Red Scare - Silicon Valley Skanks

Episode Date: March 17, 2023

The ladies discuss the Silicon Valley Bank collapse, the Agnes Callard saga, and the study abroad girl.

That sexy asmr garbage truck outside. We're back. We're talking about sobriety. Are we? No, not really, but the lead up to sobriety, which may take many months to many years. It's a process. sobriety is like getting a facelift. You really have to do your research, as you said. So it takes me a long time to do research personally. You don't want to be sober. I'm a, I'm a spiritual PhD student. So I'm doing research for getting sober for the next 10 years. You have to make sure you're an alcoholic. Because if you're not, you get sober. What a waste. Yeah, you haven't actually addressed any of your underlying spiritual melodies.

Alcoholism in AA is apparently fully self diagnosed. So anybody can be an alcoholic. You too can be an alcoholic. Yeah, of course. Cool. I mean, that's when you go to meetings, there's a huge discrepancy in like the range of issues that people are there with, you know, and it really just is up to you to decide if there's that question, lying, cheating, scheming, different types of lying. And in sex and love addicts, anonymous, it's, um, you think it's just going to be like people who compulsively fuck or like have sex with strangers or like can't stop fucking, but there's also like sexual inter-exics, intrigue addicts, there's like a whole range of issues that slaw. The fuck is a sexual inter-exic? It's when you

it's when you starve yourself of sex. Yeah, it's when you so asexual, but no, but you have desires and horniness. I guess, yeah, but you have some, some other issues with with sex and intimacy. Um, I'm sure I've said it before. I don't, in my experience, I don't think the 12 step program is appropriate for addressing like intimacy and sex issues. Right. But it's a good place to start. If you're like addicted to like pornography, or if you're actually like a shame style, like sex addicts who like can't stop. Yeah, that's a discrete thing you can address through 12 stuff. Something that you can actually like abstain from. Yeah. But many people in slaw, it's just, it's more like ingrained in their personality and there's no, but there's, I was

in a, I used to go to like a women's meeting in Glendale when I was trying to recover from my intrigue addiction. And, uh, I remember, you know, people go around in a circle and share. And the girl that went right before me was like, I'm just court order to be here and I fucking hate all you people. And I just want to put a needle in my arm and like, and I was like, Oh my God. And I was like, well, yeah, my boyfriend didn't text me back fast enough today. We got this huge fight. So I think it's similar also with, with alcoholism. It's like some people really, everyone's rock bottom looks different. Yeah. And some people never hit it. True. Those are called functional alcoholics. Like me. My rock bottom is like, I forgot to

send an email every day, every day rock bottom. Every guy next to me was like, I stole money from my wife. And then hijacked a car, raped the woman inside. Woke up covered in vomit. Didn't know where I was. But because I'm a impressionable, porous woman, I saw that Jack got sober. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Interesting. And he wrote a really lovely and inspiring thread about sobriety. And frankly, I was very shocked and impressed because that was the last guy I thought would ever get sober. Totally. That was the guy who liked, liked to drink. He's a rowdy gay drunk. And a raconteur. Well, best luck to him. Yeah. Cardella bean is sober and on the cover of

Vogue, she did a Vogue cover addressing her sobriety of like four months, which I would not, I would not do. Personally, I take more. That's a very high risk proposition. And she's still addicted to pickpocketing. She's addicted to lesbianism. She's addicted to rug munching. I'm left diving. My British accent is so wack. It's getting worse. I know, but we should We should, we should. Please respect my sobriety journey that I'll be embarking on next week or week after next. When I get around to it, respect it for sure. It seems like what's the longest you've, well, you didn't drink during your pregnancy. I sure did not. So you've done it before. I had like a glass of wine during my pregnancy. Yeah. I've done it before. I can do it again.

I'm a cold turkey kind of gal. My lens not going so great. You're what? My lens, my Lenton. Why not? Because I keep drinking. Yeah. But I like, at one point, I kind of was like, well, maybe just beer. I was like, monks drink beer. They brew beer and they, and yeah. And they drink it. So I was like, maybe just spirit. Yeah. But then, you know, you're at a martini party. And the next thing you know, then you're stressed out, then you're really knocking them back. That was a little bit of a rock bottom for me that night, honestly. The Roger Stone night. Me too. But spiritually, not chemically. For me, both. Well, I was chemically medicating to stave off my spiritual crisis. And then I ended up sobriety screaming.

Seems like an increasingly attractive proposition. But I'm a contrarian, so I don't want to do it because it seems like everyone's doing it. So I have to hold out the longest. Everyone's definitely not doing it. But I increasingly, I increasingly feel about drinking like I feel about racism. I'm kind of over it. Yeah. Even today, I'm not, I'm not super excited to drink this beautiful chilled red that you brought. Please don't. You don't have to. No, no, no, I will, because I have low impulse control and low self-esteem. So I know, I know. I'm sorry. It's my bad. No, no, it's not your fault. I have only myself to blame for digging myself into this hole. I went to Clando at 5 p.m. with Jordan Castro. And we were both drinking like ginger beer and soda bitters.

But I was really like shaking because I was like, I have to order a drink because the bartender might think I'm gay because we're here at a bar, both clearly being sober. And then some guys came in and ordered beer so like the pressure was off. Right. Yeah. It's, it's, it's tough out there. I think like sobriety when you hit your like late 30s to early 40s is less decision or a choice you make and more like a hormonal state and a state of mind that you rationalize as being your decision or choice. You don't feel up for it anymore. It's just not sustainable. Yeah. Yeah. And one wonders, you know, if you are in a, if you are, if you find yourself a site at the New York Young Republicans club where there's no young people around here,

distress is mounting and your impulse is to start like binge drinking. Maybe that's a place you shouldn't be at. Exactly. Yeah. You have this whole fantasy built up about finally being the youngest person in the room. And when it actually happens, it doesn't feel so good. You're like, hey, you guys are all 42. But yeah, I had a deep moral hangover the next day. I texted you. Yeah. Yeah. Dasha texted me being like, dude, I want to stop drinking. I was like, this is new. Okay. I'm getting texts from, from men I don't remember talking to, being like, hey, really great meeting you. What an awesome long conversation we had. It was so interesting what you were saying about being a Pisces. Should we get that drink? And I'm like, I don't know. Like slamming your fists like

the Pope is fake. Like what you said about the Pope, it was just like so moving and profound. Like, I'd never thought of it that way. I'd love to pick your brain. Like, please, please pick my brain come on over and sex murder me and drill a hole in my head. Get an ice pack. But it threw my eye scrambled the front below like a Vietnamese 13 year old daddy. Um, well, sobriety is not really on the docket. That's something we'll, we'll return. No, no, it's not. We don't have to keep going down the rabbit hole. I don't want to be sober. I don't either really, but I don't want to continue drinking. I, yeah, but I don't want to identify as an addict or have like a overly, you don't want

the stench of sobriety, the stain of sobriety hanging over your shoulder. I want to like drink less, but have the option and sober people are like religious converts or people who've fallen in love for the first time. They just like want to scream it from the rooftops and love talking to you about it. And cause they're like the dog in the burning building, like it's fine, you know, and they want to like assure you, I assure themselves that they made the right decision and that there's like no shame involved. Right. Well, they probably most did most people did make the right decision. It is. Yeah, it is. If I, if I quit drinking, it's going to be out of vanity because I was undressing the other day and I noticed that my midsection was looking kind of

soft because I've just been like guzzling wine and cocktails for the past two weeks. Yeah, we've been drinking more than usual. But I think that's a seasonal effective thing because we're just like suffering through the last weeks of winter. End of winter. You're going to want to drink then spring. You're going to want to drink. Oh, no. Damn. Oh, no. And I dropped a sig into our equipment or our podcasting then. Oops. But yeah, whenever I've quit drinking for any prolonged period of time, it's been an interest of like vanity because I knew I had like a photo shooter was going to be photographed or had, you know, some press to do, right? Because I do you want it to look quote healthy. Yeah. Yeah. And you do look a lot better. We do drink a ton.

Even like two weeks, I feel like you're really. Yeah. I'm like, wow. I was looking at like sober testimonials online and a lot of them do this thing where they take a selfie the day that they vow to quit drinking and then take a selfie like three weeks later and then like a year later and they look like radically better. Yeah. Like every person's drunk selfie is like a mug shot, you know? You're like mug shoddies, but not hot. Now's the time. But I think, I mean, the big test, though the there's the AI questionnaire is lengthy, is that it's negatively impacting your life. Yeah. But my life is negatively impacting my life. What isn't negatively impacting my life? Not drinking. Maybe drinking is improving your life. Exactly. Well, okay. So in that thread,

Jack said that the big fear with quitting drinking is that people might not like you when you're sober, which, you know, I understand and it's relatable, whatever, but that's like never been my fear because people don't like me anyway. I'm just kidding. Everyone loves me. But my fear is that if you give up drinking, you'll have no relief. Yeah, that's what I like. It's that you won't like other people. But you don't like those people anyway. Yeah, that's true. They're driving you to drink. I know. It's so much easier to talk to people when you're drunk. Yeah. But when I, last year, when I really was more vigilant during Lent about not drinking, I would still go out and socialize and mostly had basically positive experiences. And there is something about

like being at a party and drinking like soda water, where everyone around you is getting drunker and more dehydrated. And you feel like a genius because you're getting more and more hydrated, right? But yeah, you can't quite hang as long. You don't have the stamina. Yeah. To really do like an all nighter. But I don't have the stamina to do that anyway. Yeah. And why would you want to do that? You know, you're having the best night of your life. But to be literally devil's advocate, I don't think you should stop drinking. You should be sober. No, I don't want that label. Just drink low and drink sometimes. Yeah. Like only I had the thought that I would just only drink when we're podcasting.

That was initially my thought. I can't be drinking at no right wing party. We couldn't not drink at that party, though. That was yeah. And those martinis sucked, by the way, did we discuss this already? No, they were whack. The stone martini. Yeah. At that point, I was already so drunk and it was given to me in like not a martini glass and just like a normal glass. So I was just guzzling it down like all the other vodka I was drinking that night. It was that I couldn't even take I I couldn't say. Welcome to Red Scarra podcast, where we recap the Roger Stone martini night over and over again. We have it. We have it. We have it recap the Groundhog Day stuff.

Yeah, it just keeps happening. Remember that night. I wish I could forget. I wish I blacked out more so that I had no recollection, but instead I have vague, hazy memories of my, the pitch at which I was screaming, and then the terrified faces of the men who were looking at me.

And I distinctly remember one guy looking at me going, you're psychotic. The night started to look more and more like a Hieronymus Bosch painting or a Lewis Wayne illustration. Some circle of power, pretty sure. People were looking demonic and warped. I think Republicans ordinarily look like that. They are not sending their best.

Yeah, like the men all look like Kyle Rittenhouse and the women all look like Kimberly Guilfoyle. They have like weird Venetian death masks on at all times. I'm out. I'm tabbing out. Yeah, I don't know if I said this on the last one, because also, again, I have a wet brain, so I really don't remember.

Being drunk all the time really fuels your malignant narcissism, because it helps you be like amnesiac and out to lunch, like oops, I forgot. I know. I was like, Maddie was asking me to find an email. And I was like, I can't. She was like, use the Gmail app. And I was like, I can't remember my passwords.

Yeah, I know. I can't do it. She was like, you can do it. You're just being a diva. I was like, I don't understand. It was daylight savings time. That's really thrown me off course. Oh yeah, it was daylight savings time.

This year, I feel so much more tired. I feel like vaguely jet lagged or something. It's taken everything from me to adjust to the iffy an hour later. It's because we're poisoning our bodies with alcohol. Right. For real. And also, you know, the other, the last thing,

the bad thing that alcohol does is it makes you more anxious and stressful because it literally raises your cortisol levels. The cortisol, of course. And so the only relief for that is to reach for another drink. It's like a vicious circle. Well, it's like smoking cigarettes feels good because you're having nicotine withdrawals,

not because there's something intrinsically good about. I like holding a sick. I tried to get into vaping a couple of weeks back, and it didn't really stick. I just I like the hand feel of a cigarette. And vaping is dangerous because you can do it all the time. Yeah. And there's apparently like seed oils and chemical additives

in the vape, which I'm so stupid I didn't even know. I was like, oh, it's just pure nicotine flavor to taste like a mojito. Miami Mint is going to be the death of me for sure. I can feel it like coating my esophagus. Like depositing black tar in your lungs. What is on the docket? Oh, yeah.

The problem at the bank. Oh, yeah. I hate when annoying bank shit happens because every time it does, I vow to get on the computer and go on one of those like Vox explainers or listen to like Sauger's pod and get to the bottom of it. But I never do. We should have that guy on the pod.

Oh, yeah. And Jason Kalanak, he's at Jason on Twitter. So you know he's powerful. He's like a tech guy. He has a podcast with some other techies. He was tweeting a lot. He was very distressed about the bank, Silicon Valley Bank. Yeah.

Trying to know what was the bank. There was a big what bank called Silicon Valley for Silicon Valley. What could possibly go wrong? It was there was something. It was they did something, a buyout, what was it called? I think they had a liquidity crisis. And when everyone tries to bail out immediately.

When everyone tries to pull all their money out. Yeah. And apparently the banks don't have the money. Yeah, because they're gambling away your assets on various high risk investments. I know. I said to Matthew, he was trying to explain to me. I said, well, I said, I didn't give them permission to do that.

And he said, you literally did. That's what it means to put your money in the bank. Isn't there a bank where I can just store my money? No, they all gamble with your money. And they all make weird shell accounts to do dirty investing using your identity. I mean, I was part of a Wells Fargo class action lawsuit unbeknownst to me because they opened up many bank accounts

in my name and the names of other customers to gamble with our futures. But once again, merely the collateral, not the target. Per usual. For once it'd feel good to be the target. But it seems like we keep getting rocked by these financial collapses that threaten to become full on financial crises.

But then nothing happens and everything is mysteriously memory-hold. Some people write some articles and some people fire off some hot takes. And then the Fed steps in and bails everybody out. So they bailed them out. They're good. Like immediately.

And then there was, of course, the standard operating procedure with banks is that the FDIC ensures your deposit up to $250,000. So if a bank becomes insolvent, you are owed that money immediately up front at the very least. But I think I remember reading something like 90% of deposits in Silicon Valley Bank were not protected. Ooh, spooky.

The door opened mysteriously. Were not protected by the FDIC. But then the Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, that old bitch, stepped in. That old count Dracula. And said, in fact, deposits would be FDIC insured and eligible for protections, whatever, whatever. Take everything I'm saying with a grain of salt.

I don't know what any of it means. You know, it's a good bank, city bank. I don't think there are any good banks. I do my banking over at the city bank. That's where my debit card's from. Also Bank of America. And I have an American Express card that I enjoy very much.

I picked my lock with my American Express card yesterday. Because the handyman locked me out. So it's a very practical card to have. It has multiple uses. It's awesome. I recommend the Delta Rewards one. It gets you miles. Yeah, the $800 yearly fee practically pays for itself.

The what? Yeah, it's an expensive card. You have to pay for the card. And I got to pay my own bills. Yeah. Damn, bro. I read an article on CNN News about Senator Ted, John Kennedy. How many Kennedys are there?

John Kennedy, huh? Ted might be dead. The federal bailout of Silicon Valley Bank wouldn't have been needed if SVB bankers understood the basics about hedging bank risks or if federal regulators weren't asleep to the rising possibility that the California Bank might fail. Senator John Kennedy said on the Senate floor Wednesday,

Kennedy said SVB wasn't broke and was only suffering from a liquidity crisis that both the bank and federal regulators had the power to correct. Rhonda Santos swooped in and blamed diversity initiatives apparently even though he was a backer of this 2018 legislation that supposedly removed controls on small and mid-sized banks like SVB. But of course, that's all bullshit

because the stuff keeps happening because people know they're going to get bailed out. Yeah. They're not like, quote, asleep or naive. Money's not real. Yeah, nothing is real. And I, well, it's fake as it gets. Isn't this bank also linked to the big crypto bank, which

I also know nothing about? So it's like a cryptocurrency bank. I don't know. Again, take everything with a grain of salt. Oh, no. Why is this important? During this time, SVB received billions of dollars from venture-backed clients.

In one year alone, their deposits increased 100%. They took these funds and invested them in longer-term bonds. As a result, this created a dangerous trap as the company expected interest rates would remain low. During this time, SVB invested in bonds at the top of the market as interest rates rose higher and bond prices declined. SVB started taking major losses on their long-term holdings.

And of course, all the top execs started pulling their assets out, da-da-da. My dumb, retard question is, what's a bond? What's an interest rate? No, is I know that interest rates have been low for a long time. But why would you assume that they would stay permanently low? Tech pros, finance guys, please. Yeah.

Don't tell Anna. Don't bother. I don't even know what a bond is, man. And people make fun of me for when the Wall Street bets stonk, game stonk thing happened. When I asked if other countries had stock markets, people loved to be like, ha, she doesn't even know. I was like, well, answer the question.

No one can answer the question. You can just laugh at me for asking. No one seems to have any answers. But that's besides the point. I literally don't. Do you know what a bond is? Can you tell me in a succinct way? It's like a debt security that people buy to invest and stuff.

This is why we should never. What are they buying? What? What are they buying? They're buying the bonds. What is the bond? This bond is a security. It's issued by a government or a corporation.

They buy a piece of paper. Or whatever, like a, I don't know, a contract, whatever. A document. OK, OK. It's like an NFT. OK, it's like an NFT. And the NFTs were not expensive, and then they started buying more expensive ones.

Sorry, what? The bonds were cheap. The interest rates went up, so the bonds tanked in value, something like that. They should just do what my boy Lukashenko does with inflation and say forbidden. Inflation is forbidden. Rising interest rates, forbidden.

What's this piece of paper? That is a document. It's in Russian? It's a Russian document from the revolutionary era that a right-wing Twitter and non-buddy of ours sent to me to see if I could find a translator for her. So I took a stab at translating it. It's about the women's death battalion.

Oh, interesting. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Rzhenskaya battalion smerty. Interesting. How's the translating going? Good, good. I'm a very good translator in Russian, actually.

I used to work as a translator, believe it or not. I believe it. Cool. I'm a very obviously slow reader in Russian. But I have a bagate slovarnik. And I'm verbal and good with language. Good for you. I used to work for this guy who was like some Russian Jew

entertainment entrepreneur translating, what do you call that, a deck, translating decks for Western investors. So he would make pitches, pilots for Russian children's programming. And I would try to whip it into shape by making it sound less phobby and more colloquial. Yeah, cool.

Yeah. Most of the banks are fine. Everything's OK. Yeah, until it's not. I mean, it's always fine. I think the thing is that the SVB is not a large bank. It's like a mid bank. But most deposits are over a quarter of a million dollars.

They have a lot of money. They have a lot of money. But the fact that the government rushed to bail them out means effectively that banks in general are too big to fail and will be bailed out, which we already knew that. We should start a bank. We should start a bank, Red Scare Bank, where you never get your investments back.

We just squander your money on the real real. Yeah, your money's been converted into real real credits. We just scam right wing men into parking their funds with us. Yikes, OK. Stupid whore bank. That's a WB. I'm a gambling addict. I know.

At least the amount of money I have is better for me. No, it's good. This is a great premise for a bank. Yeah. We invest your funds in retarded, foolhardy ventures. We're going to the casino. We're going to play Blackjack. We're going to the Borgata.

We're not even going to Vegas. So we're going to New Jersey. We're going to New Jersey. Yeah, Atlantic City. And you will see returns, because I'm feeling lucky. We're going to link up with those two Nigerians that fake hate crime, Jussie Smollet. I can't believe there's still a lot of Jussie Smollet.

I knew from the second it happened. I know. You really call that. I was like, no way. I was like, no one's recognizing this guy from Empire. But now there's a whole Fox special that they produced, where they talk to the Nigerian guys and take them to the scene of the crime.

They should make a whole TV show out of that. They want to, man. That Eclipse is Empire, which Empire was kind of like succession for black people. It was like about family dynastic warfare and entertainment and venture. But what was I going to say about the bank? Oh, yeah, Eli also told me that, hypothetically, this also

means that if the government refuses to bail out a bank, they can sue the government, which I'm not sure how that works. But OK. OK. Anyway. That's why you got to spend it if you got it, folks. Because you got to buy the most expensive mattress you can find, because they can't take that away from you.

Yeah, and you have to hide the money under the mattress. That's where my money is. Yeah, I was like, should I be pulling out all my money? Yeah, it would be great to get some sound financial advice about how to invest your money. Yeah, that'd be nice. Something about a 401k or a Roth IRA. Anything I thought would be good for me.

But I'm a Christian, so give us this day our daily bread. I'm like, I'm taking it day by day. It's good to know that. And you make plans. You make plans. And God laughs. Yeah. So don't bother.

In Soviet Russia, plan makes you. You make five-year plan. In Soviet Russia, you laugh at God. And we all see how that turned out. Anyway, I'm going to dip into my notes and see if I have anything else to say. I really dread talking about financial crisis. No one's tuning in for this.

This is tough stuff. Yeah. What's it called when everyone pulls a bank rush, a bank run? I thought it was called the liquidity crisis, but I could be wrong. No, there's another word for it. Bank run. OK, you Google bank rush, and I'll Google bank run.

Yeah, it's a bank run. Bank run, yeah. That's what happened. That's how the Great Depression happened, right? I think so, but this bank run was apparently prompted literally by a group chat around tech guys who started to speculate that the bank wasn't doing so well and that it all kind of snowballed.

Yeah. That's depressing, because all it comes down to is expectations. And I'm in the wrong group chats, turns out. I'm just in the group chats where they're dropping the n-bomb, by which I mean neoliberalism, gossiping about women's waistlines, these bitches. I know.

How come I'm not included in any inside trading group chats? Seriously. We can use some tips. I have no investments, dude. I have some crypto investments. You do? I do. But I got logged out of the app, so I don't even

know how much money I have. That was my next question, what app? So I have an account on Coinbase, which is the shitty one. There's another one that's better, where you don't have to pay fees or something. My investment is stable. I've tripled my investment. Oh, nice.

But we're talking about a very small sum of money. Yeah, yeah, yeah, of course. And the crypto bros keep telling me to just hold out, but. I think that's a good one. No skin off my back, but I don't think anything's going to come of it. I need a man's to intercede on my behalf, to take complete control of my finances

and make some good decisions for me. You can do that easily. Yeah. You can cuck some Jewish guy into taking care of your finances. That'd be nice, yeah. I mean, you read the Agnes Calard article, right? That's like the whole premise of that article in a nutshell.

What? Well, we'll get to it, but she basically cucks her husband with another guy, then divorces the husband, then marries the other guy, and they all live together in a weird polycule with the kids. And everybody is wondering why. Because they're philosophers. Yeah, yeah.

So that they be wondering. Everyone is trying to look for a rational, not philosophical basis for this bizarre living arrangement that's clearly harmful to the children, even as they strenuously claim it isn't. And it's because, well, I pulled some quotes. I guess we could get to that. Let's move on to that, because that's really more our speed.

Let me find the quote. The New Yorker. It was in the New Yorker, right? So when Agnes got pregnant with Arnold's baby, they moved back in with Ben, because it seemed unnecessarily hectic and burdensome for the two older children to shuttle back and forth between homes, i.e. she wanted Ben to raise all three of her children.

Ben is obviously the first husband, Arnold, who was a graduate student of hers. And then similarly, Agnes and Ben saw no reason to separate their bank accounts translation. She wants Ben to manage the family's finances, because the guy is probably the only adult in the room. And they kind of paper over all of these practicals with heady, horny discussions of philosophy

and how you should be as a human and what it means to be in love. So, yeah, bloop, you just want to enjoy the excitement of being with a cute, younger man who is inexperienced, while also enjoying the... How old is this lady? Comfort of being with an older, dependable man who's also not exciting.

How old is she? I think she's in her 40s, but this went down when she was like 35 and the grad student was 27. She's 40s? She's 47, okay. Yeah. Anyway, so, okay, let's backtrack. So, basically the story is about this female

philosophy professor, Agnes Callard, who fell in love with her male grad student, many such cases. The catch, of course, is that she was already married to another philosophy professor and they shared two young sons. Then the bigger catch is that she divorced the original husband and married the new boyfriend,

but they all live in the same house together. Also, she's autistic. Super, yeah. Intense for immunity to certain obvious truths and facts that most of us take for granted. Agnes specializes in ancient philosophy and ethics, but she's also a public philosopher, writing popular essays about experiences

such as jealousy, parenting, and anger that feel to her like, quote, dissociated manner. Falling outside the realm of existing theories, she is often baffled by the human conventions that the rest of us have accepted. It seems to her that we are all intuitively copying one another, adopting the same set of arbitrary behaviors and values as if by osmosis.

How has it come to past, she writes, that we all take ourselves to have any inkling about how to live? So this woman is like, Aiella Meets Moldvug. She's like a horny, nerdy overshare with like a sense of child like wonderment, but no sense of personal boundaries. For like the most basic kind of rudimentary human experiences.

I mean, overall, she seems pretty harmless if you don't have to personally deal with her. Yeah. I wouldn't, I don't know. This was one of the things that really dissuaded me from going to graduate school was that in my last semester of undergrad, I worked for a professor at a different college. A different like university professor who was also married

to another academic who had many such cases. She had, they had twins clearly via IVF when she was 50 years old, when I was in her employee, she was about 65. So she had like two girl and a boy teenage offspring. And I worked like out of her like guest house, like in her home. So I was became very privy to certain family dynamics.

And it was like watching like two autistic people try to like parent these poor kids to be like a very tumultuous part of their life. Like navigate something that most people just do intuitively and naturally without any forethought or afterthought. And then another professor at the, I was going to go to CalArts.

And at the time I was working as a waitress in one of their faculty, one of the professors would come into the restaurant that I worked at and interfacing with him and seeing how ill equipped he was to even like go through the motions like eating at a restaurant. And he was like semi-regular. Like they're all, academics are so stunted.

None of them are good. None of them have any idea what's going on. They're living in like a dream. And they think that they're, and they're malignant narcissists who think that their specific experiences are somehow more interesting and valuable. Yeah, well, here are some.

So this article continues on in these like very heady, breathless tones. Agnes and Arnold struggled to do their work. Almost every day they went out for coffee together and had long conversations about philosophy which felt like the real work. In accordance with university guidelines they had declared their desire to have a relationship

to the chair of the philosophy department. And Agnes recused herself from academic authority over Arnold. Sometimes it seemed to Agnes that the universe had been pre-arranged for her benefit. If she and Arnold were taking a walk together and she craved a croissant, a bakery would suddenly appear.

If she needed a book, she would realize that she was passing a bookstore and the text she wanted was displayed in the window. She thought this was now her permanent reality. Kind of like low interest rates. Arnold said that the first time Agnes's sons came to his apartment, I remember watching them play on the furniture

and suddenly realizing this is the point of the furniture. And they just keep hornily realizing things that are just like intuitively obvious to most people. News of the divorce reached her students and Agnes worried that they would feel disoriented or betrayed, spoiler, they didn't care. Then she gets invited to be the keynote speaker at an undergraduate philosophy conference

and decides to give her talk on her recent experience of falling in love. It was titled on the kind of love into which one falls. Ben read the draft to the talk in advance and gave her feedback. He and Arnold sat next to each other in the front row. She told her students that she had a professional obligation

to clarify the situation. Philosophers often describe love from the outside, but she could provide an insider account. Notice how she takes any opportunity to tell her story, especially if there are like some quote university guidelines or a quote professional obligation. Women be telling a story.

To like disclose your romantic status because obviously it provides her with like a legitimate sounding pretext to talk about what she really wants to talk about, which is herself. But I mean, that's innocent enough. Like I get that. I get it.

I get what it feels like to be in love and want to tell everybody what's less innocent is like how truly sheltered and entitled these people are. By these people, I mean the people who run all of our like cultural and political institutions. Right. So she said six and a half weeks ago,

I fell in love for the first time. You did not think I was a person who subject your children to divorce. You did not think I was a person who'd be married to someone she had not fallen in love with. You are not sure whether you know me anymore. She told her students she had built a professional obligation

to clarify the situation, blah, blah, blah. One of the things I said very early on to my beloved was this, I could completely change now. Radical change becoming a wholly other person is not out of the question. There's suddenly room for massive aspiration. And of course like the big spoiler of the story

is that her new relationship goes the exact same way as her old relationship, which they gradually become like disenchanted and disillusioned with one another. And also the whole concept of romantic love and have more heady, horny philosophical conversations about whether they should get a divorce. And then she comes up with this concept

called immaculate divorce, which is a divorce free of pain and stress and disappointment, which like kind of negates the whole point of the divorce. Gwyneth Paltrow already came up with that. It's called conscious uncoupling, okay? And many of these insights have been elicited by, yeah, people like Gwyneth Paltrow

or Carrie Bradshaw on, I've been rewatching Sex and the City. Like hotter, more famous, fictional and non-fictional people. Have already gone through these things and there's six seasons of Sex and the City that you could gain a better understanding of emotional shortcomings of men.

Have you watched Sex and the City? I have, yeah. Not fully, but I've watched episodes. I vividly remember the one where Samantha blows the hot Dominican UPS guy, because I remember thinking like, Is that a package for me? Yeah.

And her like brassy sandpaper dipped in honey, Marianne Williamson voice. And I remember thinking like, what are you talking about? UPS delivery guys are not that hot. I've never wanted to blow my UPS delivery guy. Samantha's a real nympho. She's my favorite one actually.

She's the best, second best actress on the show, I think. Who's the first? I think Cynthia Nixon who plays Miranda is actually, she's the best actress really on the show. Samantha's my favorite character. Mine too. Do you know enough, are you familiar enough to say

which of Carrie's love interests is your favorite? I only know Mr. Big and then the Irish guy with like the long hair. Aiden? Aiden. Aiden the furniture designer. Mr. Big is not my favorite of Carrie's love interests because he reminds me of my tech bro ex-boyfriend,

Mike Papi. Mm-hmm. Yeah, no one, I don't love Mr. Big, though I see how they kind of deserve each other. I'm a fan of Burger played by Ron Livingston who's like a novelist, but he's super insecure and he's threatened by Carrie's success. And things sort of unravel between them in the sixth season.

It's a great show, anyway. Yeah, it's fun. I tried to get into entourage because Maddie recommended it and it's kind of like Sex and the City for Men, but it never quite. You have to finish watching NGE. Yeah, yeah.

Because we promised. We made a promise. Fuck, what was I gonna say? Sex and the City, Gwyneth Peltrow. Oh yeah, the divorce thing. Yeah, immaculate divorce. The thing with divorce is that divorce should be sad and tragic and painful

because you have broken a vow to your partner and to God and should have to suffer for it. Yeah. It's not something to be taken lightly. I mean, you're literally not allowed to do it if you're Catholic, so. Yeah, it's kind of like a punishment you incur for failing at marriage.

Yeah. That's why it exists. And you can't. You can't protect people from rushing into marriage. And Catholics actually think, not only can you not get divorced, but if you do separate from your spouse, any partner, if you remarry, for example,

that is not a legitimate marriage because sacraments actually cannot be broken. Right, it's a, yeah. Unless your previous spouse dies. And this really gets into the so you're living in adultery if you're living in a second marriage. Really, okay, didn't know that. But this really gets to the question,

the philosophical question of what it means to be human. Yes. And in my philosophical genius mind, humanity implies tragedy, disappointment, failure, suffering. That's not all humanity is, but you have to have those things to be human. It definitely doesn't mean

the kind of convenience and ease. Yeah, like a friction that color describes of everything sort of manifesting. Well, in the way that she describes their divorce is so eerie because it's so frictionless. Like she calls up her husband, announces that she wants a divorce, takes the train to see him.

He suggests therapy and talking it over, but then comes back to her a few hours later and says like, you know, babe, I think you're right. We should get divorced. It must be nice, honestly, to be such a spiritual dependent. The mean him? Her. Her.

How so? Well, cause she's so, she's so clearly like dependent on this guy. By that, I don't mean that he has the money and she doesn't. I mean that he takes care of everything. Right. Like manages her life and manages the household. Clearly pulls most of the weight

and taking care of the kids, including the third son who's not even his, who he basically adopted. So he's a literal cock. Oh, he may. He's not the stepdad. He's the dad who stepped up. Yeah.

Yeah. There was a good, she talks about her autism at one point in the piece. She says, Agnes has generally avoided speaking publicly about being autistic in part because she worries that people will find it preposterous for her to use the label once closely associated with people who are nonverbal.

But she feels that the diagnosis helps her understand her immunity. She's the pull of certain received structures of meaning. In addition to the philosophical underpinning of her marriage to Arnold, there's perhaps an autistic one too. And that most of us learn to ignore all the subtle ways in which we settle and compromise it

based on our received sense that this is the way relationships work. That is the way relationships work. Wait, how? Like through settling and compromise. Yes, they literally, that's not a negative or bad thing. That's just like a fact of life. It's not autistic not to notice those things.

It's narcissistic. Yeah, like what it means to be involved with another person is that you have to be reciprocal and you have to keep in mind their needs and expectations. Yes. There's also, yeah, this very interesting quote that happens. But when you're so special on autistic. I actually do believe that Agnes is more autistic

than she is narcissistic. Those are slightly different things, but the danger of an article like this is that it emboldens other people who are merely garden variety narcissists to think about life this way. And I think she's, when you talk about the autism spectrum, you refer to behaviors that are functionally the same

as something a narcissistic person would engage in. It's like the interpersonal realities of being autistic are not so different from being narcissistic. Well, yeah, that's the other thing that stuck out at me because you know, she, there's a very convenient part where she doesn't want to talk about her autism diagnosis because she doesn't want to steal valor from nonverbal people.

Which is such a convenient and flattering way of putting it. Of course, because no woman, especially a woman like her who takes every opportunity to like talk about herself and in fact has made it her life's work. And like the essence of her philosophy would pass up a chance to talk about her autism. It's like Katnip, the only reason she's not doing it is because, you know, to protect herself

from accusations of narcissism. Right. It's like so obvious. Which is very non-autistic actually. It's actually kind of calculating? Yeah, exactly. And cynical? It shows the kind of...

Well, the calculus. Manipulative emotional calculations that I don't think real autistic people are capable of. Yeah, that part seemed immediately fake and gay to me. The other part is there's a part where Arnold, her lover, characterizes Agnes' idea of loneliness as a barrier between two people. And his idea of loneliness is an internal question

of being able to be honest and tell the truth. I quote, empathize more with his idea of loneliness than with hers. But of course, he's being like very generous to her. He's being nice and patriarchal and masculine, trying to protect her from various bad accusations because loneliness for Agnes is not, in fact, a barrier between two people.

It's not being able to inflict herself on somebody without reciprocity. She sees other people, especially men, as sounding boards and sources of validation as disappointed and disillusioned when they fail to live up to that because they're actually real people who have needs and desires and expectations of their own.

There's that part where she chimps on her first husband because she's making dinner while he's grading papers and he's not paying enough attention to her. She's making pita with hummus, with homos. She's like me. She's putting the pita bread on a plate and making dinner. She's taking the shake shack out of the bag.

This reminds me of that classic, iconic SNL skit with Will Ferrell and Rachel Dratch and Christopher Walken. The one I'm talking about where they're professors and they're like Pauly and they go forth into the fold, usually played by Anna Gasthier or something. They're like, we rubbed our bodies with goat fat and made love until the sunrise. Then Will Ferrell inevitably trips

and sprains his back and lashes out petally at Rachel Dratch. You can imagine that's what living in the Calard household is really like. My back. Arnold, my back. My allergies. My allergies are falling off.

My autism is acting up. She really could have saved herself some money on therapy bills for her kids down the line if she had just had a regular affair. I know many such cases though in these like polyamorous situations is that they don't want to actually be accountable to other people.

They want everything to be sort of contractual on their own terms. Frictionless and on their terms. In their control. That's what really fucks me up about the therapeutic language of radical transparency and radical honesty. People always coming at me sideways

saying you have to be honest and transparent about your desires. No, that's a way of absolving yourself of responsibility to other people. Hey, babe, I want to cuck you with this other guy. Yeah. And to say nothing of how opaque desires are even to ourselves that we don't actually

even really know what we want. Yeah. Well, it seems like she's in the somewhat unfortunate position of being like a horny high IQ Jewish with a male libido and a male developmental disorder. But a female, all too female, a classically female trait of not knowing what she wants,

wanting everything at once and wanting to absolve herself of responsibility. That's the thing that gets muddled in all these convenient, selective confusions of autism and narcissism. Which people deliberately confuse quote honesty and quote transparency with responsibility.

They don't want to take responsibility. Well, I think the thing about being really honest is, which I do think is virtuous, is that people who are truly honest, like the, okay, Greeks, right? Like when Nietzsche writes about aristocracy, he says that the defining characteristic of real aristocrats is that they don't lie.

Yeah. And you don't have to lie if you have a real aristocratic temperament because you sort of have the truth on your side. You couldn't possess the truth. And you don't do things that would require you to lie because you have the integrity of your desires, your choices, your behaviors.

You like, you remain accountable to other people because you are honest in a more idealistic way. You are always being true. So what you're saying is that academics are all pearls and plebs because there's too much democracy. Exactly. That's exactly what I was saying. And more than that, they're neurotic

and Lacan says that what the neurotic wants, the defining characteristic of the neurotic, He's being Jewish. He's being Jewish. No, but he says the neurotic wants to be begged. The only thing they don't want is to pay the price. Yeah. They want everything on their own terms.

They want to like, artistically, neurotically, like, compartmentalize their lives in a way where they don't have to be accountable to other people. Literally, she's having her cake and eating it too. Good for her. At the expense of her children. Radical honesty and transparency only work if you're being radically honest and transparent

with yourself. Exactly. Not with others. Saying whatever comes to mind to other people, airing your internal monologue in a stream of verbal diarrhea is, well, only, it's designed to hurt others. And it's not even necessarily the truth. Yes, exactly.

I mean, the charitable read is that you hurt others as like an unintended consequence of telling the truth. But the reality, the unflattering reality is that I think all of us have, at times, a desire to punish and hurt and inflict pain on those closest to us because we resent them. For loving us. For loving us.

So we tell them the quote truth in order to, you know, dig the nail in deeper a little bit. Jordan actually had a really good tweet today that was like, the only thing worse than repressing your desires is having your desires come true. Like getting what you want, fulfilling your desires. Yeah. Sorry, I botched that.

Well, it's true because desire doesn't get to be satisfied. Yeah. Isn't that the famous Lacanian? Yeah, that's the idea is that it's like the desire is the yearning. Yeah. But specifically for a lack, it can never really be fulfilled. So when you think that you are fulfilling your desire, you don't even know what you even want.

Yeah. So how could you even begin? What we call like maturity in the worldly sense or grace in the godly sense is just being able to like anticipate that actually you don't know what you want and fulfilling your desires will be just as disappointing if not more than few times.

Yeah, repressing them. So you basically have to settle and compromise if you want to attain some like contentment in this life. But it's a double-edged sword because you also can't present the individuals that you are compromising with. Yeah. That's where grace comes in. Yeah.

Which you're like obviously like liable inclined to do or whatever. You have to suffer in like a dignified way and take responsibility for yourself. Well, which was much easier to do back when we didn't know that we had the choice. Now anybody can get divorced and women are spearheading the divorces. I don't know if that's actually true.

No, I think it's statistically true. Women file for divorce more often than men. Oh. I think men are more often unfaithful. Yeah. But a friend of the pod Sasha said something very smart that men cheat to stay and women cheat to leave. Very interesting.

Yeah. I mean, how many times have you cheated at the tail end of a relationship because you were trying to force the issue? Never. Who me? Who me? I would never do something like that. Who am I?

No, I think that's true. Yeah. Yeah. Men can comfortably cheat on a woman with many women throughout the years and still love her and stay with her and appreciate her. Right. That's a known fact.

Right. A woman's infidelity is more of a betrayal. Yeah. Certainly. It's more powerful and destructive. Did you see this girl, the Van girl? No, no. I saw that you were tweeting about it, but I missed that too.

It's been on Musk's new, like, in Musk's new algorithmic model. I have been exposed many times. Musk's extended universe? To this TikTok video this girl made that has right-wing guys absolutely seething about. She's very young. She's 21. She is one of those Van girls who lives in refurbished vans

and travels around and is trying to parlay that into an influencer career. She's like a middling... Didn't that girl get murdered? Exactly. Well, exactly. She's one of those girls. She loves living in her van and she moved to...

She made this TikTok video about how she... It starts with her like... I think like an airplane bathroom being like, I'm changing my life again. And in it, she describes how she had moved to Europe, had this boyfriend who was her quote, ride or die, who she's like super in love with. She was supposed...

She had planned to stay in Europe for like a few years, maybe longer and now has decided to leave and go back to America where she's going to build out like a new van and start another like chapter of her van journey. And I kept seeing many like frog Twitter right wing guys like posting this video being like, see this is why women should have no agency. This is why women are evil.

Look at her narcissistically justifying her, like leaving her boyfriend to do whatever she wants. And because those in the video, she was like, because I realized I put a lot of myself into this relationship. And now I need to be more independent. She's like, she's a very sweet. She looks a little bit like Gwyneth Paltrow to me, which is maybe why I'm so into her.

Anyway, I looked into her name is Abby. Her boyfriend's name is Dante. I like looked because the videos sort of makes it seem like she met him in Europe and then shacked up with him in another van and now is like leaving. But then I looked, I dug deep into her social media. I stalked this girl. I found out that her and Dante had actually met like.

You're probably the nicest person who stalked her. These other guys clearly have not stalked her at all because they would know that Abby and Dante actually haven't broken up. She didn't leave Dante. She's just going back to America because it's really hard probably to live with your significant other in a fucking van, a broad little or.

She's doing the same thing that Agnes Callard is doing, which is having her cake and eating it too. She's keeping that poop on ice. I don't even think so. I don't think people know. We don't know enough about Dante's agenda. Or maybe this is, you know, maybe this is just a viral stunt by the two of them.

It's not as she's being very. Who knows who didn't leave Dante. Okay. Her and Dante are still together. She went back to the States. She's going to build out another van. When they moved to Europe together, they bought a van in the UK, built it out together

and now are traveling around in it. He's keeping that van. She's building out another van for them to have in America. They'll probably see each other in like three or so months. Realistically, they'll probably break up whatever. They're extremely young. It doesn't matter. Abby's done nothing wrong.

Abby is not the problem. I mean, right-wing chimpouts over viral videos of TikTok influencers are as predictable as like bank defaults in the standings. They're basically tailor-made. But they don't have all the facts. They just don't know. And I think it's for all this discourse about the longhouse,

it's like once a beautiful wanderlust, like Abby comes on the scene, she gets nothing but vitriol. There's some sort of expectation that she should stay in this van with Dante when she wants some solitude and there's nothing wrong with that. Yeah, when like 99% of young relationships

in this day and age are basically like destined to fail. And maybe they won't eat that. And maybe they won't. And Dante has his own thing going on. There's so much projection where they're like, oh, another nice guy betrayed by some whore. And it's like, what do you know about fucking Dante? He was too nice.

Dante's into skydiving. He's into bass jumping. He's with his boys in Europe. He's doing his own thing. I'm happy they're spending some time apart. There's like an endless procession of Croatian and Romanian whores to satisfy his whims and needs. Exactly.

What are you talking about? So what Abby wants to build out another van? So what if she's goal oriented? Hey, hanging out on right wing Twitter is really threatening to turn me into a feminist. Literally, I'm like, I'm a feminist now for the way these men have treated this girl. I'm like, you're all fucking wrong.

It's like the time is a fat circle. We started this podcast as anti-feminists and we're going to end it as full on libtard, libtam, Hillary shells. I mean, y'all are the real denizens of the longhouse here. You're like punishing this girl for what? Yeah. For wanting to ride?

For wanting to hit the open road? I doubt she even knows she's being punished. No, she's not on Twitter. She's on TikTok. She's too pretty. Also, this TikTok video is probably posted like six months ago. It's all cultures downstream from TikTok and we're not on there. So we're reacting like way later.

She has no idea this is going on that I'm vocally defending her. Whatever. Aristotelian Greifer, 69, 420 said, I'm a roasty who hit the wall. Abby's going to be fine. I'm rooting for her and Dante if it doesn't work out. It's not the end of the world, but y'all aren't like Dante. Dante's not on Twitter. Yeah.

He's base jumping. God bless those people. Seriously. They're really, you know, embodying vitality. Yeah. Yeah. They're living their lives. Being young and building vans.

Exactly. Exactly by living a nomadic lifestyle. And getting sex murdered six months from now. Abby's going to be fine. Fast dying. Be free. Have fun. Anyway, why were we on the country?

America used to be. Van girl tip. How did I get into? I'm not even drunk for once. Wow. Doing a podcast sober hits different. I forget. I forget why.

I'm just suddenly capable of all this high level neoliberal critique. Go up, queen. I don't know. I'll keep drinking for the both of us. No, I'm going to, I'm going to slug down some little choke. But to also pretend that this is some kind of like new phenomenon. That's indicative of the symptomology of our times that women have become increasingly like, uh, cold hearted.

It's like, I'd hate for these guys to find out about like Anna Karenina. Yeah. Or a Scarlett O'Hara or Kathy Aime is my favorite one. I actually think Anna Karenina and Scarlett O'Hara are not so bad in the grand scheme of like, uh, well, Anna Karenina pays for it in the end, you know, she's a cautionary tale. Yeah. But yeah, I think I said this already on one of our earlier episodes. Uh, women like Scarlett O'Hara and Kathy Ames are a dying breed.

More importantly, they're totally fictional characters. But, um, like women who were like, um, uh, calculating and opportunistic because they wanted to secure some material resources. That's a type that's increasingly on the wane because like I said, chicks will do it for clout and for an army of simps now. Like it's unclear now whether young women, even though they would probably say they want this, actually want, um, you know, true love. I think they want an army of simps.

I'm serious. I don't know. But also like it's, I don't think that it's, but yeah, there's no more Scarlett O'Hara. No, none of it is there. Women's women are, that's the problem. There's like, no, there's nobody around to take responsibility. And then you can't really ask these precarious young men to perform chivalry when they can anticipate that they'll get nothing in return and will be like cucked by some woman who

shacks up with her graduate student. Right. So it's a really shitty situation. Yeah. Women have, women have too much, uh, power. That's, well, that's why I always return to that, um, famous Wellbeck passage from whatever where he talks about how the analyzed woman becomes an unsalvageable scumbag who's utterly incapable of love.

Yeah. Too late. Too late for me. Yeah. I mean, it sounds misogynistic, but it's kind of true. And when he talks about psychoanalysis, I'd be curious to like crunch the numbers and see how many women versus men do actual psychoanalysis versus talk therapy. I think Wellbeck is probably using psychoanalysis to mean talk therapy.

Very few people do legitimate psychoanalysis. Oh, on the couch. Yeah. Like to do it for reals, you have to do like four. It's just not not a model that exists anymore. But yeah, women who are engaged in some therapeutic practice. Yeah. But it doesn't even mean a woman who sees a shrink anymore.

It just means a female neurotic who's like hyper self-conscious and hyper self-aware, which is all of us. Frankly, no, men included. We're not going to make you have to pee. Yeah. Go off queen. As far as I see it, Agnes seems like a harmless boob and blow hard. Who's like forever confined to the ivory tower.

And it's really not a threat. That's what they really belong. But it sounds like her life's work has basically been applying certain philosophical principles and philosophical questions to the domain of like personal improvement, i.e. bastardizing philosophy, which that's. That's why women don't belong in there. Yeah. That's why women should not be philosophers.

But that's the scary part because once these kind of inquiries become like democratically available to all people, they just become fodder for rationalizing your narcissism, you know. Amen. That's the business model of therapy. It is. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Forever plumbing the depths of your trauma. Right. And coming up with like, as you said, like elaborate justifications for your own behavior. Almost most people's therapists are not qualified. Yeah. Shouldn't be, you know, most people go to therapy to have someone say like, that's so true, girl. Yeah.

You're so right. Janice. Your mother is such a narcissist. Yeah. Yeah. It's like that famous scene in the Sopranos where the shrink is like, I trust you to handle this with like the generosity and grace that you're known for her breakup with Ralphie and then she throws him down a flight of stairs.

Can I smoke one of your cigarettes? We. We. I see a therapist and my therapist is one of the good ones. I've been in therapy for a year. Yeah. He doesn't, he doesn't really like sugarcoat anything or let me get away with anything. He calls me in my bullshit all the time and I find our time together very productive because

he's a 37 to 45 year old Jewish man with whom I can talk about all the other 37 to 45 year old Jewish men in my life. Same. Mine is the same. Mine's like a late 30s, early 40s Jewish guy. But on the other hand, he would be the first to admit that he's in love with you. So horny for me that he's like really interested in my life. He'd be the first to admit that you're his favorite patient.

You're not like the other patients. I'm not like the other patients. Your life is interesting. I'm not like the other patients. I'm a 37 year old shock job. I think that part is actually mildly interesting to him because I can see a twinkle in his eyes every time I sound off about the profession, you know. Right, right, right.

I hate Dasha so much. I've trapped myself in this relationship with her. I met another younger podcast and I have to be third. You cook me with Ivy won't make you live in my house. I was just going to say Ivy Ivy. So you're 18 going on 42. You're wise behind your years. Shut up.

Is it true that your body count is higher than Dasha's? She's a virgin. What? Damn. Go off queen. She doesn't seem like a virgin. She's a femso. Wow.

She cute. We love Ivy. No, I only say very nice things about my friends and colleagues in therapy. I have nothing. I mostly I just sound off about the mental illness that I'm forced to witness every day on the TL. Of course. Yeah.

My there was like, so he's a Bronze Age pervert. So there's a sky and he's like a brilliant writer, but also like a gay bodybuilder. And he's like sort of my friend on the internet. And my third is like, have you ever met this person? I'm like, I had the dream again. Tell me more about this Bronze Age pervert and how this make you feel. Anyway, you were saying I had the dream again where he showed up and taught me how to do the Rosie cheek makeup tutorial using the freck blush that we got in our capacity as

influencers. I never send it an influencer ship of the freck product. Dasha is such a bitch because she said that girl Geo Scotty applies way too much highlighter to the tip of her nose. So little too much. He's like, who? You know, the Greek towel boy. There's this guy.

His name is Steve Saylor. He lives in a closet surrounded by blazers. I've never met him either. But I know he's real. It really is like describing her imaginary friend. Steve Saylor in the room with us right now. Like I was watching Sesame Street with the baby and Eli kindly explained to me that Staphalophagus, who's like my favorite character on Sesame Street, because I relate to him

as somebody who has like large, mournful eyes that many people describe as dead eyes and a large trunk is Big Bird's imaginary friend. And I thought he was his real friend. And then I realized that my relationship to like people on Twitter is literally like Big Bird and Staphalophagus. Okay, guys, let's walk by the Bodega again. Anyway, actually, what? Everybody knows therapy sucks and is a scam.

But yeah, we still do it. We'll never stop. Twitter is a kind of therapy. And just sitting on the couch anyway. I was just browsing the Staphalophagus Wikipedia. He's so cute. I think initially people thought that he didn't exist. And then he was proven to be real.

Yeah, then he was like written into the. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But initially he was Big Bird's imaginary friend. I did that deeper into movies podcast this morning and I was like explaining to the guy this dream I had as he like dissociated about like it was after the ion pack Oscar screening. And I was like wasted and delirious and I had this dream that I was like in that room at Nine Orchard and like everyone was there is like you and Eugene like Vish Ava and Peter all these people Maddie and I was I said like hey guys like the killers are the best band

ever. And then they mocked me relentlessly because everybody was like what about the Beatles or the Rolling Stones or the doors or the who and I was like no you don't understand like the killers are the best band and then I realized it was like a thinly veiled symbolism for like my daily grind on Twitter dot com where I say like alarming and unsubstantiated shit and people pile on me for good reason. I think the killers are the best band ever. I think the strokes are frankly better than the killer.

But nothing's better than Mr Brightside. Yeah. Truly. I mean that's like the best song ever made. And they have like some other minor. Move over Bob Dylan. The strokes have many hits. Yeah they do.

They have the one that's like da da da da da and they have the ones like da da da da. Exactly. And the killers only have one. They have the killers have smile like you mean it. Yeah. When we were young. When we were young. They have a lot of bangers.

They do but not as many as the strokes and not definitely not as many as Oasis. True. And then there's MGMT which is like at the bottom of the list. Of best bands. Like ever. But there is low on the list of the best bands ever. And I used to sleep with a guy who used to hang over my head that he like knew one of the guys from MGMT.

But that's not why I continued sleeping with him even though we were clearly in a situationship. It's because I have low self esteem and low helplessness. Of course. Of course. Anyway. Yeah. I had sex with a guy once who was wearing a clap your hands say yeah. Like you wore it during sex.

Maybe he removed it but probably not even. How many guys have you had sex with who worn a t-shirt during the act? I don't want to talk about my body. But it's yeah that's not infrequent. Yeah. Men like to keep their shirt on. They do. They do.

I've seldom encountered it much like I've seldom encountered like an uncircumcised penis in the wild. I think I saw my first uncircumcised penis when I was like 27 or 28. Wow. Crazy. Wow. One of my first boyfriends though Jewish or Michelin was uncircumcised. Interesting.

But yeah there have been a few. Yeah. I like it. I mean it's fine. It's like a sleeve. It's like a sleeve. It's fun. It's like a sleeve of cookie dough.

Apparently they like it better. Not that they would know. Not that they would know. Not that anyone would know. Yeah. So it doesn't really matter. Yeah. It's fine.

Sometimes I see TikTok videos on Twitter and Instagram of like post red scare type podcasts of like two girls that are very like Anna and Dasha. We invented. We invented. Yeah. They're like totally inspired by us. Yeah. It's a blonde and a brunette forget about it.

And I like crank the audio and they're saying some shit like no you don't fucking understand a guy should be investing your money for you. That's neoliberalism. My body count is 1000. I'm like wow these chicks are so annoying and unbearable. Then we hop on the mic. Yeah. And then I remember that's how most people experience us.

Yeah. Yeah. Well. Anyway should we talk about study abroad girl. Oh yeah. Yeah. Another hot chick for right wing guys to have a chimp out to another wanderlust though not really I guess she didn't enjoy her time.

She didn't enjoy it. Was it in Business Insider I think so that published a very brief personal essay by a girl who studied abroad in Florence. Yeah. And did not didn't like it and she had some complaints. Yeah. Um that I didn't find particularly egregious. Her complaints were like it was a lot of humble bragging going on where she was like

yes I'd walk around a lot of like my peers wanted to take cheap Ryan air flights to go see sex shows in Amsterdam and get wasted in Ibiza and meanwhile I wanted to travel for personal research and exploration and improvement and they just like didn't share my values. Yeah. She was lonely or the one where she was like I wanted to live in a house with seven people and do potlucks but actually they were traveling abroad. They were hostile towards me.

Yeah the locals were hostile toward me and I was often alone and it was like that kind of thing which is just like I mean it's literally like a troll bait article. Yeah. Designed to like infuriate people for clicks. Yep. Many such cases. Why even publish it. Yeah.

One wonders why even. Yeah. But I'm done I'm done piling on young people. And young women especially. And young women especially though young men don't really get as many think piece opportunities nowadays but yeah I'm sure if they did they'd be just as annoying. You know it's so strange you're right that young men don't get any think piece opportunities but you would think that while young white men might be throttled from pitching to magazines

young black and Asian men would be welcome with open arms but yet you don't see those think pieces much either. They're not into creative writing. Some are. Yeah. There's a nice like living to be made being like the one like black or Asian guy who's like you know culturally with it in middle class and can pander to libtards but yet they don't exist.

Just goes to show it's a women. Yeah. It's a woman's sport. Yeah. They're the best at talking about themselves. Yeah. The minutia of their experiences they've internalized. I think perhaps they've internalized this essayistic voice more than men have.

So they're more. Yeah. Like anytime anytime I read love love or Joan Didion for a prolonged period of time I do find myself internalizing this kind of. Yeah. And thinking. Manors. Yeah.

And this like manner of speaking and this idea of myself as like someone that could write a little essay about something and I just don't think men have feel that impulse maybe quite as much. Yeah. Which is good. Well it's not only it's not only a good sign but it actually makes me rethink my commitment to race science because it turns out no men of any races are really into quote telling their story which is a cool thing about men in general.

That's nice. Yeah. Yeah. I love that about the brothers. It's true. I read the white album and slouching toward Bethlehem like last summer and I found myself thinking in Didion voice. Of course.

Yeah. It's a nice mode to think in kind of but it's very it's very influential. It's very yeah but only sceptic only the parts where she was really conservative and racist and talked about water system in Los Angeles County actually you know Joan Didion and Steve Saylor are a lot alike when you think about it. So true and yet one is so beloved and one is so maligned. I saw him tweeting about how of the two big Jewish West Coast writers Susan Sontag and Pauline Kale he prefers Kale to Sontag many such cases.

Sontag stock is really plummeting because I think everybody's has gotten wise to the fact that she's kind of dowdy and humorless and rigid. Well she's boring. She's not into rock as Polly is. She's not into rock so she really has no idea what's going on and Kale while annoying in her own ways is at least I mean she at least writes about like movies yeah which anyone can enjoy. Well and she's like rowdy and round she and shoots from the hip Susan is too much of

like a Capricorn to let loose. Very much she has like big Capricorn energy she's a stick in the mud and everybody can feel it. We're like the Steve Saylor of Australia. I was gonna say that I'm like the the premier unofficial historian of Susan Sontag because I've read like every biography on Susan Sontag which I can't even take credit for because I was just copying my sister who's like a real the real Sontag stand and so I've read like the like the Sontag and Kale book by Craig Seligman which I highly recommend.

I read the Seagrid Nunez biography of Susan Sontag. Seagrid Nunez is the former girlfriend of her son who she abandoned to like to study abroad in Florence. So it wasn't technically a study abroad it was a scholarship that the IFA gave to all first year students who like had a certain GPA mine was a 4.0 haters. You get $3,000 to go anywhere and because I was a terminal contrarian I chose not to go to like Florence or Paris or anywhere I probably should have gone and I went to Egypt and Istanbul with my gay best friend and that's fine yeah it was cool yeah it was a learning

experience but I did kind of fake study abroad in Florence briefly for like a week or two because I went to visit my sister who did the full semester oh okay and did she have a good time I think she had a great time yeah she met a lot of her like lifelong friends there developed like a keen interest in Italian culture yeah well she's better adjusted clearly than this yeah totally yeah she's not an attention whore and has normal personal boundaries and this is into her own privacy good for her but I I personally loved studying abroad in Italy I'm like you at Yale I'm 18 and so I love those students that that study abroad trip was the the location of my like a famous early podcast story of being propositioned

by the guy on the island same way so I was like 20 we went to Teremina in Sicily and Teremina is like a resort town there's like a beautiful hillock in the ocean with a gorgeous bronze age villa on top of it that was like studded with fake ruins I eat a rich person live there yeah and my sister and her boyfriend at the time were like having like a couple's fight so I swam off and scaled the hill and this like guy came out fully naked and it was bronze age pervert the rumors are true we are childhood friends and he started speaking to me in Italian and I made out some phrases about what I made out well I'll get to that he was talking about like historic preservation and architecture and like antiquity and so

I was trying not to stare at his penis and I was like okay this guy's cool that that that's just the way that they do it over here in Europe they're into like national nudism nudism and sunbathing like sunning their balls and honking eggs whatever he's not trying to have sex with me everything is fine it's cool and then he like pinched the strap on my bikini and was like take your costume off let's do it here and the cuck I was I said no thanks and calmly walked down the mountain and swam back to my sister and her boyfriend honestly I regret it I should have done it and that would have been a story I should have I should have had that tryst that was cool that's what study abroad is for yeah

regrets yeah Italy is great I went to Italy went to Milan with Rafi my ex-boyfriend when I was a teenager and then again with the cast of succession that was like the most prolonged time your study abroad that was a kind of like my study abroad which obviously I enjoyed studying some broads I never been I've never been to Florence I don't know it's the humble braggy part where she was like I spent my weekend like touring like walking around blah blah and cooking amazing local ingredients and I was like what's when where was the problem it was I sort of left the article being like what was the issue it's because she was coping and seething because she had FOMO and felt like her classmates were having a good time

and she wasn't right she thought she should be having a good time given the circumstances but somehow she wasn't well it is what you make of it yeah because they were all fucking and sucking yeah that's how Gerardian mimesis works it's called being a woman yeah you can never be happy because you covered something she could have made the best of it honestly I know I was reading that article thinking like this sounds perfectly fine and fun you have a lot of time alone and you get to cook with like local natural ingredients they call them bio over there not organic which I like yeah bio cotton I oh yeah what's what's the problem it sounds like you're just bitter but you know I'm past bashing young women

who write troll bait for right wing and on yeah I think if you're under 24 you should be forgiven for everything then you get a pat you guys have whatever yeah you write some dumb little think piece you dump you leave your boyfriend in Europe to go build out another van well life is gonna be people being like she's gonna surely be regretting it when she hits the wall and I'm like she's a long way childless she could already she could ruin this guy's life she could ruin several guys lives and still settle when you hit the wall what's the consensus depends it really varies what does it mean to hit the wall to be past childbearing age definitely but I think more notably to be to pass your youthful prime

yeah that's what that Pink Floyd album the wall was about another band that's worse than the killer is no offense 100% worse than the killer who's like the hottest blonde man I've ever seen a thousand percent worse than the killer is put um yeah it just means that you have your sexual marketplace value has diminished have we hit the wall is debatable we're podcasters so our stock keeps rising baby no I made him coping but I really don't feel like I really hit the wall because I seem more attractive than ever yeah the wall is really what it implies it means what it sounds like like you you you cannot pass the wall well basically hitting the wall is like okay the the criteria should be like can you walk outside today and

find a man to impregnate you and if the answer is yes you have not yet hit the wall okay that's generous yeah and I can simply by walking into the projects next door this is this is another reason why I'm anti-racist by the way because black men have a more generous definition of hitting the wall they've never heard of the wall yeah totally well they've never been interested in me so in that in that regard I've hit the wall a long time but yeah I guess when when Jewish guys don't want to jamie into being in a situation with them anymore yeah but Dasha there's two types of Jewish guys in the world those who prefer much younger women and those who prefer much older women and there's no Jewish guys who date women

at their age they either have mommy issues or a different sort of mommy issues okay so all right left Jewish guys love to not in a leathery 50 year old they do it's a fact of life so you're saying I've got a long ways to go yeah you've got a long career ahead of you but the wall yeah provokes is meant to sort of provoke in women a kind of anxiety about the passing of time it's actually it's it's it's really a toxic not just as I'm nearing it but because it I think it causes a neurotic fixation on like capitalizing on one's resources while they have them yeah and it sort of quantifies everything into this marketplace yeah algebra that people then have to do to to figure out what they

can be like leveraging capitalizing on it wears away at your defenses and makes you like more inclined to have sex with the right wing and on who's donated to the Ricky Vaughan campaign that's what they want if you're if you're listening to Tucker address I think he did okay so now it's kosher to donate well I mean I don't want to be on some list we're already on a list being on a list for being in a group chat where they say the n word is different than being on a list for donating to the legal defense fund of a thought criminal you don't want to hear someone from one of Vaughan's group chats flipped and is now cooperating with the government many such cases be careful out there that's the guy I'm personally gonna

have sex with the informant it's Richard Spencer yeah it's not it really isn't safe out there and Dasha Richard Spencer Tariq Nishid if you had to Tariq it's Tariq for me he's cute well I've never had sex with the black guys yeah just for the novelty of it there's always time to start the wall is a long way I want the wall to collapse on me I just want to die when I hit the wall killed by the wall here lies Anna I'm gonna hit the wall like um what's the name for the Fast and Furious movies Paul Walker I'm gonna hit the wall like Paul Walker in a total car drunk out of my mind after losing all my life savings in a casino I'm gonna hit the wall like Vin Diesel slowly getting thicker in the waistline

and making more and more undignified appearances for less money in Jersey City where things have happened anyway shall we yeah we can sign off now did man ever hit the wall yeah but way later okay because they're attract you know they they men peak way later and that's true and that's also something a man baby it's a man baby I like to transmit to some of our incel listeners is that many of these guys are like they're very early twenties so your life is really just you know no no man is really fuckable in that age range no so the best is yet to come hang in there it gets better drug addiction and then sobriety is