The Tim Dillon Show - 204: 204 - Katie Herzog

Episode Date: June 14, 2020

Tim has on Seattle-based journalist Katie Herzog to discuss CHAZ, her exile from the gay community, Furries, and many other things that if I typed them here would take us out of the algorithm. In this episode there are bulldog puppies and stories of friendship and cereal. Enjoy. Bonus Episodes every week: https://www.patreon.com/thetimdillonshow Merch: https://www.bonfire.com/store/the-tim-dillon-show/ Katie's Plugs: https://twitter.com/kittypurrzog https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/blocked-and Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Katie Herzog was a writer at The Stranger. She's no longer there because she was furloughed and she offered herself to be furloughed and now she's independent. She has a podcast called Blocked and Reported and you should go and join her Patreon. She's incredibly bright. She's a breath of fresh air. All the things you would say about somebody who's canceled all the time. That's what you say. When someone's canceled you go, they're a breath of fresh air. They are. But she's great. I was in the Palm Springs and we tried to do this interview but we could. The Wi-Fi wasn't working. Now it is much better. We wanted to have Raz Simione, the leader of the Seattle Autonomous Zone because they had reached out to us. You know, they had contacted

me on Instagram. Raz had retweeted me. Maybe they had in the interim found some of my earlier work or maybe they had just gotten cold feet or maybe Raz is reading emails from the CIA about what he should do next. I don't know. But they are welcome to come. I hope we have Raz in the future. But Katie Herzog is here with us now. What is your read on the Seattle Autonomous Zone? Are you going to go and explore it? Well, first of all, you're getting the name wrong. You are dead naming the Seattle Autonomous Zone. It's actually the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone or CHAS, which is probably the funniest part of all this. It sounds like a tennis coach. I find this whole thing extremely funny. What people from outside Seattle might not know is that

the capital, the area where this is happening, where they have declared an autonomous state outside the jurisdiction of the United States, is in a really highly gentrified neighborhood. My former office is actually in CHAS. If I were still working at The Stranger, I would be entering the zone every day, which would be sort of ironic because right now, apparently during the protests, someone graffitied fuck Herzog on the door of The Stranger. So it might be a little bit awkward for me to try to get to work through CHAS at this point. Luckily, that doesn't happen. This area is super highly gentrified. It's the historic gay neighborhood in Seattle, and it still has like rainbow crosswalks and lots of gay people

and stuff like that. But it's also really expensive. It's mostly like chain ramen shops and $3,000, $4,000 studio apartments. A lot of Amazon workers live there. So I keep imagining what the well-healed upper middle class Amazon workers think about their new overlords. And there's also, so they've taken over this park, and the park is surrounded by multi-million dollar condos and townhouses. And so I just, I'm really curious about what the residents of CHAS think about, about what is happening to their neighborhood. And I'm sure some are totally supportive, and I'm sure some are just absolutely terrified. Why has the Pacific Northwest historically been a bastion of a lot of activism and a

lot of anarchists are out there? What is going on over there? Is it the rain? Is it the weather? Are you wanna some type of, is it an energy vortex? What is happening with Portland and Seattle and these places that make them such a hotbed of this type of activity? That's a great question. I don't know the history of this, how long this has been going on. I mean, you know, like 20 years ago, where the WTO riots in Seattle, which were the World Trade Organization had a meeting there, and the city just erupted into total chaos, much like we're seeing now, although a lot of it seems to have calmed down. And Portland, of course, has its own fair share of activism. The cities are different in some, in some important ways. And what's

happening in Portland and to a lesser extent in Seattle is that, so both of these, these are very blue cities that are surrounded by more conservative suburbs and rural areas. And so in Portland, what you will have is like proud boys or patriot prayer or something, these conservative groups come in from the suburbs or the rural areas and just sort of stage their marches there. And, you know, it's a lot of American flags and pro-Trump stuff. And then Antifa and other like affiliated anarchists and just people who like to fight in the streets will just come in and respond to them. And there's this clash and it feels very much like, you know, like LARPing, like cosplay, sort of revolution cosplay, where nothing actually changes. Nobody's mind

is changed. Just some like shit gets destroyed. And then everybody, you know, the proud boys go back to their, go back to their suburbs and Antifa goes back to their, you know, the co-ops that they live in or their parents' basement or whatever. Yeah. So it is interesting. Both areas do tend to be hotbeds with this sort of political activism. I mean, also, both areas are sort of the cities at least are politically very homogenous. So you have basically no presence of a Republican party. And I think when you have an ideologically homogenous area, what happens is extremism. You know, if you don't have anyone to sort of check your ideas, they just sort of naturally flow to the edges of acceptable thought. So I think that's also probably a part of it.

We're, you know, we hear a lot about Antifa. And, you know, you see them and you see the things they do and they're absurd. And then we see like, you know, they're directing traffic and they're not letting people go back, you know, who like is Antifa? Is there any organization? Is it just a ragtag group of, I mean, what is it? Is it in your estimation, a terrorist network? Like what is it? And does it deserve that type of designation? I mean, I don't know. What is it? I don't, I do not think Antifa is a terrorist organization. I don't even think Antifa is a big threat to cities like Portland or Seattle that do have a larger presence of Antifa. It's just a group. I mean, anybody can join Antifa or BlackBlock or whatever. You just put on the,

you put on the outfit and you go hold up a protest sign or cover your face with a, with a balaclava. Although these days everybody's face is covered. So a little bit hard to pick Antifa out of a crowd. It's not, there's no hierarchy. It's, you know, it's anarchist in nature and Antifa sort of appears at moments and then disappears as soon as the, as soon as the fight is over. It's not, this is not, they don't have much political power. They don't have any political power. They're not a democratic group. They're, I guess they're far left, but they don't have political ideals in the way that we think of those sort of like get people elected, go through legislative process. I think their aims are much more about dismantling the state, dismantling

capitalism. And I'm sure there's lots of, you know, people who are committed to the cause and there's also lots of people who just like to, you know, like to play pretend, like to sort of get all pissed off and go break some windows. We were going to do a sketch called fat Antifa, where me and my co-host Ray Kump, we're going to dress up in all black and it was guys that were going to a march, but kept getting sidetracked by different fast food places. And then at the end, we just attacked like a Trump supporter, like a 14 year old and they beat the shit out of us. And it just, we never filmed it, but it was an idea that we had is part, when you look at these protests and there's such a valid anger, right? I mean, there's such righteous, justified anger.

Dave Chappelle did an amazing job at like articulating it. Is the major disconnect with a lot of these protests? How any of them lead to political change? Like how does a group of angry people who are very justified in their anger, how do they affect the political process? Many people believe that that can no longer happen. That we're living in a time where elections, you know, don't matter at all, even local ones. And that this, this chaotic energy will just be a means and an end where these systems will all somehow magically be remade. I don't know, but is that one of the issues that you're looking at this and going, you have this anger, it makes a lot of sense. It's very justified. But then a lot of it seems to be like directed at like ending isms and racism and capitalism.

And it seems like, well, wait a minute, why don't we focus on one thing at a time, which is like ending police brutality. And then people say, well, that's a function of your privilege, your talk, but it's just a function of my logical brain going, how are you going to end an ism during a pandemic and an economic meltdown? Why don't, why? So how do you, what do you see as the biggest issue with these protests really enacting any type of real reform or change? Well, I think the problem is that the loudest activists are oftentimes out of touch with the American people. And so even if people who support the protests, who recognize that police brutality is a, is a problem, that corruption in police forces is a problem, that racism is a

problem. And the two things can be disconnected, you know, police brutality, white people, Asian people, Hispanics, everybody is affected by police brutality, specifically actually Native Americans are the group most affected by it. And so if you divorce it from sort of the cause of Black Lives Matter, I personally think you would have more legislative success, because you can build a bigger coalition if you say police brutality and bad policing affects every community in this country, every race in this country. And that's not going to alienate white people, particularly conservative white people, I think as much as the current sort of protests have the potential to do. And so you have that problem. And then you have the problem of sort of the sloganeering, right? So

what you see in the streets and what you see on the news, if you turn on the news is people chanting things like abolish the police, defund the police. These are not popular positions among the American populace, you know, the protesters as righteous as they feel. And I do think they have, you know, just reasons to be angry and to feel righteous themselves. But these radical policy positions, like abolishing the police, are not popular, even among Black communities that suffer from the highest rates of violence. What they actually, when you look at polls of Black communities, typically what they say is, we don't want to abolish the police, we want functional police, we want the police to help us when they call them, to not ignore us and not to brutalize us,

not to defund them and not to... And there's some irony here when you talk about defunding the police. Well, if you defund the police, that means there will be fewer policemen, police people on the police forces, which means that response times when somebody calls sign one one are going to go up. And according to the Seattle police department, this is already happening right now. Then they've also have spewed a fair amount of bullshit, so we have to take everything that they say, I think with some skepticism. The police chief, for instance, this week said that in chas businesses were being shaken down for money and basically the residents of chas were exhorting the local, their new tenants. And it turns out that this doesn't appear to be true,

so I think we should be skeptical. That said, once you talk to people, if you talk to protesters and you say like, or the leaders of these protests, I guess in some cases self-appointed leaders, and you might say, well, what do you mean by abolish the police? And they say, oh, we don't really mean abolish the police. We mean like break the police force down and rebuild it up as something different or defund the police and use the money for community policing. But when you rely on slogans, it's like build the wall, or something like that. It's just sort of an empty slogan. And I think this has the capacity to really turn people off. I mean, that said, I think they're seeing some successes. San Francisco today, the mayor of San Francisco

announced some reforms to the police department that could actually have an impact on police brutality. Minneapolis, it looks like they are going to sort of defund the police and try to rebuild it into a community policing organization or something like that. Who knows if that will be any different. Did you see that Andrew Yang tweet where he goes, why don't we just call them the guardians? Yeah, I did see that. I did see that. I mean, but the thing is like, you can change the name. And if you still have the same populace, it's not going to actually change anything. So I think a lot of this slogan hearing is empty, or it's out of touch with how most Americans feel. But we are seeing, I think, some successes from this group, and we'll see how long it goes.

I think there's potential for leaders to emerge that maybe could have a future in politics, although I'm not sure that anybody that I'm aware of has particularly emerged on the national stage at this point. Breonna Taylor's law just got passed where they're getting rid of no-knock warrants, which are, you know, that's a step in the right direction. But there seems to be this wing of people that aren't happy with the word reform, and they don't like incremental change of any kind. And they don't like even me saying things like that's a step in the right direction. They believe that the only way to fix this system is to tear it all down. Now, to people like myself and others that are marginally intelligent, we realize that that's not possible,

like it's not going to happen. And if you defund the police, rich communities are going to hire private police forces that probably have less accountability than the public police forces right now, that you, now you, you've had a lot of issues as a writer in terms of people getting angry at you. People have called you a turf, which means you're a trans-exclusionary radical feminist or something, right? Isn't that what that means? That's the acronym. I am not a turf or a radical feminist or really even a feminist at this point. But so I guess I'm just radical if I'm not a trans-exclusionary or a feminist. I think you wrote an article on Jordan Peterson that angered people. What was the beginning of Katie Herzog being on the outs at The Stranger,

which is, we would say is a very left-wing publication out of Seattle. And you became like persona non grata there. How did that happen? It actually happened before I was hired. So I was a freelancer writing in Seattle. And one of the first pieces that I wrote for The Stranger was called The Detransitioners. And it was about people who transitioned from one gender to the other and then changed their mind and transitioned back. And this was in 2017. And it caused just this massive firestorm. People were literally burning stacks of the paper and sending me video of it. Just like there are flyers up in my neighborhood calling the paper transphobic. And my editors made transphobic, like the coffee shops that I would go to. I would walk in and

there would be like flyers calling me transphobic. So there was just a massive outcry. I don't know how many people who were mad about the piece actually read the piece because the piece was not by any stretch of the imagination transphobic. I got the voices of lots of happily transitioned people in there. It was just about this sort of small subset and a phenomenon. It's something that is happening. And in the three years since the piece is published, it's the community of Detransitioners has really emerged on their own. They're much more visible now. But this was sort of one of the earlier pieces about this phenomenon. What attracted you to write about that? Were you concerned about maybe people transitioning too early? Did you have no agenda when you wrote it?

Were you kind of like just interested in this group of people? What I'm interested in is heretics and people who speak out at some cost to themselves. And I found that among the Detransitioners that I spoke to. So oftentimes they felt really shunned by their own communities, the trans and queer communities that they had typically lived in. It's just sort of cast them out. And they continue to speak up about it despite their social costs to themselves. It's sort of ironic that after I wrote this piece, the exact same thing happened to me. And I sort of knew that it would. I had talked to other people who'd written not even critically about trans issues, but had just had written about trans issues in a way that

didn't sort of parrot the contemporary party line. And they'd all had similar experiences. So it wasn't totally unexpected. And so I'm a lesbian. I've lived in queer communities for, let's see, the last almost 20 years of my life. And I did start to notice that more and more people were transitioning. And there could be a lot of reasons for this. For one, people know about it. It's possible now in a way that it wasn't before. But I started to notice this. Things rapidly accelerated around 2016, 2017 in my community, where all of a sudden you would have a household that had maybe five lesbians all transitioned within the same year. And I just found it. I won't lie. I found it troubling in some respects because it just seemed like statistically this

is impossible. How could this entire community be deciding that they were, that they have, they were born in the wrong body, or they have gender disorder or whatever at the same time. It struck me as trendy to be totally frank about it. And now that I make my money on phasorion, I don't have to worry about being canceled so I can say things like this. So that's when I started to sort of look a little bit more critically at what was going on. And I think that my initial instincts have been sort of proven, proven out several years later that we are seeing this very, very rapid rise. And it's not something I'm overly concerned about. It's something I observe. And in terms of adults, adults are free to do whatever they want. If you would like to change

your body, I think that is absolutely within your rights to do so. I would support anybody who does it. I do think it gets more complicated with children though, because this issue has been studied for decades. And what most studies find is that children who report to gender identity clinics from a young age, by the time they're adults, between 60 and 90% of them will have decided that they don't want to transition and they are fine living in their sex at birth, which I think is preferable in some ways. And I know there's a danger of saying that, like conservatives would always say, wouldn't it be better if gay people couldn't be gay? But I think the difference is that being gay only causes you to stress if you're receiving that message from

society, right? I don't think there's anything inherently that if you didn't have sort of conservatives or Christians or any other group, not just Christians, Muslims, whatever, any sort of fundamentalist group saying that what you are is wrong, I don't think it would cause people to stress inherently, you know, without that sort of social influence. But gender dysphoria is a condition. It's defined by distress, right? And so I think we need to be really cautious about pediatric transition, because what the research has found is that between 60 and 90% of kids who arrive at gender identity clinics eventually revert to their sex at birth, feel okay about it. So their dysphoria is relieved or they have found a different way of dealing

with their dysphoria besides taking hormones and surgery that are, you know, that cause permanent changes to your body and in some side effects. And most of the children who grew out of it end up being gay or lesbian. And this has been repeated over and over and over. Are these studies controversial? I would imagine they're controversial, but why are they ignored by many trans activists and people in that community? Why, what is the big push for, why can't people just say, listen, when you're an adult, you should, now I know it's a complex issue because a lot of people say, if you have true gender dysphoria, making you go through puberty as a gender that you are not is some form of abuse. That's the argument on the

other side. But why do people not take these studies more seriously that say many of the people who do this end up regretting it on the other end? Well, the reason for this is because historically there have been a lot of gatekeepers when it comes to trans healthcare. So until relatively recently, if you wanted to transition from one sex to the other or from one gender to the other, you would have to live as your preferred gender sex for, I think, two years minimum. Before you could get hormones or surgery, you had to have a lot of meetings with therapists and doctors or things like this. It wasn't easy. And the model of healthcare has changed. So what's now called informed consent. And under these sort of policies or best practices, informed consent

basically means that someone goes to a doctor or therapist and says like, I'm trans, I have gender dysphoria. And there's also, as a sort of interesting aside, a lot of trans activists now say that you don't have to have gender dysphoria to be trans. But so regardless, or and that you don't have to take hormones or surgery, you just say that you're trans and or say that you're the the gender that you want to be. And you know, you are without doing anything to change your body. And that's a new phenomenon. I don't think we would have seen this 10 or 15 years ago for the most part. So after this informed consent model change, all of the gatekeepers sort of disappeared. And for trans people, specifically trans adults, this is a really good thing because they did have to go

through these sort of onerous processes to get the healthcare that they needed. And so now we've just sort of gone in radically the other direction where you just go to a doctor and you say, I would like to have, you know, a double mastectomy, or I'd like to have surgery or whatever, and they'll do it. You know, and I think there I think there's you're just you're going to see more false positives with with not having gatekeepers. But I think there are good reasons for trans activists to push back on the gatekeeper model, because a lot of them live through it, and are terrified that, you know, that something like this would happen again, or, you know, future generations will have to go through this onerous years long process before they're able to get healthcare.

So that's why they push back against these studies. I think they push back against them for valid reasons, you know, they're concerned. But the problem is that the data doesn't disappear, right? That these lives don't disappear. You can ignore the study. You can, you can, you know, are you with the methodology or whatever claim that the study is flawed in too many ways, but that's not going to change the reality, which is that the more children you have who transition at a young age, the more false positives you're going to have. And the more of them are going to regret it later on. You've probably heard a lot of people talk about how crucial their morning routine is to setting up the proper tone for their day, whether it's waking up early,

setting their goals for the day, exercise, meditation, or anything else. But not everybody has the time to do it all, or any of it, truly. With hydrant, you can jumpstart your mornings. Top perform. My friend, I just took my friend's bulldog. My friend is a liar and a thief. And he, he got me to take his bulldog for two days because he said his bulldog just sleeps and doesn't do anything. And the dog is a literal terrorist. And the dog rolled down the window in the car, tried to get out. I mean, the dog is just, I mean, this is why you can't do anything for people. The dog is, they said, well, yeah, it'll sleep. When it gets home, it just sleeps. Yeah, it just sleeps. That's what it does. It's tearing everything apart.

When you see the growth of something like non-binary, where people are identifying as queer, and they say, I'm identifying as non-binary, and many of them are white middle-class college students that, you know, this seems to be, and that's not all of them, but, you know, at schools like Oberlin and Wesleyan and places like that, people are identifying as non-binary. How much of that, because to me, and I'm on Patreon, I don't have to, I can do whatever I want, a lot of it to me seems like a identity crisis that's not really rooted in any true gender dysphoria as much as it's rooted in a socio-political understanding of the world and a desire to be maybe in a protected or a desire to be in a group of people that's not seen as the oppressor.

How much of this is a phase and how many of these people grow out of that non-binary distinction and then just live either regular heterosexual or homosexual lives? I'm not sure that this has been studied, and I think that the phenomenon is probably too young or too new to have good data on that, but I agree with you. I find that personally, I find the concept of non-binary incredibly regressive because it presupposes that if you're not non-binary, if you're non-binary, then what am I? Does that make me binary? It relies on these stereotypes. If you talk to people and you say, all right, and I've done this, I have a lot of friends who identify as non-binary and trans now more actually every day and not because I'm meeting

new people. I've had these conversations with my friends, so explain to me, what does it feel like to be non-binary? And they'll say, and I do say is both the singular and the plural in this case. Sometimes when I wake up, I feel like a man and sometimes I feel like a woman. All right, well, what does that mean? Or I feel like neither. What does that mean? Well, sometimes I want to wear masculine clothes and sometimes I want to wear fem clothes. And so to me, that's just reinforcing stereotypes that I think both men and women would be better off rejecting. And so that's my problem with the idea of non-binary. I think it just reinforces this. It reinforces the binary in this very ironic twist. And to be totally frank, I think it's very trendy. It is trendy. I'm sure

that lots of people would get mad at me for saying this, but it is undeniably trendy. Identity is such a huge thing now. When I was a teenager, I don't think we ever talked about identity. We talked about the clique that you were in and the style that you had. And I think there's a lot of overlap. Like, you know, we had the goth kids and the all kids and the jocks and the rednecks or whatever. And now you have, you just like add another way. And now we have the non-binary and the Nazis and the activists and the anarchists and, you know, yeah. And the asexuals and the aromantics and the furries. And it's just this like, we just have more labels that I ever would have imagined. You wrote an article about furries. I did. I've written so many articles. I don't

even remember doing this. I'm sure that I did at some point. What is the furry community and how are they helping black lives matter? The furry community. So, furries can be a couple of different things. The most interesting furries are the furries to dress up like stuffed animals and have sex with each other. That, like, that's in the suits, right? In their fur suits. So that's what I've always thought of as furry. But there's also, it's now, it has gone from sort of a kink to an identity. And not all furries have sex in their suits. Not all furries are kinksters and not all kinksters are furries. But what started out as a kink, I think, has become much more of an identity that people think seriously. The great thing about furries is that they tend to have like anime

avatars in their, in their bios or like cartoon drawings of themselves in their fur suits. So it's a really good signal of who not to take seriously. Yeah. My friend Nick Mullen made a very interesting point once about a lot of the people that you see like identifying as non-binary. A lot of them, it's either not only anime avatars, but they're kind of like nerds. They're very, they seem to be over-invested in like these mythological worlds. I think that's why J.K. Rowling's treason hit them so hard. Dude, I know, I have like, I have an ex-girlfriend who called me out when I wrote this detrans piece, like excommunicated me from her life. We were on good terms, but just like was done with me after I wrote this piece. And she has about six Harry Potter tattoos.

Obviously like at this point, I can't ask her how she's feeling, but I just wonder how quickly she made the appointment to get the Oliver tattoos covered up. Yeah. What do you think it is? What is the overlap there between nerds and people that have some type of sexual identity crisis? And I mean nerds, not like nerds, like people that are coders, but I mean people that, you know, whatever, play magic to gathering, like our love these mythological worlds. Also a lot of them, there seems to be an overlap with people that have sexual identity issues. If you could stipulate, if you could guess what that overlap would be or postulate what it might be, what do you think it is? Okay. This is pure speculation. So I don't know if anybody has studied this. I have no, no like

good data on this, just pure speculation. So I think there might be two things. And the first one, I say with a little bit of hesitation because I feel like it could get me in trouble, but I'm going to do it anyway. I think the first connection is autism. So there's a really high, and this is not so much about furries or fantasy worlds. It's getting good. We're getting good. We're getting, we're getting close to the meat. The meat is tender closest to the bone. Keep going. Okay. So there has been research on natal females. So what we typically think of is like teen girls who transition to either male or non-binary or whatever. So this population has spiked in recent years. And there's some, the, there's some overlap between natal females who, the concept is called

rapid onset gender dysphoria. So it's basically a population who doesn't have a history, a pediatric history of gender dysphoria, but sort of spends a lot of time online and decides at some point that that he or she or they are trans. And like surprisingly high percentage, and I don't know the numbers often have my head and I don't know if anybody does actually. But there is some overlap with people on the autism spectrum disorder. So I think that might be part of it. People who maybe are more drawn to the online world who, whose social skills are making human connections face to face isn't sort of their primary way of, of interacting with the world. And when you spend a lot of time in online communities, it's just like any other community, what's happening in the

community rubs off on you. So I mean, I think, I think we're in the midst of a social contagion in terms of trans stuff. It's probably not something I would have said that if I still worked at the stranger and, and you know, had an editor who could yell at me for it, but I think anybody who's really been observing this would say that it's obvious. What explains the rise in autism? Oh, that I have no idea. Oh, well, I mean, I've done a little bit of research on this and I think probably, well, vaccines obviously, but it's not that there's a, is that true? Do you think that's true? No, I don't think, I don't think that's true. No, but there's a, I think, so you had my audience, you had my audience and you just lost them. You have a lot. Yeah. And then you just

lost them. It's a, it's a fickle group. When you said all the trans people are autistic, they were like, they press subscribe on your Patreon, they press donate. And then when you said autism didn't come from vaccines, their finger went off the button. So you gotta be very careful. But so if it's not vaccines and I'm not saying it's vaccines, what do I know? I was vaccinated. I'm, I'm fine. You know, what more or less, more or less, what do you think it could be? Oh, I think I probably died, like better diagnostic tools. I mean, it's possible that people are, I did see, okay, there's a book called by Johann Hari called, I'm forgetting the name of it, but the latest book by Johann Hari, who's a journalist, wrote a book about the causes of

the root causes of depression and anxiety, specifically depression. And if I asked like most people on the street, what causes depression, what I think they're going to tell me is there's a chemical imbalance, right? And it turns out that that's not true according to Hari that really that was like the idea that there's a serotonin imbalance in your head. And that's the reason you're depressed is based on like a very small study in the 1960s that was never replicated. What he argues, and I'm not an expert on this. So I'm just like repeating his findings. So if anybody gets mad about this, yell at him. And instead of me, what he argues is that depression and anxiety are much more a response to living in a disconnected world. People are depressed

because our lives are shitty. And it's actually a natural response. And there is evidence that SSRIs, things like, you know, Paxil or Lorazepam or whatever, these, these drugs that are used to treat depression and anxiety are mostly effective as placebo. And so I bring this up in the context of autism, because there's one line in his book that I don't know if this is true. Please, like this is this is just like anybody who's listening to this research this yourself before you take this a face value. He says that there is some evidence that there may be a correlation between taking birth control and autism. I mean, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, not taking birth control about taking SSRIs and autism. So we've seen a spike in and the uses of antidepressants at the

same time that we've seen a spike in incidences of autism. I want to, I want to, I want to like like just, I am not an expert on this. So nobody consider what I'm saying. I think what Katie is trying to say here is don't take the medicine folks. You don't need it. My mother, who's a schizophrenic, she probably needs it. She, well, she, I mean, to be honest, the way the world's unfolding, I wonder if we're gonna have to go apologize to my mother because everything she's saying is happening. She said they were, they were people, you know. Listen, it's very interesting, right? When you talk about anxiety and depression, because a lot of people have this again as an identity. Like I grew up with genuine mental

illness. My mother was genuinely paranoid schizophrenic. She thought people were following her. She thought members of the family were stealing from her. She had nothing to take. She had beanie babies. She thought out, she said it at Christmas dinner once Elvis might have been her father or her father might have been a big celebrity. I get to that. Yeah. I mean, you got, you got, if you flipped your hair back, you could be, how are your, your hip gyrations? Yeah, they're not bad. They're not great. But so I was very skeptical of what I, when I, when I looked at and I saw people that were diagnosing themselves with anxiety off Instagram. Like they were, you know, so it seems like the rise in these, not to say that these things don't

exist, but like again, it feels very tied to the need to have an identity and a way to put yourself in a box and say, Hey, I suffer from this. I suffer, you know, a lot of men in comedy, straight white men in comedy have to go out now and say they're anxious or they're depressed. I struggle with depression. I'm anxious. Even though I'm white, I'm anxious. I go through things too. So it is interesting to talk about that. And of course, now these pharmaceutical companies are making billions of dollars marketing solutions to these problems. Right. I, I do think anxiety and depression are real, but I think that the cause might not be what we have always, we have always assumed the cause to be these chemical imbalances. And,

and that's where I've sort of hung up. And I do think you're, you're onto something about, you know, your pathology becoming your identity. And also it's seems undeniable that victimhood and culture is sort of, right? I mean, you know, think like my least favorite thing to do in the world is exercise. I know that if I exercise, I would be less anxious and less depressed, but that's hard. It is hard to get up and like move your body and sweat and it's not fun. It doesn't feel good. So what is easier going out and doing these things that actually will make you feel better about the world or taking a pill? I can totally see the appeal of taking the pill. It's just easier, but I mean, there's also lots of evidence that the pills are mostly

effective as placebo's and they don't work long term. You know, people have to continue upping the doses of their, of their medication all the time. And there are really serious side effects, which is the, which is the problem. You know, if you were just taking a sugar pill and you're, it relieves your depression and anxiety, it wouldn't have any side effects. But if you're taking something that, you know, makes your boobs grow bigger or smaller or makes you go bald or makes your ball shrink or whatever, you know, whatever it is, well, that's a problem. But I do think, I mean, I do think people are genuinely anxious and depressed because we live in a world that is actually safer in some respects than it's ever been, you know, 2020 aside.

But we still live in these ways that are pretty unnatural for humans, you know, especially in the midst of a pandemic, like how many people have been stuck in their apartments alone for three months and then now you can go out and protest. So that's, that's like your get out of, get out of apartment free card. But just humans aren't meant to live like this and it, and it, and it makes us kind of crazy. And we're also not meant to spend all of our time staring at fucking screens all day. No, we're not. What do you think what's, what's happened in academia and the type of ideas that have thrived in the academic space for more than a decade, but certainly have become really contentious in the last decade are now bleeding out into the

media. You're seeing it at the New York Times with the editor, James Bennett, the editorial editor, whatever resigned because they published an article by Tom Cotton, Senator Tom Cotton, with a position, which was if the cops can't contain the chaos, you got to bring in the military. At the time they published the article, I think that in polls had, you know, support of 58% of people were supporting Tom Cotton's position. They ran it in the New York Times. There's been essentially like a coup. You see it's happening and James Bennett resigned. There are other newsrooms reportedly Andrew Sullivan, gay writer at the New Yorker cannot publish an article. Andrew's at New York magazine. New York magazine. He cannot publish an article about

the riots and every article that he does publish has to be vetted a bunch of times to make sure that it doesn't, you know, trigger people. So a lot of these ideas that were confined to classrooms and confined to the universities have now bled out into the media and people are saying, you know, it's a matter of time before they enter the government or they enter the court system. What are these ideas? How would you, because they've been called a lot of things, right? Jordan Peterson has said it's post modernism. A lot of people said it's neo Marxism. Some people say it's the excesses of political correctness. What, how would you qualify these ideas and why is their spread seemingly, you know, why are they now so popular and why don't more people recognize

that they, these ideas inherently lead to a more divisive society with more violence than the one that we have now, which is, which is what I see. I see that when I read the way that, you know, people want people to interact and the amount of stresses you're putting on people in these social situations that are of different races and different genders, the attack on humor, which is huge, which is the thin, by the way, nobody in the Ivy League realizes this because they've never had a shitty job. When you work a shitty low wage minimum rate, a minimum wage job, the jokes that you do to each other are race jokes. They're base level humor that makes people laugh because the only things you guys have in common and the only things that you can really isolate

about each other are our characteristics. So if you're fat or if you're gay, I haven't been either of those two things, but if you are Irish, I've suffered for that. So people end up and in the Ivy League or in the techs, you know, companies or places like that, they've never worked a shitty job where everyone's kind of miserable and you're blowing off steam. So I just look at the way that they want to configure the world and I say this leads to more alienation, more isolation, and ultimately more violence. I think you're right. There is a lot of argument about what to call this moment or the genesis of this moment. I mean, as you mentioned, a lot of this comes from academia and these sort of postmodern critical race studies, critical, you know,

critical theory studies, theories, theories, lots of things that cannot be proved. They can only be postulated. And you have seen this really break down in the past or break out into the mainstream over the past couple of weeks since the murder of George Floyd, which is frankly a bit a little bit refreshing to see because I've been talking and bitching and warning people about the excesses of the social justice left and what's happening in colleges for years and people have said things like, ah, it's just, you know, it's campus, it's college kids being college kids, college kids demanding trigger warnings, trying to de-platform speakers, basically rejecting all notions of free speech and free expression, it's free expression and diversity of thought, just this

narrowing of liberal values. And I don't mean liberalism, democratic, but sort of enlightenment values. And we've been seeing this, those of us who've been paying attention have been seeing this for years and now it has broken open into the mainstream, which is in some ways a relief. And I think you're right, this something that started in academia has really spread out and it's everywhere in media. There, as you mentioned, James Bennett got forced to essentially step down from the New York Times for basically publishing a problematic op-ed by a sitting U.S. Senator. There have been firings over the past couple weeks and or the past week or so at Bon Appetit, Refinery 29, The Philadelphia Inquirer, a journalist at the CBC was fired for saying the

N-word as she was quoting somebody. She was, you know, the same thing that happened to Papa John last year where you can't say this word even to quote somebody. The, you know, Second City, Step Down, CrossFit, there's been lots and lots of these firings. I think probably the most egregious one was a guy named David Shore who tweeted an article, it was a, not an article, it was a study that had been conducted by a black man that looked at public perception of violent versus nonviolent protests in the 1960s. And what he found is that violent protests tended to make voters drift to the right. Nonviolent protests increased democratic turnout. And so this basically analyst tweeted this out and there's a massive outcry, a study by a black

man. So he tweets this out, there's a massive outcry and he got fired from his job, right? And so this is going to continue happening. Someone in my DMs referred to what's happening right now as me too for microaggressions. And I think that's a very apt way of putting it. And one of the parallels is that you're seeing these purges in the same industries that affected the me too, that were affected during me too. So media, tech, academia, these sort of elite institutions mostly dominated by upper, upper middle class and wealthy people where you're not seeing it as much and where I don't think you're going to see it as much is in, you know, in the working class, right? So restaurant, the places where you're actually more likely to be,

you know, to experience actual racism, not microaggressions, but actual overt racism, or over sexual harassment. And this is not to minimize the experiences that people have, you know, have gone through as sort of the upper echelon of American culture. But, you know, I worked at, I worked in cafes, I worked at restaurants, I was a dishwasher, like that is actually where you get sexually harassed. And that is actually where you hear like overtly racist comments. And I do not think you're going to be seeing these purges in that, in that sort of class and sort of the underclass. And I also don't think they will, the underclass will benefit and as much as sort of the upper, the upper class as well from this, or at least some people will

benefit. How much of this do you think is the excesses of the kind of gangster capitalism that we have now, where you have lots of wealthy institutions and corporations avoiding taxes and essentially creating a parallel world for themselves to live in. They are now using the language of social justice to communicate their commitment to changing the world, but largely it's aesthetic and that they're still, they're still running out the back door with a bag of money. Right. There's a lot of irony in seeing somebody like Jeff Bezos, like lauded as a hero for making a pro black lives matter statement when like if Jeff Bezos actually gives a shit about black lives, he could make sure that his black employees

get bathroom breaks at his fulfillment centers or healthcare. Same thing with companies like Uber and Lyft and all of these, these tech company or the NFL, any of these companies that have come out and made their statement. But it also right now, the pressure to conform is so high that it is not surprising to me at all that brands are jumping on this. For one, not doing it would be terrible PR. There's been a list circulating among like in the LA theater scene, like a crowd source list that notes which theater companies or whatever people in this field haven't come out and made a pro black lives matter statement. And so if you're worried about cancellation, the LA theater scene has always been a little weak. It's always been in New York. It's been

in New York. Yeah. The LA theater scene. Come on. Yeah. So maybe that's their issue is not feeling up to up to what is the ruling class other than the paying the lip service? What are they are? Are there people right now sitting in the smoke filled rooms going, this is good for us? Keep them divided. Let's feed the flames. Are they like, Hey, let's figure out a way, you know, I'm talking about the people that are at Davos, the people that go to the Bilderberg group, the people that own these media companies that are, you know, government intelligence, you know, national security apparatus, call them deep state, call them whatever permanent political class of people largely unelected there because they have a lot of money.

What are they doing? What is there? What are they going to try to do? How do they, are they going to try to wield this anger that you see right now? I have to admit, I don't have any connections in the deep state. So I'm not, I'm not sure I'd be able to really answer that question, but you know, historically, how many of these protest groups have been co-opted by the FBI? I mean, look at Cointel Pro. I mean, look at all of these things, right? I mean, we know that a lot of times things are pushed in and maybe we don't even need, you know, the infiltration anymore, because people are just ready to push things further than they should go by themselves. But like, you know, you have a lot of billionaires in

this country, you have a lot of wealth and you have a lot of people. What are they, if you could speculate, what do you think they are feeling at this precise moment? Are they seeing things come? Are the wheels coming off or are they not coming off and are we all overreacting because we're paying such, you know, hyperclose attention to all this? I think there are a couple of different issues here. I mean, what are they feeling? I bet some of them are feeling a lot of white guilt. If they are anything like the people who I'm following in my social media feeds and the friends that I'm talking to, a lot of white guilt probably. Will that actually change anything? Like Jeff Bezos feels some white guilt. Is he actually

going to change the policies about Amazon? I don't think so. I don't think that he will. I think that the reason that companies and brands are engaging this is because to be perceived as racist will kill your brand. I have no idea what the people pulling the strings at Davos or behind the scenes. Think of any of this. I mean, you make it sound like they've got devil horns sticking out of their heads. And I don't know if that's true. It sounds a little conspiratorial to me. You said devil horns. I didn't say devil horns. What I'm saying is that what I've read about the fine folks at these places, the ones that frequented Little Saint James, the ones that cut the sweetheart deal for Jeffrey Epstein, the people that get us

into wars all over the place that we need not be in. I'm a little skeptical. I'm curious as to what they think about this. That's all. I'm not saying they all have devil horns, but I'm saying they have entrenched interests. And you wonder in a period of chaos like this what they feel. I wonder if they've soured on Trump. I wonder if they're not a monolith, by the way. I mean, and nobody that's read about this stuff that's saying things that these people are monolith, but they do exist. I mean, the reality is like, you know, these things are real. Obamagate is real. Brennan and Clapper, these people are real. You know, they have interests. They have the capability to do lots of things behind the scenes. And I'm just, I'm, do you,

and this is a question for you as a journalist, do you ignore that dimension of power completely? Do you feel that that dimension of power is just a fantasy of Yahoo's on Twitter? Do you don't give any credence to the idea that there are very wealthy, very powerful people that operate behind the scenes? No, I think that's probably likely true. It's not something that I follow and probably because, you know, I'm not an investigative journalist in that particular way. You've got enough problem. I mean, you're being canceled at coffee houses. The last thing you need is to CIA hijacking your car. I mean, I'm more worried about is, okay, so I'm worried about a couple things. I'm worried that the protests now are going to lead to a backlash when Donald Trump gets

elected. And I'm worried about that not because, like, I, like, I don't think I have, I think Trump deranged from cinema is real. I don't think I personally suffer for it, but I do think, like, I do think orange man is bad. And not because, like, and I actually think that the president has too much power. So if you have a total bungling idiot in the White House and he isn't actually able to get anything done, I'm, I'm like, I'm okay with that. I mean, he just told the Black News anchor on Fox that Lincoln may not, did you see that clip where he goes, link, link, what Lincoln did was mixed, freeing the slaves. He goes, you don't really know. And then the Black anchor on Fox news had to go, well, we're free. And he goes, yes, you free. No, I mean, the president of the

United States, he's also doing a rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma, this, the scene of a massacre of Black people. I mean, he's doing it on Juneteenth. Are all of these things, you know, I mean, I don't know. I mean, is this guy a white supremacist? I think it's, I think it's red meat. I think he's just trying to rile up his base. I think he's trying to capitalize on what happens now on what's happening now. And from, you know, from like, not even never Trumpers, but Republicans who have been more supportive of Trump, they have, they have criticized them. The sort of intellectual Republicans have criticized his handling of, of this crisis and the pandemic. They have criticized him. I don't know that they represent the base and Trump needs his base to come out and he doesn't need

them to come out everywhere, but he needs them to come out in a few select districts and a few select states to win, you know, because of our electoral college, to win just a few states and he'll have the election. And I'm, I'm very terrified that the backlash is going to lead to that. That said, I'm also scared and not equally scared, but I am also scared, concerned, let's say, that if Joe Biden wins, Joe Biden is not woke, right? And Joe Biden, he's, you know, he's old as shit. He, I sort of, all of his like, his, his gas and his missteps, I sort of like them because what they show me is that he is unintentionally not politically correct. But I think right now, the pressure to appoint people to his cabinet who are representative of these sort of illiberal

liberals, I think we're going to see that. And so my concern is that Biden gets elected and he appoints Robin D'Angelo to lead the, you know, the new like department of reparations or something like that. Hopefully he wouldn't appoint a white woman to do that. But these sort of critical theorists that we are just talking about, I am worried about that being entrenched in government. And you're already seeing this in education. So education systems specifically in cities like Newark and in Seattle, I'm sure this is happening in San Francisco, probably LA, sort of the big metro areas, but all over the world, they teach this critical race theory that is basically, it's essentialist in nature. And it focuses everything on race, right? And I don't actually

think that that's good for the Republic. I think the more you focus on race, the more you're going to have resentful white people responding to that in a negative way, because people don't like to feel guilty because of their race. They just don't. And so I'm concerned about Biden getting into the office and appointing a bunch of like, you know, university cuckoos who are then going to be dictating policy. Like Elizabeth Warren, do you remember, did you watch the LGBTQ town hall last year? I'm ashamed to say I did not. Oh, well, you really missed that. It was only about nine hours long. And there was a lot of like crazy rhetoric. Like at one point, there was a lot of like outbursts and protests, which was sort of funny because mostly it was happening during

Mayor Pete, the one gay guy. So he did that like him. So these politicians like at one point, and you've probably heard this, Elizabeth Warren said that if she is elected, she would appoint or she would vet, she would allow a nine year old trans kid named Jacob, who was in the audience to vet the next secretary of education. And maybe that was just rhetoric. I think it's like utter insanity for one thing. It's a campaign ad for Donald Trump, but it's also just stupid on its face, right? We don't let children, we don't let children dictate who's going to be the next secretary of education. I don't care how trans they are or how cute they are. We just don't do that. So that's my fear is that this current moment is going to force Biden to adopt some of the

identitarian, the like far left, identitarian policies that some of his opponents like Warren and Castro and Booker and Harris, basically everyone else, even Marianne Williamson, were advocating for it that I don't think Biden really believes in, but just the pressure has built, the momentum has built. And even if it doesn't reflect the, you know, the dominant perspective of the American voter, what it does reflect is a dominant perspective of the media, Twitter, the loudest, most powerful voices. What is the end game for the critical race theorists, the people that push this narrative? What is their end game? What would they like society to look like if they had their way? I think they would, they want power. I think

that's, that's the end game. And this makes it sound more sort of duplicitous than I think, than I think it really is. I think a lot of these people are true believers. They're anti-racist and anti-racist is not me, not racist. It's a, it's an actual set of values that are sort of very essential in nature, that whiteness is something that needs to be overcome. What is whiteness? Somebody explain to me, I don't know what that is. I have no idea. I have no idea. I have no idea. I mean, it's, it's more than just, it's more than just your ethnicity. It's this, it's this, I guess this thing inside of all of us, maybe it's like a soul that it's connected to white supremacy. The original said,

all of this rhetoric is incredibly religious, right? The difference between, I think, what's happening now, sort of great awakening and actual religion is that religion, most religions have some mechanism for, for reform or reconciliation or grace. And this doesn't exist in this current dogma. So I, you know, I've never taken a class in whiteness studies. Maybe I should do that. Maybe I'll go back to school and become a diversity trainer if my podcast doesn't work out. I've never told you this, but when I was a young boy, I loved cereal. And my best friend was a kid named Paul. Okay. Why are you laughing? Because it seems like you're making this up. No, it's, it's not what's happening right now. I'm sharing something that's very deep

and personal to me. And that's why it's taken me a little bit to get it out. But I think you assuming that I'm, it shows the type of person you are. Okay. What did I say his name was? I think Paul. Paul was my best friend that I've ever had. He was a good kid and he believed in the same values and ideals that I believed in freedom, democracy, the markets. And Paul had a tough home life. It was a hard life. It was, it was not easy. You know, his parents had a rough marriage and they were fond of the bottle and they liked to drink. They liked to throw a few back and then they would mercilessly beat him. And that was tough for him. But,

but there were good times, you know, there were good times. Do you know what he loved? What? He loved cereal. He loved cereal. He would come over to my house black and blue and bleeding. And, and I would say, Hey, Hey, let's have a bowl of Lucky Charms. And he would love it. I mean, he would take his mind off the beatings. I mean, they used to go at him. I mean, there was, I went to call from, you know, you go call for somebody like when you have friends, you go, can I call for my friend? You know, the parents go, yeah, and then you go knock on their door, hey, can Paul play? I mean, one time I went and they, they both had hockey sticks out and in the backyard,

they were just going at him. I thought he was dead because he was no longer moving and they were just hitting him with the hockey sticks and they were making a game out of it. I don't, they were weird people. Not without, they were fun, you know, not without their own, their own characters, but they were just, you know, hitting what appeared to be his lifeless body with hockey sticks in the, in the backyard. I don't even know where they got the sticks if they even played hockey. It was a horrible thing to say. It was a horrible thing to say. Now, when they saw me, they looked at me and they didn't stop. That was even weirder. They saw me and then they just kept beating him and hitting him with sticks and I, I said, whoa.

And I went, I went up to him, eventually they stopped and I went up to him and I carried him. He was, I carried him, you know, like Christ when he went off the cross. I carried him back to my house and I kind of, I nursed him back to life with lucky charms. Now he's dead now. His parents cooked him and ate him. Now that is neither he nor there because if he was alive today, he would want to eat lucky charms because they reminded him of the good times in his childhood, of which they were admittedly few. And, but he wouldn't want the sugars. He wouldn't want it. He kept himself good. How did, do you see this as a way, what is your feeling about the people that say we're trying to end capitalism? What is the, what, what, what is that, you know, in terms of,

you know, people are, I mean, there's obviously all of the, the, you know, the contradictions you have to breeze past. You're tweeting that from an iPhone, you're tweeting that in a Starbucks or whatever it is. But, you know, we, most people realize that the present form of capitalism is unsustainable. Right. So how, how serious are these people? They talk about reforming it and are they the people to reform it and how do you reform it? You know, with more than slogans. My perspective on this has changed in recent years. I probably would have called myself a socialist five or six years ago. But what I've realized is that the, the version of socialism that we think of is like the ideal socialism. So like Northern European democratic socialism,

right? It's socialism. Sure. Like there's high taxes. People are taking care of, there's a welfare state. But then there's the other kind of socialism, like Marxism, communism, sort of socialism adjacent in which the state, the state controls the means of production, right? The state, the state controls the businesses. And I see nothing in America's recent history that shows to me that the state would be better at, at maintaining and producing goods and, and having functional companies than, than free market capitalists are. So I've changed my mind about this a little bit. I find myself much more sympathetic to free market values than I did before. That said, you're right. I mean, capitalism as we know it is deeply flawed. But to me, I think what you could

do is, you know, regularly capitalism, a little better things. Like to me, I care deeply about the environment. That's sort of, I care more about the planet and the people in some respects. And so, you know, stricter controls on things like emissions, you know, there are arguments to be made that all people and companies respond better to incentives than they do penalties. And I think that that is something that should be explored. But I think socialism, for a lot of people, especially young people, it's just become a sort of a signifier, right? So you put like a little rose emoji in your Twitter bio and now you're a socialist. And what you want is like, you know, you want free healthcare, which I think, I think we should have a single payer healthcare system.

I don't know that we should totally dismantle the private healthcare system before we, before we do that. You know, they want free education. Lots of them have student loans. They want free shit, essentially, which I totally, I want free shit too. I sympathize with that. But I don't know how much they have thought about like, you know, Donald Trump is our president, the federal government has and state governments have shown over and over again that they are unable to manage industry as well as the free market is, you know, just things like ventilators or like in Washington state where I live, you know, we have this unemployment system. It's antiquated, you know, difficult to use people. A colleague of mine just got his first unemployment check. He's

been unemployed for three months, just got his first unemployment check this week. You know, the system isn't, isn't functional and it sees government systems that aren't working. And I think when people talk about capitalism, one of the major issues that I have with it is this, this parallel world where wealthy people can evade taxes and they can, and this happens all over the world. You know, it's not, it's super national in nature, the way that this system functions, where you can just take money and dump it into real estate in cities without, you know, putting your name on it. You can do it through a shell corporation. It drives up the cost of real estate in these cities like New York and London. It prices everybody else out. You know, people have,

people like their home. They like where they grew up. These, these areas have histories and they have, and they're, you know, the relationships that people have to these places are deep and complex. So when you just allow a group of billionaires from all over the world turn these cities into money laundering schemes, it fills people with that type of anxiety that then gets redirected in a very unhealthy place, whereas it's race resentment or it's paranoia or it's conspiracy mongering. And I think a lot of that starts with people seeing places they loved kind of be taken over and being used for, you know, international criminals, really, to, to stash money. And that's one example of, of the system. But the other example of the system is like,

you know, the amount of money and its impact on our political system is absurd. I mean, it is, but all right, let's think about how effective that is, right? I mean, obviously, when you have things like, you know, massive corporations donating to senators or whatever, like we need to be concerned about how this is impacting their votes, but you have someone like Michael Bloomberg, right? How many billions of dollars did he spend on his campaign? He fucking lost, you know, like, like the Koch brothers, you know, essentially sat out 2016, right? So I'm not like who spent, Joe Biden spent almost a week. Did the Koch brothers sit out 2016, didn't they have a war chest of like $80 million a chain made or wrote about? I don't think they,

I don't think they supported Donald Trump. They didn't support the president, but they went to local elections and things like that. So when it comes to at least the presidential, the presidential race, I'm not convinced that these massive influx infusions of cash, whether it's Bernie Sanders style, five dialers at a time, or it's, you know, Michael Bloomberg spending, like spending his own fortune, or if it's, you know, big money packs, I'm not kidding. The president may not matter as much as the ability to manipulate things on a local, even state level. Sure. So I think that like that concerns people like me, where I'm not a Marxist and I don't believe that the government's going to be good at producing goods. But I'm saying if you don't

regulate people, and none of it has to do with America. This is my other thing with capitalism, like we've married the capitalism in America so closely together. It's like, this is the way we do it. But how many of these people don't give a fuck when a city like Detroit collapses? How many of these people don't care that the rust belt of America is, is been hollowed out and they're dealing now with an opioid addiction? How many of these people care about the South side of Chicago and the shootings that are happening there? Or do these people maintain residences all over the world? And their loyalty is to an economic architecture more so than an actual country. That to me seems unsustainable because I don't want to live in a technocratic surveillance state,

which is I think what these people want. I think they want to treat people. I want to think they want to strip people of rights, surveil them. And then they're going to have all the best real estate, you know, you drive up the California coast, all of the prime real estate is owned, all of the good real estate. If you like the environment, you know, go to, uh, you know, the Puget Sound to tell me how much of that has been taken over by insanely wealthy, powerful people. But you also have to, I mean, you do have a point. I mean, in places like Vancouver, Vancouver, BC was for a while the most expensive city in New Zealand. I go on the show from Marxist to Fascist multiple times throughout the episode because what we do is we, we gotta, we maximize it. And if you

want to do well at this, you and, uh, who's it? Jesse Pinkman, who you're writing with. But the point is if you want to do well with it, you gotta, you gotta give them a look, give them a right, then you give them a left because everyone that listens wants, all of my audience wants the guillotine. Who goes in the guillotine? It depends. Okay. Well, I don't think anybody should go in the guillotine. Well, well, enjoy the poor house. Keep going. Okay. But there's also, so I think you're right about this. I mean, internet foreign speculation is a big deal on, on local markets. I mean, in Seattle, they've, they've tried to cut down on foreign buyers, um, buying essentially second, third condos because you end up with cities where, you know, basically you have these,

you know, multimillion dollar high rises per unit and nobody living in them, right? It's just, it's money marking. But one of the reasons there's a housing crisis in the United States is because it's just a supply and demand issue, right? So there's just not enough housing. Well, why would people be, why would developers want to build cheap single family homes when they can build these massive skyrises or whatever? It's just more expensive places. So I think you're right. I mean, is regulation the better way to get there? Or are market incentives the better way to get there? I mean, to me, that's the question between socialism and capitalism. Well, aren't we giving tax abatements to luxury condo developers? Aren't we giving, I mean,

I mean, so we're incentivizing that activity. Yeah, absolutely. Or you have things like, you know, but just like the insane tax breaks that they get that's like some, a company like Foxconn will get to go to a place like Wisconsin and bring in 500 jobs or whatever. You know, and like I live in a city with, I don't know how many billionaires live in Seattle. I mean, there's the fucking ton of them. And we don't have an income tax in the state. It is unconstitutional to have an income tax in the state, which is exactly why Amazon and gate, this is why they live here. Jeff Bezos initially wanted to house Amazon on a, on a, on a Native American reservation because the tax law, they have even, you know, even more relaxed tax laws on reservations than they

do in places like Seattle, which have just like incredibly regressive. But that's the thing. Like last year, there was a huge debate in Seattle about instituting a head tax, right? So there's no, so we have incredibly high property taxes and incredibly high sales tax. And we'll have levies all the time because there's no, there's, this is like an incredibly wealthy city and there's no income tax anywhere in the state and no capital gains tax, which is it's a, it's in the constitution, right? You have to amend the constitution to change this. So the city has tried to do little kind of work around. So they were going to institute what's called a head tax or a per-employee tax on, on businesses. And so Amazon was so opposed to this that Jeff Bezos just like,

was like, I'm not going to build another tower. They were in the midst of building a tower. We're just not going to build this tower. We're going to move. We're going, he was going to take his ball and go home and it was, he can do, you know, I mean, he did the same thing in New York when AOC basically extorted him into, or she attempted to extort him and basically decided not to house this, you know, Amazon, two headquarters in her district. And so there's this really, there's this really funny image. So we have a Seattle has a socialist city council member named Shamis Wan. And there's this video I saw. Her name is Shamis Wan. She's Indian. She's Indian American. I thought you said Shamis one, like the last name was one, like she is the one.

She thinks that she's the one. Sure. You will see her oftentimes on, or like cable news shows screaming loudly. So Shamis Wan, there's this great video of her. She's the real proponent of this head tax and Amazon, she wants Amazon out of the city. So she honestly couldn't give a fuck if Amazon takes her, if Jeff Bezos aside, it's like, we're leaving Seattle. She wants Amazon. She doesn't care. She wants them out. She wants like, she wants a socialist, a socialist reformation. So there's great video of her standing in front of what's called Bezos balls, which are these two big glass glass structures that he built in the middle of the Seattle. And so she's standing there and she's screaming like, you know, like workers rights or what I

don't remember what the slogan is, but something about like an Amazon had taxed for like to provide, you know, they were going to use the money to deal with a homelessness crisis. So something about like helping the poor, helping the working class. And then behind her, there's a couple dozen dudes in like construction uniforms, like hard hats, and they're like high visibility vests, chanting, no Amazon head tax. So you have, you, so the problem is that the socialists, especially this, this particular socialist proclaims to stand for the working class, while the working class itself is basically like, fuck you. And that's part of identity politics, right? And I think one of the problems we're seeing now is, as you mentioned, there's been this

divorce. Everybody's focused on their sort of a, on their racial group, their, their sex, their gender, their, whatever they identify as, and there's much less cohesion among the working class. Whereas if you wanted to have an actual movement to raise the minimum wage or to improve conditions for workers or address income inequality, it would be, I think, much more effective to have a, to coalesce among the working class. And it would just splinter into these separate groups based on this color of our skin, which I think is what Bernie Sanders was trying to do. I wasn't a Sanders supporter because I thought he was going to get just trumped by Donald Trump. Um, but I think that was his, I think you think had the best chance against Trump

because Sanders, to me, I thought Sanders said a lot of good things about unions and workers and the rights of people, you know, to have healthcare and to have, you know, early childhood education and like a lot of things that would have been positive overall for our society if he could get them done. So I really flipped back and forth on this. I thought Sanders for a while because of the momentum that he had after 2018 and all of this popular support, particularly among bringing out the youth vote, but he just didn't, you know, his, he got fewer votes in, in this primary than he did, you know, in, in 2012. You know, that was amazing. The amazing thing is that the Sanders, like groundswell support, which wasn't there. Well, I think part of that is because of Elizabeth

Warren, um, because she split the vote, right? And Warren, I had been a big Warren fan and then she just turned, she turned away from being like the champion of the consumer and the little man and the person talking about corruption and politics and, you know, in government, which is what you're talking about, talking about, like, you know, uh, like the, the quote unquote epidemic of murder of trans women, which doesn't exist and just this hyper focus on identity politics, the trans women epidemic of murder doesn't exist. Katie Herzog, autism is the reason people are trans. Go into this because you said this to me the other day. So much trouble. No, you're not. You're going to get fucking famous. All right. All right. But I don't know if that's a good thing

or can you change your background to Charlottesville? I'm kidding. Katie, tell us about, you can't see the, you can't see the cross burning at running out. If there's, if I haven't seen a lesbian apartment, this is the most Seattle apartment. Everything's gray. I live in a house. I, well, good for you. Good for you. Come and do it now. Come and do it now. And really impressed me. I moved to the suburbs so I could get away from all this shit. So I'm a, I'm a suburban homeowner because all we hear is a trans woman are being murdered and nobody wants that. And we hear it. We hear it. And we hear trans women of color are being murdered. You say no. What say you? Okay. So what you hear about is the quote unquote epidemic of, of trans violence or epidemic of,

of trans murder. So if you look at the statistics, and this, this has come about to tell you comes from the human rights campaign. So this is like the primary gay and trans rights group in the United States. And up until recently, they were considered far too regressive on trans issues, but they have since shifted from being a gay rights group to I think primarily a trans rights or trans advocacy group. So this is from HRC. HRC says that in 2019, 25 trans people were murdered. Right. So 25 of anything, like just on, on its face, it's just incredible to me that, that people continue to call this an epidemic because 25 of anything is an epidemic, right? So I ran the numbers and I, I can't remember them off the top of my head,

but it turns out that when you look at, look at murder rates, and this is a little bit difficult to do because we don't really know the population of trans people in the United States. It's probably underestimated. But so using like the most current data, what I found and what other people have found as well is that the murder rate for trans women or trans people is slightly lower than that for natal females and vastly lower than that for natal males. And it, it is true that trans, that black trans women are much more likely to be the victims of murder than like a, you know, a white trans dude in Seattle, just vastly more likely. But when you drill into the actual cases, these particular cases, what you find is that the

vast majority of these people who were killed in 2019 and 2018 and 2017 and every other year were not killed in bias crimes. They were killed doing sex work. They were killed in, like through domestic violence, ran a bad luck. There were a couple bias crimes last year and it's all terrible. People shouldn't be killed. Like, let's just like acknowledge that. But this isn't an epidemic. It's actually not even disproportionately high. It is, it is higher for sure for black trans women, particularly black trans women who are sex workers, but transphobia doesn't appear to be the actual root of these killings. And to me, if you care about trans lives and you want trans people to be, have healthy, happy lives where they are not

victimized, you need to get at the root of the issue. And if the root isn't transphobia, then you need to stop repeating this, this slogan, you know, that transphobia is killing people or whatever because it's just not true. And so the other statistic that gets floated around all the time, all the time, this is like, has been like back in the news this week. Is there, is the argument that they're more likely to end up in sex work because they're trans and they're discriminated against at other jobs? Well, yeah, I think that's, that's, that's probably part of the argument. You know, and there are certainly socioeconomic factors at play here. If you're black, you're more likely to be poor. If you're poor, you're more likely to be doing sex work. There are,

this is like real intersectionality. You know, there are these like interlocking, interlocking, you know, characteristics dependent on these populations. But so this other statistic is even crazier. And that's, that's that the, the life expectancy of trans women is 35. And sometimes they say like, no, it's life expectancy of like black trans women or trans women of color, but you see this repeated all the time. Trans women on average only live to be 35 years old. So I looked into this last year and that number comes out from basic, like almost nowhere. So there is a human rights organization based in South America and they pulled different like LGBTQ advocacy groups and they asked them, they asked them, they basically got data on, on like, on rates of

victimization. And what they found that in like very specific populations, like sex workers in Brazilian Flavolas or however you pronounce that word, the average age. So the average age of a murder victim, of a trans murder victim, actually not even average. So in this particular population, so 80% of trans murder victims in this population were under the age of 35, which is not actually uncommon. I mean, most people who are murdered are young, but this has nothing to do with the United States. This is extrapolated from the most, some of the most dangerous areas in the world doing the most dangerous job in the world. So it has nothing to do with your average trans person in the United States. And also,

a lot of trans people don't come out until they're well after the age of 35 years old, right? So it just, on its face, it just doesn't make any sense, but people continue to repeat it. And I think this is really bad because it harms trans people, right? I mean, what do you think it would be like to wake up every day and think like, I'm never going to live to be, to see my 36th birthday, I'll never be able to be president because trans women only live to be 35 years old. It's just not true. And it just gets repeated. And that's what drives me crazy about the media. So what happens is like a study will get published or some advocacy group will commission a study and then they'll issue a press release. And then the media picks it up and doesn't do any sort of

digging into it, doesn't look at the numbers, doesn't ask for the data, just assumes that it's true and just starts repeating it. And then, you know, celebrities pick it up and start repeating it. And then it just passes like a virus through culture. And all of a sudden people think that, you know, trans women are being hunted in the streets. This came up Kamala Harris at the LGBT town hall. Someone interrupted her and said, like, we're being lit, we're being hunted. And she said, I know you are. And it's just not true. There's like, there's not a serial killer going around terrorizing trans women. What's happening is that they're being trans, they're being terrorized by misinformation that typically well-meaning people continue to spread because they're just not

skeptical. So in closing, because you're so smart and people should follow you and read everything you do. You're one of the best followers on Twitter, kitty perzag on Twitter. You are somebody that I think has, you know, you've ruffled a lot of feathers. And do we get back to facts ever in this country? Do we get back to objective information or is anybody going to be able to say what you just said without, you know, your intentions being challenged and being called a Nazi and a racist and fuck Herzog, you know, spray painted on the outside of the stranger. Is anybody able to be going to be able to have these conversations ever again? Do we see any, is anything positive culturally happening right now that might lead us back to

a more fact-based, rational discourse in this country? No. There it is. And by the way, agreed. I agree with you. Here's what I think is going to happen. I think that we're in the midst of a mass hysteria and it's not just what's happening right now. It's like the Salem witch trials, but many of those women were witches. And it's oddly enough, being a witch is also very trendy right now. So I think we're in the midst of these things happen in American culture, or not just American culture, they happen all across the world. You see things like the Cultural Revolution and Communist Nations and the difference between, with lots of the same sort of social strictures, right? So in like Romania in the 70s and 80s, 60s, 70s and 80s, they would have these

what were essentially like struggle sessions, like mandatory self-criticism sessions where people would get together and publicly proclaim how they had been enemies of the working class, and usually what they had done was some sort of thought crime. And we're seeing this now, but instead of it being sort of a top-down directive from the government, this is coming from the bottom up, right? So this is coming from the culture where people, particularly like, you know, sort of elite middle class or upper middle class, highly educated white people, are voluntarily sort of taking place in these struggle sessions because of like real sense of guilt and a real sense of like profound shame about what people with our skin tone did before

we were alive in many cases. So I think that's where this is going. I hope that I'm wrong. And I think it's going to last for years. I think that we're going to, we're seeing something break open now that is going to spread farther and wider throughout society. And people are going to get scarier and scarier to speak their minds and to be honest, and I'm deeply concerned about it. I don't think this is how like the end of the world, I think that we're in a moment back to Trump. And now we're going to swing back the other way now. I keep wondering, like it would be very interesting to me, you know, there's all this panic about Trump sort of issuing authoritarianism into the United States.

He has absolutely not been able to do as much as he would like to. And I keep thinking like, what if we do, what if he does issue authoritarianism in, but it's not the federal government, it's coming from the resistance, right? It would be sort of like perfectly ironic. We do devolve into this authoritarian society where nobody can say what they believe. And I'm not talking about, you know, I like, I think that norms should exist in society. I don't think that we should have no rules and people should just go around, you know, screaming, racist, shit or whatever. I don't think that the problem is that what is acceptable thought, what is acceptable to express has become increasingly narrow, right? So I'm talking about just like talking about the

realities of biological sex, these things that are basic mainstream opinions. That's what I'm worried about being pushed out of the competition. Did you see the thing today where somebody said, Trump just enshrined biological sex is defined to men and women in the law. All trans healthcare is now wiped out. This is what you see on Twitter. And people are saying that's why what JK Rowling said was so detrimental and dangerous. Is any of that true? I haven't looked into this. I saw, I saw this floating around Twitter. I think what they did was just from like reading a headline and really not reading into it at all. I think what they did is roll back protections under the Obama care, under the Affordable Care Act for trans people,

which I'm against, you know, I think that, that, I think that, you know, insurance companies should cover, should cover, you know, trans healthcare. I think that's probably what it's about. But they're like, their argument is that JK Rowling's expression that men and women exist is the reason that, yeah. Dude, this has been in the works for a long time. And I highly doubt that Trump is, is dictating public policy based on JK Rowling. Not that particularly, but they're saying that's the problem with, you know, biological essentialists is that they're, which it's so funny, biological essentialists, I mean, even to just say that word. But, you know, when you have that, those types of opinions, though, they allow governments to take away

healthcare from trans people. I just, I think that's on its face. I don't think that. I think it's like two issues that are unconnected. Yeah, JK Rowling, she wrote a piece called, like Turf Wars or something, and it's sort of an explainer about why she came out recently and sort of dipped her toe in the conversation about, about trans stuff. And she's referring to something really specific that's happening in the UK, this gender recognition act, which would move from a process. There's basically, because of the NHS, the National Health Service there, if you want sort of trans healthcare, you have to basically go in front of a panel. I think I'm getting this, right? You basically have to go through, there's steps that you have to go through to get healthcare.

There's sort of more of a Cape Keeper method there. And then in like 2018 or something, ironically, the Conservative Party introduced this Gender Recognition Act. And they, the reason they did this was because this was on the heels of gay marriage. And gay marriage was such an overwhelming popular success that they thought, like, hey, we'll just like, we'll like jump on this bandwagon and do something for the trans people and everybody's going to love us. And so, what they proposed with this, this law that would make a sex change would be basically self, self declaration, right? So if you say right now that you're a woman, legally you are female and you have access to women's spaces. If I say I'm a man, I have access to men's spaces.

And so the Conservative Party proposed this. And then there was a massive backlash, not just between like radical feminists who don't want trans women in their spaces, but like Catholic women and mainstream normies, just women who said like, we are uncomfortable with this. So she's talking about something really specific and not trans healthcare. And I think she like affirmed her, you know, her beliefs that trans people should have access to the healthcare. Right. One last question. You said you got into writing about detransitioning because you were interested in heretics. And now you've kind of become a heretic. Do you think you manifested that? Is that, did you want to always kind of live on the outside of mainstream? I mean,

I kind of do, which is why I'm a comedian, right? Like my job, I guess other than prostitution, it's like the second oldest job. Like I'm like the town crier. I'm the fool. I'm the whatever. Like I'm the guy that's in the public square just shouting and then people come by and throw them change or whatever. But what about heretics? So fascinated you and, and you seem very comfortable being one. I guess that's probably because I haven't left my house in three months. And so I'm like, I no longer have people screaming at me. Yeah. I mean, it's probably an element of self reflection there. I don't think it was conscious at the time, but I would say that the writing that I've done before and, you know, and after that piece tends to, I try to find the unexpected

and things, you know, and I've learned that almost nothing, nothing you see is as it appears to be. And so I think that's the part why I'm drawn to these things. And the more I read, the more I realized that everything I think I know about the world is more complex than I thought. So yeah, it's like the more and more informed you get, the less, you know, you feel like you have any clue of what's going on. And the less you've realized you can trust institutions. And I don't want to be like, you know, I'm not Donald Trump. I don't, unfortunately, I don't have his, his money or his tan, his spray tan, but, you know, I don't believe in like the, I don't want to be like the fake news person or whatever, but I will say like a lot of mainstream and, and I saw the

Covington, the Covington thing happened was completely fake. Jesse Smollett. I mean, there's a lot, we've seen a lot. Okay. I got a question for you. So as a gay dude, how, how long did it take for you to think like, oh, Jesse Smollett does bullshit? Well, you know, what bothered me about the Jesse Smollett thing, and this is what always bothers me. And I've, I've spent my life in New York City, LA, I've been to Chicago a bunch. I've witnessed very few things that I would consider, you know, and I've been in places where everybody's drunk. I spent a lot of time with drunks in comedy clubs and things like that. People have yelled things out at me. I mean, it's part of the fucking contract you sign up for

when you're a comedian. I've been on subways late at night and all that stuff. The idea that they're with these Trump supporting gang of people in a metropolitan city committing hate crimes seemed very weird to me. Impossible? No, but it seemed odd to me that that when I, when I heard that, it made me go, huh, really? At 2am, there's just guys with Trump hats on going after Jesse Smollett, who's getting a subway sandwich at 2am. That was the thing that got me. I was like, aren't you rich? Why are you eating subway? Why are you post-mating or grub hubby or something? Why are you freezing? And I, and I, and I did a video about this several weeks later. I was, I was attacked by Elizabeth Warren supporters. I was hit with feathers and a headdress and I was

attacked. And so I understand what it's like, but yeah. Did they come back and apologize to you after it turned out that he was full of shit? I'm sure that they did. Well, the weird thing about me is, is again, I came out late in life. I came out at 25. Then I started standing up comedy right away. I quit drinking the same year. So you had all of these things happen at once. I became essentially another person, right? I never had the time to like just be gay for two years and like just party and drug it up and fuck. I came out. I had to stop doing drugs and drinking and I started doing comedy. So it was this weird problem. I was an actor as a little kid. Like I had a lot of traditionally gay experiences, right? I'm insanely talented and gorgeous. So when you have those,

you look like a ballerina. I do. And you know what? I look like how they do when they don't do as well because I've seen older ballerinas. So the reality is you're wrong and right at the same time. But I always, you know, here's the thing, man, I hate group think. I've always hated it. It's so weird to me. It's the antithesis of humor. Like this, this, this weird kind of cultish. I've, you know, I was a drug addict. I understand what it's like to live this binary existence of like, I'm either high or I'm sober. I'm getting drugs. I'm not getting drugs. And so to me, when I got rid of drugs and I stopped drinking and I went into comedy and I was doing this and I was following the path that I should be following. Like I just, I really started to get

weird about people that had, you know, no room for nuance. Cause I'm like, that's where everything lives. Everything lives in nuance. Jokes live in nuance. And I've always a fan of like, you know, you know, people, people say, I don't present as gay. So it's easier for me. 100% true. They're a hundred percent right about that. But like being gay is the 10th most fucked up thing about me. Right. In terms of the life I've lived, I mean, I bought a house when I was 22 with a subprime mortgage on cocaine. I mean, I, you know, most people wake up, you know, gay people will wake up or straight people wake up next to someone and go, how did I get here? I woke up in a $700,000 home and said, how did I get here? And then there was a stack of

there's a title beside you. Yeah. And I owned the property. So I had done all this weird shit. I mean, I dropped acid on eighth grade stage of my graduation. Well, you know, I was doing acid and when I was in eighth grade, I was doing cocaine in eighth grade and ninth grade. I was hanging out at crack houses. I was like doing wild stuff. And then I was selling subprime mortgages for a long time, trying to help the country really. And, and, and I was just involved in all this weird shit, man. And to me, sexuality is a part of the story, but it's not the whole story. For most people, it is their whole story. Most gay, gay people, gay people, it is. There's something wrong with that because it's like, you're completely right. I mean, I find it like

very, I find it aggravating. And I don't find it, I don't find it interesting at all. But, you know, and like, I lived like mostly in queer, in sort of queer circles for most of my life until I basically got excommunicated in the last few years. And when I think back about that time, it's like all we talked about was being gay. That's all we talked about. Right. That's so fucking boring. I mean, everything was gay. Somebody be like paper plastic and I'd be like, I'm gay, you know, it's like, it was just fucking boring. It's boring. It's boring. It's weird. And now it's, and now I, and now that's everywhere. It's everywhere. Everyone's gay now. And it's weird. It's, so I always felt like, yeah, I'm sure I had internalized homophobia this side and the other

thing. But then like, there was a time of comedy when I started to do a comedy, when I said I was gay on stage, people say, ew, or like people would be like openly hostile to it. But then it turned to where like, I even like in longer sets, I say it in short sets, I stopped saying it because when I said it, people would clap and that's like the worst thing in comedy. Good for you. Good for you. And then I'm like, oh, enough. What a weird fucking thing. What, but people are heavily invested in that, which makes them unique. And if what makes you unique is your sexuality, and otherwise your basic bitch person, if what makes you unique is your sex, which is what I love about all these people. They're like, I'm queer and I love the real housewives and I love,

you know, Frappuccino. And I'm like, you're just a basic bitch. It doesn't matter who you sleep with. You like, you, you have nothing unique about you. Groups of queers are conformist like every other group. They are. I mean, they are any group you have any, these sort of, we break up into these tribes. It's not that different from high school. And they're all like each other. And I, you know, I'm, that's, I guess, an offensive thing to say, but it goes from like long observations of hanging out with these communities. How does it affect you? Like, are you, when you say you're actually communicated, do you just not get the invites anymore? What? Oh, dude, no. I don't, I like basically live

a pretty friendless existence. And I do have, I have like three or four friends. I mean, most of them are older. I have friends in like their sixties and seventies now. And just some old mountain lesbian you talk to who just lives on a houseboat and she chain smokes inside. Oh my God. See, this is what you want. That you don't want a lot of friends. You want, I want a houseboat chain smoker. Yeah. Yeah. She like just Seattle in the fucking seventies to learn how to be a pilot. I mean, she's just fascinating. Or I could hang out with queer people who only talk about being queer.

So yeah, I would say I don't have, I don't have very many friends, but I do have a wife and a dog. So I'm still, you know, I think it's like when you, when you look at the sixties, Camille Pagney talks about this, when you look at like, cause there was a lot of similar ideas happening, but it was all about sensory experiences and LSD and the body and people fucking and free love and Hinduism and like, you know, expanding your mind. And then you look at this revolution and it's all about like nitpicking language and like a very churlish, secretarial, uh, you know, weird bureaucratic, sexless, fearful existence. And you're like, whoa, they got everything wrong. They took like everything from the sixties.

And now it's like the bad shit. They took all the bad shit. Now it's people just chewing their tongues on Adderall going on tweet threads. It's like crazy. And what's scary is what's next. That's what's always scared me. I'm like, is violence next? Because it seems like everywhere in the culture, from celebrities to the media, there is just a, it's violence is being excused and even like in certain corners of the media, agitated and like requested. Right. It's justified because it's violence in the name of, of a righteous cause. You know, it's, I don't think people have, are very aware of like recent history around the, around the world. It's not, it's not like any of this is new. Which in some ways it's good because we can see how

we can see sort of these patterns, you know, he would, these mass panics, these hysterias, they come and they go. And I think, I think we're in one and you can't really see it until, until it's over. Tell people where to find you. Where can they support you? Where can they read your stuff? So my podcast is sort of my main thing now. I decided I don't want to be a writer anymore. Words are over or writing is over. I'm just going to be a speaker now. So my podcast is called blocked and reported and we're on Patreon. It's like blocked and reported at Patreon. I don't know what it is. You can Google it. I'm on Twitter at Kitty Perzog and that's, I guess that's the only places I want you to find me.

That's where she wants to be found. She's a one woman wrecking crew doing battle against autistic trans communists. And if there's not trouble, if there's, if, if you don't see the value in that, well, I don't know what to tell you. Thank you for doing the show. I appreciate it. You are, you're not a retweeter. She never retweets what I do, but I enjoy her anyway. She doesn't read too. I keep big tabs on that. She never retweets, but that's okay. But she's, she's a follow on Twitter, man. If you're not following Kitty Perzog on Twitter, she's a great follow. I love the way her mind works. It's very, very fascinating and good luck, man. Listen, Patreon and all of these things are the future. Like these, one of the things that

I'll kind of close with this, what bothers me about people in my industry is that they're, they're supposedly super progressive, but they're all married to these archaic institutions. They're like, let's reform Hollywood. It's like, what are you saying? Create your own avenues. You have the technology to do your own thing. I've made a hundred sketches in the past two years. They're funny. They get millions of views. They've never been on television. They, we put them on Twitter and Instagram and YouTube. We, you know, we put out two podcasts a week. You know, nobody inhibits us from doing this. There's no editor. Nobody's telling us what to say or what to do. And we live and die on, on basically the response of the audience. And yet so many of the most progressive,

most evolved minds of my business still refuse to do that because they don't really want to put their talent in the hands of the audience. They want to basically, they like these cartels as much as they don't want to admit that. They love these cartels of people that will either green light something they want to do or not. So it'll be, what you're doing right now, when I'm doing, I mean, this is just kind of it. This is kind of it. Yeah. And it's actually working out. It's shocking. Yeah. It's shocking. Well, listen, good luck with everything. Thank you. You're welcome back anytime. I appreciate it. I know it was an honor for you today to speak to me. It was. Thank you, Tim. I appreciate it. Thank you very much.