thinks his dad knows who Nick Fuentes is. And he said, God, I hope not. And I was like, I think it, like, so as of three weeks ago when we were texting about the Phil's, I can confidently say Matt's dad does not hate Jewish people. I shouldn't have read this actually. That's a joke. Is the Phil's? Yes. Is that weird talking?

I like, I've gone on vacation with his family. They let me put my, like, an old Matt's. mattress in their basement. They won't let Matt do that because they like me more. Like, I am very close with this man and this family. I've experienced zero odd, like, thought towards Jewish people, full stop. I don't think he knows who Nick Fuentes is. Like, and I was like, I think if he knew the hatred this was coming from, he might feel different. But because it just presented as news, it reaches him down the stream where somebody isn't like saying, I'm a proud anti-Semite.

I thought that you were anti-Semitic and then you doubt the Holocaust. And like, you could apply this for whatever. I thought you like hate gay people and so you assume that like whatever thing. I didn't realize it like now kind of works in reverse. Yeah. In fact, actually, so I built a model for this for a conference years ago. I was invited, I was invited to Salzburg, Austria to the South. sound of music mansion to give a presentation on like how fascism was evolving online.

The way that I used to describe it was like a pyramid that goes both ways, which I guess if you if you line that up, is that a Jewish star. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway. So don't think of it that way. Instead, just think of two triangles in going in different directions next to each other. And so it was a triangle and I was like, look, it can go up and down.

So like you can have a bunch of people sharing stuff and they don't understand like how ideologically it fits into anything, but they're just like, oh, that's interesting. And as it goes up the pyramid, it like gets like aggregated and condensed and clarified by more and more extremists until you get like, you know, Nick Fuentes at the very top. But it also travels the opposite direction, which is like Nick Fuentes can pose something. And he can watch that slowly actually become less and less extreme until you have the average person sharing it. It's a two-way street. So that was the first thing that truly caught me off guard. But then the details he referenced, to me, they feel inherently insulting and hateful. But to him, this man, again, I really know as not hateful.

They just seem like factoid, I guess. Let's take a listen. All right. Yeah. Let's get into it. He brought up, like, the swimming pool and, like, the library. and like some of these other amenities at amenities quote unquote at Auschwitz. And my mom was like, the swimming pool was so they all had to bathe together.

Like it wasn't there for fun. So then your dad was like, yeah, it was basically like an Airbnb and like, you know, like a million of them got pneumonia and no big deal. You know, to be honest, there was 24 hours where I thought my mom was going to divorce my dad. and I didn't necessarily think that was a bad thing. Have people hit you up at Ryan at Garbageday.com and said, what should I tell? Email.

Dot email. Dot email. And said like, what should I tell my friend, my dad, my mom, now that this person is saying this like crazy shit? I mean, it happens. People ask. I mean, I've been fighting my own battle. with misinformation inside of my family for years and years.

And I've tried different tactics. I was really into fact-checking. I was really into arguing about it. I have a new tactic, which is partly for my own benefit, but it does seem to kind of work a little better, which is that I just laugh at them. There is probably no right way to address this because you're dealing with someone that is going to start to double down

as you unpack this, because no one wants to, especially older people, they don't want to feel like they've been duped. They don't want to feel stupid. And so when you have someone like Matt's dad who seems to have like very genuinely read some bad posts online and is now saying that Auschwitz had like an Olympic size swimming pool that everyone got to like relax in, that kind of stuff is really hard to untangle. The cognitive dissonance is going to set in if you start to fact check it. you can't really like be open and like conversation with them about it because like what if they mention this at a party or something like they're they don't realize that they're dealing with something super radioactive and it's really sad like it's a it's a it's a really sad

weird process that is just I think I assume at this point most American families have someone in their family who and it's not even just like white families either like it can happen to any when I was in Brazil like I knew for families that were super into Bolsonaro and their kids weren't. Like it's a, it doesn't have a boundary, it doesn't have, for every culture, there's a version of this. Not to sound super NPR, but like, I don't think we're having the conversation about what this means now that this is a problem for all families.

So next I want to play you a bit more about what Matt's mom did after receiving this and like, and like reckoning with its severity, but then I want to talk about like what that means for what all of us should be doing. because we all know somebody. It's just a matter of degrees. But first, let's go to ads from our presenting sponsor, X.com, where you can always trust the community notes. Let's go to ads.

Where we left off, Matt thought his parents' marriage was about to implode. So let's pick up there. Okay, yeah. Let's take a listen and see how much worse things are getting here. Was your mom saying she was going to leave them? The words that she was saying were, this is not the man that I married. And I told her, like, look, if you were one of my friends and you told me this, I would tell you to leave them. You don't have to go to divorce, but like, at minimum, like, take a weekend and think about what's happening.

So it's probably obvious that this was a long time coming. And I think for a lot of people, it is a long time coming. It's not like a overnight. This is where they end up. Like the feeds have to build on each other. If you had a guess, where do you think this started for Matt's dad? Do we know? Okay, that's great.

I do know. Great. So I would not put this in the same camp as like even like voting for Trump, honestly. I don't actually count this as like the same sort of level of brainwashing. Like, so I'm trying to think like where you would casually encounter Holocaust denial material. So I'm going to stop you there because I think what's shocking about this is how anodyne this starts. Matt's dad was a real big what happened to JFK guy. Sure.

Okay. So like his household, most of them are now sober, but Matt's dad isn't. But like they're all big drinkers and like at some point they'd start talking about like, what do you think? happening with the umbrella guy in the crowd. Yeah. It was like this fun. It is fun. He was really into the shining conspiracies.

Yeah, the Kubek, fake the moon landing stuff. Yeah. No, absolutely. It started off in the most boomer dad. You're just drinking IPAs talking about steak and you're also talking about like pretty harmless conspiracies. Right. What do you think comes after JFK?

Area 51. So back when Ashton Coochard was on everyone's Facebook saying that sex slavery was happening in every basement in the country beside yours, do you remember when Chester Bennington of Lincoln Park died what was going around? Yeah, I actually just saw this the other day that Chester Bennington and a bunch of other like alt rock guys who all died were part of some sort of documentary about like sex trafficking and they were killed before they could like release the documentary or something. Yes, yeah. That's a weird. So Chester Banton is a weird one because I think when he did kill himself, there were like a lot of reports coming out about his history with sexual abuse as a victim of sexual abuse. Right. Right. Right.

And it is one. I think it is unfortunately one of those like purple monkey dishwasher events where you really cannot talk about that stuff online without it spinning out into like really conspiratorial spaces. So like, yeah, that makes sense. I could kind of see how his Facebook feed would start to like populate that kind of stuff for him. Right. So this wasn't ideological. It was just conspiracies are fun. And for a long time, it had basically no ramifications.

These things evolve. And Matt's dad ended up here. So I'm going to play you what happened next now. Okay. I end up leaving work early because like I'm freaking out. And the next morning, I talked to my mom. And she explains that, like, they sat down together, I think, to her credit, she did something that you are supposed to do when someone this close to you starts to express extremist ideas, which is, like, engage with them sincerely, ask them questions. And, like, you can do a little bit of refuting, but also digging in as to why they're attracted to these ideas is almost more effective.

and he is like, you know, I just, I feel like we're being lied to about what's happening in Palestine right now, and we've been lied to about so many other things by the U.S. government. So like I question everything as a matter of course. Sure. Classic. Yeah. After this conversation, it became, I have questions instead of facts. And then they did the thing that all families do when they don't want to confront a truth, which is they both felt heard and omnis.

and they let things go blurry, and they decide to not press it, because if they press it, the whole house could fall down. I would say this family is taking it pretty seriously compared to almost any other family in the situation I've ever spoken to. I mean, it was a long time coming, but this is how Matt reacted once he was told this. Whether or not my dad actually, like, now believes that the Holocaust 100% happened or not, like, I don't know. But like, it sounds like he realizes that at least there are social consequences to expressing certain ideas.

And he's also like, he doesn't leave the house. Even if he thought the Holocaust wasn't real, he's a retired man who mostly watches sports and, like, wants to hang out with his family. He doesn't leave the house a whole lot. For Matt, this has been like a slow boil for years. they've been like stifling it down. Obviously, it got much worse during the pandemic. And Matt was getting married in 2021, but this was still pre-vaccines, so it was really small. And we were all obviously required to test before going.

And his, which made his dad very uncomfortable. Sure. But, you know, he relented. And, you know, it just got more extreme from there, and it's affected the relationship more and more. I knew it started to become a problem when he took me aside and was like, listen, they're coming out with vaccines. I'm asking you as your father, please don't get the vaccine. I, like, sort of laughed it off, and I was like, oh, Dad, I'm going to get the vaccine. It's kind of crazy to look at how slow, but also how fast this ramped up.

after COVID, I think we all just thought this would magically go away. And maybe it has for some people, but also for the people I know, it's just gotten worse. I feel very bad about it. The vaccine is a really fascinating one where, like, my dad is going through, like, a measles thing right now. He doesn't have the measles. He's just, like, very into, like, the idea that you can cure them by just getting them. Jesus. Like, I understand.

Yeah, it's like, I. he's also stopped wearing sunscreen lotion because he said that that that gives you cancer it's not that the sun gives you cancer it's that sunscreen gives you cancer I don't agree with the people who are like this is illogical and it's like no it's clearly logical you can see the thought patterns here

I don't know enough about Matt's dad to like do the mental map of like how he reached this point but like from what you told me it seems like he was already kind of like conspiratorial and like anti-government in a way that was like you know, tolerable and like maybe a little kooky. And recent events, perhaps, like in Palestine, have started to make him reconsider, like, other things that he understands, right? So do you say what or who is lying about Palestine? Like that, I feel like that's a missing piece here. No, of course not.

It's what comes across his feed. But like, I mean, we've talked about this on the show. Like, it is completely dissonant from like what you had seen mainstream news. Sure. It is totally reasonable to be like, I think they are lying and covering something up, like, hold on, don't fall for that trap. Who is, who is law? Who is they? I think it's totally, you know what happens? When you use they enough, it just becomes the Jews.

That's, that's literally what starts to happen eventually. It is totally reasonable to look at how Palestine has been covered by the mainstream media. By the mainstream media. And feel you are being lied to by the mainstream media. By the mainstream media. And I think, I think. think most of the time you are, actually. Right.

And Kat Abdu in the episode where we discussed this had this point. Right. When there's valid criticism, it is not illogical to jump to like, well, so what else? And that brings you to a bad place. But what stuck out to me that I hadn't really, I kind of imagined that everyone who was like a vaccine denier was like really excited to like go to the ER when all of us are dying from the magnet vaccine and tell us I told you so. But, like, I hadn't, like, sat with, and maybe you experienced this with your dad, is that, like, Matt's dad was like, like, he loves his son.

And he was, like, fucking worried about his family. Like, to him, oh, all of my family's going to die because they're falling for this poison. That's really isolating. My dad, when he got kind of, like, weird about vaccines, I found a little workaround that got him through the worst of COVID where I just be like, look, you can just admit you're scared of needles. Like, it's okay. And I've found that that worked, you know, enough. But the isolation with the internet, while it isn't new, it is definitely more pronounced. And I think older people have a problem with sort of forgetting that the rest of the world around them isn't in those same spaces.

Like you and I, if we look at too much TikTok one day, I think you or I would be. like, oh man, like my feed is like delivering me a lot of really crazy stuff. My experience with older people is that they sort of assume that we're all looking at this together. And I think it's... It's really true of Fox News. Yeah. And that's what Fox News does.

Like, Fox News is actually telling them, like, we all are. So, and this is actually something where I would not blame the internet. I would actually blame the limitations of the television for training a generation of people to think about the news and reality this way. So like, you're only seeing the sausage. And once we transitioned into the internet where like it's a free for all and people can argue all day long and information is constantly changing, now you're seeing the sausage get made. But you're still thinking, like, you're looking at the guts that go in the sausage casing and you're like, that's the news. I think that's broadly true.

And I think the other side of that for people like Matt's dad is they're like, well, now I see how the sausage gets made and I'm questioning everything. So I asked Matt, as someone who works in extremism, how will he make sense of what his dad gets out of, you know, asking all these edge-lord questions? And, like, where that leads him personally. So this next clip is a bit long, but take a listen. Putting on my professional hat for a second, one of the reasons why conspiracy theories are so attractive to people is because this idea that you are, getting secret knowledge or receiving information that nobody else has has an intoxicating effect on your brain. It's literally a meme at this point, but like you're scrolling and it's like the one thing doctors don't want you to know or the like here's the one trick to huge shoulders in the gym or whatever it is. Like people frame it that way because on it, it hits you on an emotional level.

Do you feel like it is now too late to do something? I think about this a lot. If... Come back to the mic. I was thinking. I was relaxing and having a think, Grant. For me personally, I just want a meaningful relationship with my father. And short of that, I will take a pleasant relationship with my father.

When somebody's like an active alcoholic, it's possible for like a day. Yeah, exactly. It's possible to have like a good. good interaction. Yeah. What the conditions are right. But like on the whole, you're never going to think of the relationship as like. Pleasant.

That's not on the table when you are in different realities. Yeah. And that's the thing that I've really come to terms with. It can suddenly turn. There's truly stuff around like food. I try not to linger too long on conversations about food because then my dad will say something like, oh yeah because you know they want they want to put

all this bad stuff in our food to keep us sick or like it's fucking exhausting like it's just exhausting to be having a conversation with somebody and then suddenly we're talking about a cabal or we're not talking about it but I can see it in his eye that he is holding back on talking about it and I know

that there is this massive unseen wall between us. And it's just fucking depressing. To say, okay, they're like an alcoholic. Yeah, one, it means like they have to accept that they have a problem and then they have to deal with it, which happens. People fall down rabbit holes all the time and then they realize that they're acting like a crazy person and they get some help and they figure themselves out. But I'm not really sure there's like a recovery structure for misinformation that way. I don't know if you can really, I don't know.

It's an interesting concept. Yeah, there's no easy solutions. And after the break, I want to discuss where that leaves us with these relationships and what we need to do more broadly. But first, I think what people really need are more ads. So right before the break, you were saying you don't know if there are solutions in the same way that, like, there are complicated solutions with addiction. So I asked Matt that. All right, yeah.

Let's take a listen. Does it feel like you're fighting a terribly uphill battle? No, which is actually kind of nice. For the last like 20 years, this field has been about identifying ideological extremists and arresting them. And that was not effective. Things like digital literacy and social and emotional learning are effective at helping young people understand how to navigate online spaces without falling prey to miss and disinformation.

But the boomers are fucked. I... Professionally, I will never say that. Have you thought a lot about why you got into this field? I am sure that there was like subconscious engagement there around like oh if I can

fix this in the real world then maybe I can fix it within my family too which you know mileage may vary there yeah what do you think of that now I think I can help create a better world that will arrive

in like 10 to 15 years there's like a there's like a feeling i've had for many years where i do wonder if like part of this stuff would actually go away if if we just like stopped taking it seriously like the the contrarian in me is like okay we've spent a decade taking this stuff so seriously and now obviously the academic research on this stuff is that like you get in a really scary spot where like you know especially bad actors they like they love uh unenforced boundaries like a nazi walks into a kind of stuff, right? And it becomes a Nazi bar. Now, I want to exclude that because, like, I do think that is true and real. But I do wonder if your dad is at the table and he's saying some crazy

shit and you're just like, you're being fucking stupid. Shut up. Like, I do wonder if that is a better path here. Like, I have tried the compassion path. I've tried the fact checking path. I've tried the, like, even going no contact path. And I'm beginning to think, like, I think my new path here is to just tell him to shut up. I think that you, you know, You can say to your dad or your family members, shut up, you're being weird. And they're, like, mostly willing to do that because, like, they don't want to offend you is, like, primarily important. And I think it's important in Matt's dad's case, too. I feel really bad for him that he seems so miserable because he doesn't know what to say.

But he really doesn't want to offend. Okay. Even if Matt's dad is spending, like, three or four hours a night alone in front of a computer or a phone absorbing, like, the, weirdest darkest shit on the internet you can't stop him from doing that yeah i actually don't even think you have to like i i actually don't think it matters to a degree because if that person then goes outside and spends the majority of their time in a situation where it is unacceptable like you can't like be at the bank and be like oh this this doesn't add up the same way it doesn't add out how many people died in the Holocaust.

Like, you can't do that. People don't like that. And, like, yeah. You know, it gets worse as you get more isolated. I don't even think this is just older people. It's everybody. I had a friend who got long-term COVID. She was isolated and she felt sick.

And she got real into some, like, now she's worried about 5G. Yeah. And I really thought that, like, once she feels a little bit better and she's, like, out back around her friends, she will just snap back to herself. It's kind of true. She knows things to avoid to say now, but it's still kind of ravaging her brain. It's essentially what we've done. And my friend talks about this a lot when he like went through like an in-cell phase and after like a bad breakup with like a really toxic woman who sort of made him feel isolated.

And he started gravitating towards these guys that like started to like give him like very early red pill theory stuff and put him on the internet. and like show him where to find more stuff that would like feed into the like hate your self-hatred and isolation that he was already feeling and he eventually pulled out of it and now he actually he researches extremism and he teaches about it and like he's married to a human woman that he seems to like as a person and it's good what we've sort of done with the death of mass media and the rise of like user generated content media being the primary thing that most people are staring at all day is create a situation where there are a million, 2 million, 10 million, different, extremely niche cults that exist.

I can see on your face you want to be talking about the printing press and about how every major tech advancement makes us go crazy and then a major event happens to try to form a monoculture again. That is where you are leading this. Am I wrong? Dude, it's so hard to have these conversations and not start with when Gutenberg made the Bible. But yes.

Media becomes cheap to publish. Everyone starts publishing media and we all go psychotic, which does happen. But then there's a second part of this that typically happens as well. You sort of get the advent of like large institutional Protestant churches. Same after the printing press. Same idea. The printing press obviously causing the Protestant Reformation and then you get the rise of like the church of England and stuff like that. People start to go like enough.

We are unfortunately in that in-between phase where we have not hit the next. wave of this. Unfortunately, and I don't want to make everybody angry again, but like one model for why AI might actually catch on is this, because the chaos of the social media age has been so extreme that there is clearly like a desire for a shared set of facts, a shared set of reality again. We just don't know what's going to come and provide that in the internet age or replace the internet. But there's kind of nothing we can do. Not on a scale that matters. And like, not even really on a personal scale.

Like, I'm in the same place as your friend at. I have given up. And honestly, the other part of me is like, if anyone's dad, like, says something so extreme that, like, it ruins their lives. Like, I know a dad who voted for Trump, put a Trump sticker on his car and got his car keyed. Fuck around and find out. Like, at a certain point, there are a human being.

They're allowed to think whatever they want to think. And if you want to express those thoughts, like, you should know, like, what's going to happen. And so, like, if your friend's dad is at a barbecue and he talks about, He starts rambling about how, like, the Holocaust wasn't that bad and someone knocks his lights out. Like, there's nothing your friend Matt has to do, actually. Like, it's not his responsibility. Yeah, there's not really anything he can do besides decide how much to engage with his dad,

which is how we sort of ended our conversation. Do you have a cutoff point? I think the things that are directly connected. to hate are my cutoff points. Where does Holocaust denial fall in there? It's there. It's there. So based on the conversation that him and my mom had, it sounds like he's walked it back.

But like, this is going to, like, I've already pulled, like, I've already pulled away. Like, it's going to take, it's a system level problem, so it requires a system level answer. and where you decide to stop engaging is an entirely personal question that whoever you are, you'll need to ask yourself. I don't think baby boomers are cooked. I just think that the way to fix it is not, we haven't figured it out yet, but I think we will. I am actually quite hopeful we will. A societal problem has been created.

And individually, we can't save them or convince anyone otherwise. And so, like, I also hear this in the other way where it's like, how do you still talk to a family member who voted for Trump? And I'm like, that seems spoken by somebody who has lots of family, just personal op-ed here as somebody who doesn't have a lot of family. Like, everyone should make the decision that, like, makes living better for them. You not talking to somebody is not going to make them see the error of their ways. And you staying in their life is not going to save them either. If your husband or your wife like spins out of control on the internet and like crashes out and Q&N stuff and you want to divorce them, you're totally in your right to do so.

Like that's fine. If you're a friend, yeah, fine. You can also go no contact with your family. If it is really horrible, you can go no contact with your family. But also they're your family. You don't really choose them. You just end up there. if you want to just live in like a like a sort of day taunt with them until they pass on to the big

internet in the sky, the Facebook comment section in the sky, that's totally fine too. But like, maybe just try telling them to shut up. So personally, like my dad killed himself 10 or 11 years ago. And the last thing he talked to me about was he tried to goad me into like an argument about global warming. I think you've told me this. Yeah, yeah. For him, he was really bitter and fucked up in his own life. and so politics became the reason of his victimization. And if I was just like, shut up, dude, you're being weird. He would have not spoken to me for months on end. So I guess, like, everyone needs to make your own personal choice,

but like it is like it is so steeped into your own family dynamics. So I would really, I would argue everyone like ask yourself, where is this coming from? What is it making up for? If you're on the fence about like, do I want to continue this relationship? This is a scenario where intention really matters. That's my two cents as somebody who like doesn't talk to some family. Right.

Well, thank you, Ryan. Actually, one last thought. I think this is all honestly Matt's fault. Yeah, I do too. The only solution is if you hadn't quit baseball and you'd become a professional pitcher, we wouldn't be. I could have done it. I could have done it, man. Go birds.

Go birds. Love you, man. In seriousness, I think Matt did a very brave thing. And while he is always annoying, I do appreciate him. And my life would be worse without him. Thank you for coming on the show. Thanks for having me on my show. Panic World is a Garbage Day production.

Subscribe to the newsletter at Garbageday. Email. Panic World is written and produced by Grant Irving. It's hosted by me, Ryan Broderick. Our amazing researcher is Adam Bumis. It's engineered by Rebecca Seidel. Our Durange logo was created by Gabby Cash. Please give us $5 at patreon.com slash PanicWorld.

Please give us products to sell by contacting Multitude at multitude. Productions slash ads. For any other way you would like to give us money or work with us or promote us or become financially entangled with us, you can reach out to our fixer, our wonderful bag man, Josh Fielstad, and you can reach him at PanicworldPod at gmail.com. and one piece of advice for me to you. Chill out. Touch grass while you still can.

Which of the following options? And I want you to hear all the options before you choose is going to be the reason why your wife leaves you. A. Too much nautical apparel. B. External processing. C.

The smell of your energy drinks. D, your inadequacies in bed E, RFK is going to make creatine illegal and you become small. No, she will leave me either for the constant smell of energy drinks, which I was literally late to the recording because I needed to run to the corner store, or the external processing, for sure. It's going to be one of the two.