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

31:11And how many times you see this, you feel this? Like you read something and you go, ah, this visceral need to defend yourself against this unseen jury, which doesn't even exist. but you just want to not have your worldview besmurched or push back against, because it's scary for what that means for the rest of you. I remember that this is essentially what happened to me and how I kind of got caught in the crossfire of the culture wars and why I say that I was a lib tard because I really... I was never like an ideologger and activist. I didn't go to college and have some worldview installed in my head.

31:53I just was like, I'm a Democrat because they're better the end. And I never had to think about it. So like I say, I kind of fell asleep in a self -driving car when I came to analyzing anything. And when I started writing for Playboy and my audience was very red blooded American male, I was mouthing off about a school shooting and the gun debate and my audience, my new audience, of Red Blood at American Males who are, you know, generally armed or at least have more knowledge about this. They were, they came at me so hard and I stopped and I was like, you know what? I know nothing about this. I actually know, I don't know how to hold a gun, And aside from knowing nothing about guns, I don't know, I couldn't identify a gun.

32:46If you put three guns in front of me, I couldn't tell you which was which. I don't know how hard it is to get a gun in California. I knew nothing and that was really the beginning of me of being me recognizing it was like a house of cards. Like, wow, if I'm this uninformed and ignorant and spouting my mouth off about this, what else is there? Yeah, so that ego destruction thing finally a little fissure crack appeared in the side of it and everything just fell apart I mean what a great what a wonderful experience for you to go through and to do that through work as well though You know to have done this thing and then for it to have sort of cracked you open and you go fuck on the other side of this Is maybe a better version of my world view in many ways?

33:30I have grown up in public in a small way. It's not like I'm a child star It's more like when I started, this is the story I want to write. It's the book I want to write because I don't think I'm alone in this happening either just this idea of being quote unquote red pill. But I do think a lot of people have started questioning everything that they were kind of raised to assume or brought up to believe or what right left center, whatever. We just live in that. I think it's actually good until you start going down rabbit holes in your, you know, you become so open -minded Your brain falls out. This was something that you see with like hippies and liberals, but now you see it everywhere and In many ways when I started this I was writing a playboy.

34:20I was single. I Had just got sober which I was saying to my husband. We talk about this a lot.

34:31I of their beliefs, their ideas. They come into the world with this sense of authority. Like do you think that we aren't like that because we're addicts and recovery? And like I just don't underestimate my ability to lie to myself. It's never, I've been, I'm always suspicious of it. You know, I'm suspicious of. We're from the same, we are from the same camp. And maybe I'm suspicious of it because I'm low -key jealous that I don't have it. Yeah. But yeah, I mean, I think about this so much that fluency and certainty are a proxy for truthfulness and insight. So it's not that you necessarily need to know more.

35:14It's that you sound like you know more because you're not caveatting. So for instance, good example of this, Peter Zayan, geopolitics guide, you know who that is. I know the name. Xen Han, Zed, D. J. A. A. A. A. A. A. A. A. A. A. He's been on Rogan, he's been on my show, he's been on Sam Harris. me, Sam, and Rogan, and maybe tons of other people that he's been onto all said the same thing about him retrospectively, which is he's the most certain man that I've ever met, ever, ever. Nothing's caveated, it seems to be this way. It appears as though projections would suggest that it's, we know what's gonna happen with fertiliser rates in Russia by 2050, and this is what's happening with the Chinese military in and around the South China Sea and blah, blah, blah.

35:59I'm like, I'm fucking blown away by this guy. I think the level of knowledge that I would need to reach in order for me to be that certain about anything would be so obscene. It would be so high that I think, well, he has to know what he's talking about. My inherent, my inherent uncertainty in self -doubt is so small that in order for me to speak with his degree of sort of certainty. I would have to know everything. So of course, he knows everything. And it's the same for, but there is a bit of like, huh, I feel like there's reliability and caveatting in a little bit of sort of standoffishness too.

36:43So yeah, that was, that's a really interesting insight. Is he right? Like, is his track record of being correct about things? I would love someone to do an article comparing those because I can't be bothered to do the first hand research myself, but a lot of the projections are a little bit further out ahead. So it's stuff to do with like 2030, 2050. So they may bear fruit, but I mean, he's got a rabbit. He was very, his candle was amazing. It's insights are fantastic. But when you're talking about predictions, you know, what is it about the retraction always gets less attention than the Right.

37:22Right. Right. Right. Right. I wonder, we had this idea the other day, how cool would it be if someone made a website where all of the biggest online commentators, whether it's independent media, mainstream media or whatever, that all of their predictions and proclamations were held like on chain somehow. So you could go back and see what did, what did like fucking John Stuart actually say during COVID. What he is Morgan actually think during BLM because so many people are trying to retro -terrain perspective and you know, I mean, Jason Calacanis from the All -In podcast, if you know who that is, All -In's kind of like fresh and fit for tech bros.

38:04And he was so ardent. So like people that haven't got the vaccine need to lose their jobs, we need to lock them in their house, max, max, max, and now so he got all of the sort of lib empathetic social justice acclaim of being part of that when it was cool. And now that everyone retrospectively kind of sees that as really cringe and a bit stupid and anti -science. He gets all of the acclaim of being like, yeah, you know, COVID, we've absolutely overblown. It's not really where we need to be. Biden's stupid and Fauci and blah. He goes, do you don't get to speak like you at least issue a fucking like I'm an idiot and I will always be an idiot for having done that thing.

38:45If I want to now be on this side of the fence or I get to stick to my gut, you don't get to do both things. Yeah. Imagine how frustrating that is for people like myself who have been screaming that Biden is not fit and being told that I'm a right wing bigot for it. And now the entire left wing media apparatus is saying it. But it's infuriating because there were real social costs for many of us pushing back against gender, pushing back against COVID, lockdowns, pushing get so for people to kind of be able to retroactively. We were just, I was talking about this with someone recently about how it's very strange the time we live in because the internet is forever and yet we live in this ever present now of the internet.

39:34So even though there's records of everything that people have said, you can still just be as shameless as you want to be Just blowing with the wind because it doesn't matter. It's so strange to me. It's so strange. Many people are much more blowy than others. Yeah, I've always had such a... And I'm sure that I've been... of it myself too, but I've always had such distaste for people that have been ardent about one position and then in retrospect have taken another one. If nothing else, because you took up my precious life, my mind share, reading that bullshit four years ago, that you now don't agree with.

40:16Like you should apologize to me. Right. Apologize to me and my sanity. But my favorite one of this was, you remember when those tanks were going through Miami, South Beach. And everyone was like, this is it, martial law's gonna be enforced. People are gonna be held in their homes at gunpoint. And it was just, it was like tanks going from one place to another place. Like it was just fucking, you know, a military convoy of some kind. It was a photo in the UK of a single squaddy army guy walking down a street of London that was forwarded many times on WhatsApp. I've just got a message from my brother who says that the army are gonna be, and they're gonna hold people in their houses at gunpoint.

40:52No, none of this happened. Fucking global health passports, vaccine, all of that stuff. Like it was, it was, Cloud Schwab is coming tomorrow to insert this directly into your back passage. This, you're gonna be boofing if the rest of your life. This is exactly what's gonna happen. And I go, well, what happened to all of that? But I'm fine for that to be your position. But at least go, well, it was because they knew that we knew so they couldn't do it because of how hard we pushed back. Oh yeah, Cloud Schwab's really listening to your dad on Facebook. That was the fucking vanguard of resistance.

41:25Was that in an Andrew Tate emergency meeting? That's really what Coul's Cloud Schwab to fucking stop doing this thing. No, it's not. If you're gonna blow with the wind, that's fine, but admit the fact that you were wrong publicly. And it's enough for your soul. It's fucking good for your soul and it's good for your ego. Because it's not that scary to go, hey, I held a position about home -on -world birth control. I thought it was pro. I learned a bit of stuff. I said, no. I held a position about what I thought should be done for a G -Nembreos selection for polygeneic risk scores. I didn't think that it was a good idea.

41:55Now I'm like, okay, I changed my position on that too. I thought epigenetics was bullshit. I learned a little bit more. Publicly I was like, look, I'm fucking, and I'm not the savant of this. I also don't have that many interesting ideas. So I guess I don't need to apologize for that much. But if you're gonna be gregarious, you need to fucking say sorry every so often. Yeah. I wrote a piece of what I got wrong in 2020, which was a lot. I like writing the, I like taking stock of this stuff. I was on Rogan when he said that the there was going to be a red wave like the when the elevator's open in the shining Which was not true and so that clip went viral and I was very wrong about that I've I've publicly on dumpster fire many times said I was fine even though people were like no We shouldn't shut everything down.

42:37I was like, ah, what's two weeks really underestimating how you should never give the government that kind of power ever And I was wrong and I've many times said I was wrong about this I think it's important and good. I'm also in better practice of that because I'm in recovery. So getting sober again. I think I'm wrong on a daily basis. Yeah. Admitting that you're admitting, like having to do a mens, having to go sit in front of people and having to take stock of all your resentments and having to look at that kind of self -inventory is so powerful and important and liberating. And it's also good for me to do because I really thought Trump was going to win.

43:20I thought for sure in 2020. Um, I thought for sure, I thought for sure in 2022 there would be a red wave because I thought people would be pushing back against COVID turns out people kind of agreed with their governments and what they did and they were very focused on the now which at that moment was Robi Wade being overturned. And I underestimated, as I was joking on, on Tom's Survivor last week, how much bitches love abortion.

43:53No one watches Dom's Survivor Christ. I know no one. Everyone can go and subscribe to Dom's Survivor. I fuck everybody should because it is actually amazing. The crap we've been getting away with for like five years. I'm not sure. So you're flying, you're flying into the radio. We have to fly. Like going back to something that I've seen you talk about a good bit. It's this is something that I'm really, really bad at. I'm unbelievably bad at working out what the standard, normy, Western person knows. Or more specifically, what do I know and take as well, well spread fact that most normal people that aren't terminally online don't?

44:39Right. And to say that Joe Biden's mental state is a revolutionary insight worthy of news. To me, it was so old, it was cringed to bring it up. Like I've referred to people that do Biden has dementia jokes as it's like the boomer humor of the last three years. It's like, of course, that's, but you know what I mean? Like it's like, okay, we get it. Like, but it's easy. It's clapped to, but it's kind of old hat, right? Like it's not fucking revolutionary. Biden's not being, but then you're like, oh, but it is. On display for the whole world, you go, ah, maybe I was being a bit too judgmental about that.

45:25Maybe we did need to push the narrative a bit more. So one of the things that I love about doing stand up and why I'm so happy to be back doing it is you get that tangible, normy feedback immediately. So I've been doing this joke about how I'm a geriatric mommy. I had a baby of 43. I'm like, they used to call these geriatric pregnancies. Obviously that fell out of fashion because clearly women love that. No, they hated it. And I talk about how it sounds like. So then I'm like, it sounds, you know, that sounds like you're uterus and moved to like a retirement, Florida, whatever. So then the next joke after that is essentially I'm like, no, they've changed it to something less offensive, which is geriatric birthing person.

46:09And you get it, but normies don't get it. I'm like, oh, so now it's just me finding out who's terminally online and an audience. I don't even think I can do the joke anywhere. I'm the one guy over the faucet that's got a reddit account. Yeah, exactly. I was like, I thought this was common knowledge. They've literally changed the language in, like the White House has changed the language and in bills and shit to birthing person, I thought this was something that was common, you know, like the common, the knowledge of the common and it is absolutely not. I've done that joke in many different venues and it like I just have to abandon it or it's gonna be something that I need.

46:50It'll cost you five years time. Exactly, exactly. It's one of those things where I'm like, wow, people don't know that this is like a thing. I'm too, I'm too online. I just spend too much time online. I asked Mike Salana about this and I know that you've been tracking this too. I'm particularly interested in kind of what the main factions of the culture war are now. Like what happens to the anti -woke? Yeah. fewer woke things to push back against because most normies are kind of in agreement with your position in any case. and this sort of first mover advantage of having crazy social justice positions has sort of been lost quite a bit, I think.

47:35So how do you conceive of the troop positions on the map of the culture war? Yeah, that's interesting. I've been talking to... There's a lot of journalists who have been asking me my opinion about this as well, who are trying to write articles and figure out, because Austin and does seem to be in particular this. It's a weird like very liberal, but also it's, you know, there's this kind of joke about Austin, Key Boston, Weird, but Key Boston surrounded. So it's still in Texas. It's still surrounded by red. There's a lot of people who I think are moving who are purple or red, you know, center right.

48:17I'm not sure because I do think in many ways, comedians out the line throughout a lot of this. There was a moment where it was like, oh, you know, you can't say anything. People that it was very strong. There was a strong push to silence people. I think Elon taking over acts has, has, you know, been another massive win for being it's just open things up a lot. They're in the past four years. There's a lot more infrastructure or for that dissident left or whatever you want to call it, anti -woke. They've created their own institutions. You see trigonometry in the UK, you see free press in the United States, Glenn Greenwald is pivot.

49:07All these people kind of perfectly timed their pivot out of Trump years into Biden years with the pushback against the anti -woke. Now, I think a lot of it depends on what happens in this upcoming election. You know, I think as much as the, the normie view is better represented. Shane Gillis is massive. There's the kill Tony. Is the fucking pinnacle of the normies? Is that what you think? No, I think, I mean, kill Tony's huge. And I feel like that's a direct reaction to, you know, people, I don't want it to be like, like, oh, you can still say retard and gay, but there is something kind of free speech about.

49:55I'm like, some of us never stuffed. That was the word retard and gay. That was the like absolute waterline. Yeah. And the overt and window has dipped below and back out of it a couple of times. It's sort of been doing this for a little while. He said, okay, this week it's okay. And that's the next week. It's not so good. So I think that seeing those trends, like, there's definitely been a reaction. I also think that when you have things like Roe v. Wade being overturned, then you get this, I don't know, it's weird because I feel very much like this in this politically homeless. There's a recent study that somebody was posting online about how they're finding more and more our independence are polarized and that they hate both sides.

50:46It used to be that they would just be like, whatever. I'm just, I don't belong in either place and now they actively disdain both sides with the same kind of fervor that the right hates the left or vice versa, which is interesting to me. And I feel like sometimes I'm like a weathervane, like I can sense which way. The different middle. Yeah, I can sense which way the vibe is shifting. And that's why I was so surprised when Trump didn't win. But again, like I said in the piece, I wrote about what I got wrong. That just speaks to my own bubble that I'm in and my own echo chamber. As much as I like to try and consume a lot of media from all sides, I'm still surrounded by a certain type of person.

51:36But now it feels like more and more like I'm shocked at how many people openly you couldn't joke about voting for Trump even like two years ago and now comedians will come out on stage and announce that they are. And it's definitely, you kind of had to hide being a Trump supporter and I don't see that. I was at a barbecue and everyone was openly talking about how they're going to vote for Trump and these are people who are not prior Republicans or MAGA. Well, there's a big difference between saying that Biden's lame and saying that you'd vote for Trump. There's a lot, there's a lot of people that are stuck in that middle ground at the moment because you need to be a very sort of particular kind of person to be.

52:31I stand with Joe, but he's our guy to be one of them. He fucking introduced president of Vladimir Zelensky as president Putin referred to Kamala Harris as vice president Trump. You know, the guy, it's almost like someone's writing these lines. Yeah. To purposefully do this. And yeah, I mean, conspiracy theories about what the Democratic Party is trying to do about. There's lots of, it's very easy, it's a very easy position to totally costless position to say Biden's not fit for duty. Absolutely costless position. And you can do that and then still end up voting for him. Yeah. Which you can say, look, you know, he's better than the other guy because the other guy totally.

53:15Orange man bad. So total like dickless position to hold largely from that. Okay. Well, what are you suggesting that happens? That's when the rubber meets the road That's a really good point that it is like a totally dickless position because I do think at least Trump supporters are supporters You know like they're they're at least like for something that is not like a negative At least now most of the Biden supporters are simply anti -Trump supporters right, right, which fair enough, I mean, I kind of find it darkly amusing to watch everyone have to defend either one of these people. And there's just such an irony to me that if they weren't running Biden, the nonstop thing they'd be harping on other than everything else about Trump would be his age.

54:05If they had some, that's what's so funny to me. I'm like, you can't even go after Trump for his age because you have someone running who's older than him. But if you had someone young, I guarantee this would be a large portion of your platform as you try and get persuadable voters on your side. It's one of those really strange things. Ageism is one of the few type of bigotry, I don't know, types of discrimination. That kind of gets to slide under the radar. You can kind of talk about people's age. You can do it in a tactless way that'll get a bit of pushback if you talk about a woman's age with regards to the way that she looks.

54:45Like that'll get you a bit of pushback. But if you talk about somebody being old or being pasted or whatever, it seems to kind of just be like, yeah, we know that that's the way the entropy works and I'm slowly declining toward the grave and it'll happen to all of us and it's kind of like a great type of equality in a way that everybody is is going to be like if everybody started off white and was going to end up black. You're like, well, you know, you were racist when you were younger, but everybody's going to be black when they get old. So you know what I mean? It was, you just reminded me of this, this guy came up to me after my set and he was really drunk, I think on drugs.

55:21And he's like, I'm moving back to Japan. He was this Asian guy. And we were talking to my comedy friend and I were like, oh, why? And he's like, I don't know. I've been in Texas and it's still racist here. and I just don't know if I can do it anymore. And then he's like, but I'm like white when I go to Japan. So it's great. I was like, do you even, oh, so you like racism when it works for you? Like it was, it was the, I couldn't stop laughing. I'm like, this is amazing. No concept of what he said at all. Like in the same breath, I was like, this is unbelievable and amazing. So yeah, so all right.

55:59So round out for me your position or whatever your predictions are on what do people who have made a career out of being anti -woke do when there's no more or there's a less woke to push back against? Um, like me. Um, no, I've always, it's funny. I talk about politics, but I really consider myself more of like a lifestyle brand because I just want people to get out of their own way and laugh while the world is burning and not take themselves so seriously. My little Buddha quote today, my daily reading was all about reducing self importance and I just love that. It's like that there's something so humbling about having to constantly do that.

56:44And I do think putting yourself out there in the way that you do and I do your kind, I don't know, maybe you're not, but I'm constantly humbled by something dumb, I said, something dumb, am I fine that I used to believe or say, I mean, you're in the arena. I'm regularly humbled by how much smarter all of the guests are than me. Yeah, that's true. I'm permanently the most stupid person in the room, which is nice to see you. You're going to be able to get out of the way too much. I don't know actually, because again, I think a lot of it is dependent on, like what I guess what happens of Trump wins, you know, they can kind of go back to that would be the best case scenario for the anti -woke because the left will go back to being completely insane.

57:36So I actually think it's been a worse time for people pushing back against the woke during Biden because they, it's like people people forget, I don't forget, because we documented it all in dumpster fire. People forget how bonkers everybody went during that time. And what you all, so is your insight that people on the left don't need to throw hail marries if they're the ones that are in power. But if they aren't the ones that are in power, they sort of scrabble around and they try to get footholds in places where previously they wouldn't have needed to. Yeah, and I think they're really, they really went, it really broke a lot of people's brains.

58:21It really just, they, and it will be, I don't, I'm not sure people are quite prepared for that if he does win just how, how crazy the left will go. My question is, do they still hold, they still hold a lot of institutional power? So will they try to exercise that power in terms of will censorship get worse? Well, all these things that the anti -woke people had to kind of fight against. Again, I don't know because now we have institutions that there's things are a lot more open this time around than they were previously. So I would hope that they would just hold the line and actually try and hold both parties accountable.

59:07you know, be calling out Trump for all of his insanity, calling out the left for their insanity, create an actual institutional movement and power around the 70 % of people who are fed up with all of this, which is like the exhausted majority. I think there's room for that But if they can look to the future of what America needs, which is I do believe some of these institutions that haven't been completely captured, you just need someone who can call balls and strikes like anyone, please. That's what I would hope for the anti -woke. And I think the anti -woke did a pretty good job of pushing back against Trump.

1:00:01It's like we always got accused of going after the left more than the right and they're like, why don't you go after Trump? It's like, oh, well, there's, thank God. Yeah, because no one's going after Trump. Like, not every late night show, every, every news. It, it, that lane was very occupied, but I would hope that they would, that's, that's what I would hope is that you would kind of go, it wouldn't just be anti -woke. I think Constantine has written about the woke right, this kind of rise of the woke right. And I think we are just seeing that those forces of totalitarianism and authoritarianism and wanting to control everything and everyone, that's just human nature.

1:00:49But I think you have to But I would hope that people would just be gathering around free market, free speech, comedy, bettering ourselves, you know, find some ideals that we can kind of collectively get behind, try and find... There's not even like a... It's not really easy to even have a third party run in America. I would love to see that. I would love to see the anti woke, you know, people in institutions try and make it easier for somebody who is a like a reasonable Third party to really run and stand a chance because they don't really have But there are a lot of forces working against that so I lord and savior RFK didn't manage to get on the the debate ticket Did you have him on?

1:01:42No, I haven't I've been to a few dinners with him and stuff And he seems like a nice guy. I wonder how different that debate would have been if R .F .K. had been on stage, the only guy with the worst voice than Biden. That's interesting. I'm glad he wasn't though, because we couldn't have actually... It went down pretty much everything that was exposed from that. Yes. I think people needed to really see... I don't know. I still think he's going to run, and I have been wrong about everything. And so now I just assume that whatever I assume is gonna be wrong and I assume Trump will probably win just based on the vibes, but I I'm guessing Biden's gonna be our next president What the most the most hilarious situation is if Joe Biden's president come November like that's hilarious most fucking absurd Situation for everybody to go through Sunny Bunch actually said the most absurd situation will be if Trump wins the popular vote and loses the electoral college.

1:03:01F**king dancing through the final days. We, all right, we never got to talk about your slut piece. We never got to talk about that article for the people that didn't get to read it. Can you explain what that was? I mean, it's a piece I'd been trying to write for a long time, probably since 2017. And I posted it last August of 2023. So it was quite some years in the making just trying to express it. But when Luis Perry wrote her book about the case against sexual revolution, it really put a frame around what I'd been trying to express. And a lot of people are having this very academic conversation.

1:03:45And it felt a little bit to me like those sleds over there, those sleds over there, they regret it. A little detached, that academic detachment from something that they were all discussing. And I was like, slut here, reform slut here. and I regret it. You know, looking back, I think that this is something I've been thinking a lot about. You don't know something's a cope until it's no longer a cope. Bang. Like there's no way out of it. You can't get out of the matrix of that. So I couldn't know that I was coping in many ways, just trying to bolster up my ego and tape up my broken soul and demoralizing experiences by telling myself that I was empowered and I was this boss bitch and I was bad, a badass like, you know, taking the word slut and using it to be powerful, sleeping my way to empowerment as I've talked about before.

1:04:57Until I was in a loving relationship with a man who respected me and truly I feel like loves me unconditionally in many ways, in a way like I've never really experienced, and until I, it's like the, so another recent experience of this was having a child. And I couldn't, I didn't realize how much of my, like I'm childless, I'm free, I don't have, I don't have the family, like I don't have the trappings of a family, how much of that was just me coping with not having this experience of being a mother because you can't know that experience until you're actually a parent. So it's weird because what you don't know, you don't know.

1:05:50And I don't, I think the sad thing for me about telling women that they can kind of sleep their way to empowerment. I think the most upsetting thing in the wake, like the comments and what I heard from that piece, was there is a there's a there's a high body count. And I'm not talking about the body count. The manosphere talks about I mean, there's a lot of dead women in that wake in terms of women who got addicted to drugs, women who got who lost themselves in ways that were irreparable. I heard really harrowing stories from people about their moms, about women who really got lost in been just kind of lost their self -esteem and their confidence from sleeping around and then yeah and and it's high it's risky as a woman you know it's still high risk behavior to just be especially if you're drinking and it's the thing again about that piece is that I learned very early on in essay writing don't burn more than one talk I would want to write everything and my editor would be like don't burn more than one when I was writing in a weekly column.

1:07:15He'd be like, don't burn more than one topic in one column. You write a weekly column, save it. That piece I wrote specifically about my own experience of being a slut, why I regretted certain things about it. And there was a lot of other stuff that I didn't cover. It's hard for me to extract how much of that behavior was tied up in drinking and drug addiction because those two things, what I have slept with, a lot of the people that I slept with had I not been drunk or drinking or whatever, probably not. I probably wouldn't... And as soon as the arrow of causation going... Right. And then it's like you try and bury those feelings of shame and waking up and not knowing where I was.

1:08:10So how much of it is, you know, people rightfully pointed out like I don't drink and do drugs and I love being a slut And maybe it was just that you are a drug addict, you know drunk and And that was the real problem not the sledding -ness but I was I was I would yeah, this is kind of like a chicken or an egg, you know, I was I was sexually I was raped when I was like 18. So how much of that hyper -promiscuity comes on the heels of sexual abuse? How much of it is just like I'm also just a sexual person. And it was never really healthy. I was raised Catholic. So there was like a lot of weird stuff put in my head about sex before I even had sex.

1:09:06And I felt ashamed of it before I even had it. It's like, how do you entie all these things? But again, this was another thing where I wrote about it and just the reaction from women and often gay men actually. I heard from shitloads of gay men who that piece resonated with of just saying, like, thank you for writing this. This was my experience. And I think again, it gets to something, like, don't lie to yourself. I was lying to myself for so many and like I think a part of me You I think you always kind of know when you're lying to yourself somewhere somewhere and I I think that I would just smoke ball or drink or go and what some of it fun Absolutely, this was something What's her name?

1:09:57I Yeah, I Aila. Aila, thank you. I know, I always mispronounce her name. Aila was kind of, we ran into each other at this event and she was like, how much of this was just you reverse kind of engine, like just remembering this differently now that you're a mom and you have a kid. I'm like, well, I started writing this essay long before I was even in a relationship and had a kid. So that's kind of a move point. But there are some that I don't regret. Like there are some, you know, like sexual dalliances that were fun and flings and I don't regret them, but the vast majority of them, yeah, I'm mad that they ever, you know what, also pointed this out was going on Rogan.

1:10:46When I went on Rogan, the amount of men who reached out to me and were like, I was like, I fuck that girl. He's like, oh my god. This is fucking horrible This is a problem with our being a slut who goes on Rogan suddenly every fucking dude You had a one night stand with crawls out of the work Mac and bean the The women in your DMs for and a half foot table away from being Eskimo brothers with Joe Rogan and fucking Neely did it Oh God, that was really the worst part of going on that podcast. It was just a guys who were like, yeah, I was like, said to my mate, I fucked her once. I'm like, I regret this.

1:11:35You like an island just above Antarctica that's be claimed in the mid 1800s or something. See that over there? Went there. So, the Aila, the Aila thing's interesting. Obviously she did that post about her birthday. Did you read that one? I heard about it at a Shabbat dinner of all things. So the people that don't know, Aila's a sex, positive sex worker. I don't know whether you can have sex negative sex workers. That would be amazing though. I wanna write that sketch. The sex negative sex worker. I'm sure there's someone for, it was a kink for that out there. Yeah, yeah, I want you to hate it.

1:12:18And I think she had sex with maybe 50 guys on her birthday or something like that. And did this big flow chart, there's a big flow chart that got, that she put together that explained like who came and who and how many people, oh, it was, so the question there is, It seems, it would be very surprising to me if she came up to you and said, do you know what it is? I really get it about the lots of casual sex thing. Like that would be, so, but there's another interesting thing. I remember there's two, two definitions of happiness both done by Dan, so Daniel Carneman and Daniel Gilbert. So Gilbert talks about how if you've spent the rest of your life in a pool with a cocktail in your hand on a floaty, just enjoying your days, even though when you look back on your life, if you might not be particularly proud of the things that you've done and you might not say that it was time well spent.

1:13:09Each individual moment was quite pleasurable. So you've sort of optimized for the now in retrospect you haven't, but it doesn't matter because each individual time unit was enjoyable. Daniel Kahneman's point is that he optimizes for the other thing and the other thing is something that in the moment can be sort of either enjoyable or not enjoyable, but in retrospect you're glad that you did. So he is much more living for sort of a reflective life Whereas Daniel Gilbert is living for a little bit more of a hedonics side of a life and I think about this a lot and I wonder whether It doesn't really matter if you enjoyed it at the time if you regret it in the future future you lives with the decisions Have passed you for way longer than present you gets to enjoy them right and it kind of almost like I have this 30th written on my I'm frigid, it's written on the whiteboard in my frigid home, which is what would you tomorrow want you today to do?

1:14:05Mm. And that, just projecting a little bit out into your future self, I can't think of a single decision that you would make whilst optimizing for your future self that would be the wrong one. But I can think of many decisions where if you said what would you tomorrow want you today not to do, but you today is happy with doing it. That's like a fucking recipe, That's what you did for 20 years. And look at how that turned out. Right. The last chopper out of Saigon.

1:14:38It's not something I'm proud of. You know, there's not even if it was fun at the time for me, whatever I was telling myself at the time, that wasn't the person I ever wanted to be when I was young. and that's not the person that I would be proud of, particularly now having a daughter, it's funny after that article in Megavai. I mean, it's got probably half a million reads now and like Ben Shapiro read it on his platform and his voice, which is very strange experience for anyone to have. I imagine writing about what I thought you are and then having Ben Shapiro read it in his voice. was traumatic.

1:15:26So then the thing about like that going viral is publishers will reach out to you and say, oh, is there a book here? You know, what kind of book? And one of the things we were tossing around an idea of was there's many more stories where that came from. There's a lot of, the thing that people kept saying to me was, I don't know if my daughter should read this.

1:15:53I want And we were like, that's a great name for a book. I don't know if my daughter should read this. And then I wrote the whole proposal. I was pregnant while I was writing it for my daughter. And by the end of the proposal, I was like, yeah, I don't know if my daughter should read this. Like it seemed like a good idea, but it feels now I'm not sure that I wanted out there. What is it that's, oh, personally about you? Yeah, there's because there's a lot, I mean, the thing about a lot of my stories out there, a lot of it. I've been, you know, there's a lot of, I've done a lot of self -disclosure publicly for reasons that are my own, but Mary Harrington and I have had very interesting discussions about, you know, self -disclosure and when it's appropriate.

1:16:40Yeah, she did your job. Yes, yes. And she thinks I need to be under a burqa, no, digital burqa. Put it on, Brigitte. She's probably right. But there's a lot of, there's a lot of, look, it's like for, there's a lot of things that I could talk about and people have offered me money to write about that I have not shared for many reasons. And those experiences would probably be things that people could relate to. And there's something, the thing that I get from writing those pieces when there is a big reaction is just, it's obviously cathartic for people. And I really, that's the, it really was one of those moments with a divorce piece and the slip.

1:17:32He's like, this truly is the power of writing. It is wild when you get that kind of like emails emails emails people telling you their whole story comments It's it's in it's humbling and inspiring and it's very It really does reveal to me the power of Sharing how powerful sharing your story can be this is how 12 step works It's one alcoholic sharing their story with another alcoholic and it helps them say I'm not alone this person got better. I can get better. I think you and I are both in the same like Our I feel like we both really are Passionate about helping people get out of their own way It's like I say to Maggie all the time my cousin if you can if I could do anything it would be to help people laugh and get out of their own way That's all I want to do in life and sometimes in order to get out of your own way you've got to be able to to look at those painful, traumatic, horrible parts of your life and laugh at them and also process them.

1:18:41You've got it, you can't just like, you know, they say in sobriety when you get sober, getting sober is like going 90 miles down, 90 miles an hour down the freeway and then slamming on the brakes and all the garbage from your car comes flying forward. And it is that process of just like, oh man, all the wreckage from my past is here and you kind of have to sift through it. And then you can drive your car again, and it's, but it takes that sorting through all that wreckage and trauma and stuff you've been running from is very, it can be tough. This is why people, this is why I do think therapy is good.

1:19:22I know there's a big, like not all of it is good, but I think that it is, it has its place. So it is sweating really hard and I don't know. I'm just, I do that kind of reaction as always. I don't know. I find it very, it's moving. You know, it's like seeing, having people feel like they can share that, those dark memories and regrets. I mean, regret. The biggest thing that was interesting to me in the pushback against the slut piece was how it was like they rejected the premise of regret. And I don't know if this is an American thing, a modern Western thing. Have you talked to anybody on your podcast about this kind of concept of regret?

1:20:16People seemed offended by the idea of regret and just like a, you know, like a philosophical level. So I've had, there's an entire book, I think it was Daniel Pink wrote a book about regret. It wasn't about, it wasn't about the sort of social signal that it plays, the role that it plays for people, essentially kind of how it feels. It didn't talk about anything to do with that. So two questions. What was it that you regretted? Like what was the regret, or what were the regrets at the core of you in reflection? And then why did people have a problem with the word regret? What was their offense at the word regret?

1:21:02Well, answer your second question first. I think we live in a like, yellow culture more than ever before. And you and I address this even, just this eternal now. There's, I do believe shamelessness is a massive part of our culture and many kind of everywhere. And there's tied into regret is the sense of shame. I think they're definitely interconnected and people really don't wanna feel shame. They also are like, I did that. It made me who I am. Yolo, like, you only live once. I'm not gonna regret something I did because it was interesting. I think regret is, it's like a tonement. What I regret is how little I valued myself.

1:21:56I regret how little I valued my body and how little I valued my essence that I gave away so freely to these men. I regretted that they could say that I slept with them just so callously and crudely. And I regret that I really didn't... But I really underestimated the damage at that cot that I knew it was doing damage to me and I regret ignoring that I was damaging myself repeatedly. And you know, people get, I recoil and people are like, oh, she slept with a lot of people she's damaged. And I recoil, but I also understand like I get, I don't think they're saying the same thing, but I do think there's something that happens when you are on like a spiritual level.

1:23:07I felt like I was damaging myself. Like it was doing something to my soul. Now I'm not speaking for everyone. Go hold up if that's what feeds your soul and you make you feel alive and you feel like sharing your essence with the world is like you feel great about that. I'm not judging or anything. I think that those, that's where my sense of regret came from was really looking at that girl and wishing that she loved herself more. And there's not much, I don't know that there's much I could have done to affect that because of my background and upbringing and things that had happened prior, but there were many times, I mean, I was in rehab at 19.

1:23:54I could have probably tried to stay sober. I mean, granted what happened after rehab was even more insane than anything that happened before. So it's kind of a miracle. I didn't do heroin again and kill myself. But again, like the other thing that drove me crazy about the divorce piece is that I, people were coming at me and they were saying, you are saying stay and be a sort of relationship. of my husband was like, why are you getting so mad that people are misrepresenting this? Who cares? Something in you is being triggered by them saying this to you. And I said, you're right. And it's that my mother married a guy who I kind of allude to in the piece who was mentally on crazy and we lived in a situation that was, I went from a marriage that probably shouldn't broken up so quickly to a marriage that should have broken up and didn't.

1:24:52So I was, it was like, I paid the cost of both of those decisions and I didn't write about that decision. I don't know the second half of my experience of my parents divorced and I don't know that I will fully, not probably until I'm in my 60s or something, but that it was so bad that it almost made me feel, I think that's why that piece felt so visceral because it overshadowed even the divorce. You know, it was like, oh, my parents got divorced. And then it was an actual crazy shitshow, the likes of which I can't even get my mind around and it made the divorce seem like no big deal. So that was why that's where I think I get, you know, it's always like the things you don't write.

1:25:48Some of the things I shared in the slut piece, there was one that I didn't want to share, but it was an anecdote that to me was so indicative of like my slut rock bottom because it was in so I've had many rock bottoms Chris so many My slot rock bottom was this text I received from a guy who was like I love you baby and then directly after it wrong person like it was It was people read that and they were like that was like a Punch and the gut. I'm like imagine getting that From someone that you're sleeping with it was like That was, it really was like my slot rock bottom. I really had to start a whole new recovery after that.

1:26:37Because even after getting sober, I was still sleeping with like guys that didn't really value me. Yeah. Yeah. And I didn't necessarily want to put that in there, but I was like, no, this is like, Like this is the crux of it right here. I know I'm not alone. Why did other mothers say that they didn't want their daughters to read? There's often fathers, but I think because they weren't sure if they were old enough, you know, they were like, their daughters were generally late teens or early twenties. I'm like, look, if they're in college, they should read this. If they're late teens, they've seen way worse online than anything that you're going to share with them.

1:27:23If they're middle school, yeah, that would be something that I don't know. Depending on how mature they are, how like some, you know, me at 13 was different than like a kid who had good parents at 13. So there was a certain level of wholesomeness that got lost in the divorce. This is another thing that people were like, they were like, get over it. You're an adult. Stop being mad. And it's like that... Regret is very powerful if you use it to motivate. But when you get sober, there, one of the reasons people have such a hard time staying sober is because of the massive amount of regret that they have to face when they get sober.

1:28:12The truth about what they did to their life, their body, their money, their family, their, the list is fucking endless. And it is much easier to just drink again than have to face any of the damage that you caused to yourself and everyone around you in society. And God forbid if you're one of those people who killed someone when you were drunk driving or even, you know, the very extreme versions of that. There is, it's a miracle anyone gets sober truly if you, in order to face a lot of that stuff. The hardest thing for me to face was the loss of potential. Just years spent drinking at a bar, not going to, not finishing college when I wanted to go to an Ivy League.

1:28:56Not, a lot of that was my own decision, which I can completely take responsibility for. A lot of it is like, well, what could have been, because my husband and I do say the moment, both of our lives changed and we became, my husband and I met recovery for people who don't know. which is probably everywhere. Because why would they know that? So we both talk about how the moment our lives, we were both like kind of shy, good kids who got straight A's and then became drug addicts. And it was when our parents got divorced that that shift happened. That we can, if you said point to the moment in your life that everything changed.

1:29:38So, you know, a lot of parents who read that piece, They don't want to hear that. They're rightfully. I wouldn't want to hear that either because you get divorced. You're telling me I'm going to condemn my child to being a future drug addict? Yeah, a lot of people were like, these are just neglectful bad parents. I'm like, the other thing that really struck a chord with people was becoming like a third wheel in both your parents new relationships because your parents get, you know, some parents are good and they'll be like, I'm not going to introduce new people. I also don't think that's the majority.

1:30:12People get lonely. People are people I hate being alone. And if you've been in a marriage, you're not used to being alone. And it's like they'd start dating. And my first book that I ever wanted to write, that I still want to write, was when I was writing for Playboy, it was like this whole round of men were getting divorced, but they got married pre -social media and dating apps. And they were like baby seals being entered into the like shark infested waters. These guys had no idea. They changed boys. Guys, she doesn't love you. She wants your bank account information. She's got an only fans like they just had no idea.

1:31:03It was wild. They'd be sending me these things. So yeah, I don't know. It's been like, I think I'm suddenly kind of very fascinated with regret and why there's this weird aversion to it. That reaction to something, whenever there's a reaction to a piece like that where I'm like, oh, I didn't know that this, it's interesting. It's like throwing sand on some strings, tripwires, you didn't know existed. I wonder, so certainly one thing that comes to mind is in an era of psychological fragility because especially for women, the role models for young women say that the world is, the world should fold around you and you are already as perfect as you are.

1:31:54That any challenge that you come up against is because of the men that don't believe in you or some sort of structural problem that's going on, and you are immutable. You are already formed brilliantly, and the world is mutable and it should fold around you. That's in contrast, male self -development that says, the person is mutable and the world is immutable. The world's not gonna change, pick yourself up by your fucking bootstraps. Like David Goggins and Jocka Willink, your way through it. I think that what that causes is a bunch of fragile and sometimes narcissistic women, because it's literally like the source code dynasticism because it says if there is ever a challenge in your life, it is not your fault or your responsibility.

1:32:34It is because of something and someone out there externalizing that sense of that locus of control. So if you're to say to someone, something that you did that you can no longer change was something that you shouldn't have done. You shouldn't have done. Not because of the structural inequity, not because of Trump's America, not because of fucking whatever, that was you, you did a thing. That's uncomfortable to deal with. That's a really, really uncomfortable realization because you can't go back and change it. You have to transcend and include that. You have to integrate that into your being, okay, who am I?

1:33:13Now that there's this bit of me, and if you've not gotten used to disagreements and overcoming challenges, this is a big challenge because you can't unfriend yourself. right? It is you. It is a part of your story. You know, you have some some friend and they've they're they're they went out with someone else or they slept with your boyfriend for ex boyfriend or whatever it is it's like they're out of your life. That's you to you now you have to deal with that. And the only other alternative is to fingers in ears. No, no, no, that wasn't me. You don't understand. I'm allowed to there is never anything that I should be responsible for in that way.

1:33:49And I wonder what the equivalent male response, if there was an equivalent piece that could be written about men, I wonder what difference we would see in terms of regret and how guys and girls weave that into their stories in different ways and how they integrate it. Well, what do you regret? I want to try regret. I regret not being a better boyfriend to a lot of the previous girlfriends that I was with. So, just a classic party boy, and I had these girls that just worshipped the ground that I walked on and were so loyal and great to me. I just didn't, I wasn't me, I didn't do anything like fucking horrendous to them, but I did not treat them at all with the level of sort of respect that I would want to, and that I'm proud of, and I wasn't proud of that.

1:34:41I wasn't proud of the person that I was when I was behaving in that way, disregarding, and not playing games, but understanding, being able to play games in a way that didn't seem like I was playing games. Right. All of this sort of manipulation, much of which was me wanting to have my cake and eat it too, wanting to have the sort of validation and the support of a woman whilst not needing to give necessarily the type of commitment that they wanted from me. So I could keep my options open so on and so forth. Right. Like a good bit of that was in there, not being more open -minded, to differing points of view, you know, very sort of working class northern, northeast England mentality.

1:35:24People born, work, live and die in the same 50 -mile radius and that's kind of all that it is. And I always knew that I was a little bit of a square peg in a round hole, but I just accepted that as like the buy -in to life. I'd been an outcast in school, I'd been an outcast in the I had a sport that I'd played to a very high standard, and then I'd gone to university, and I'd made myself into an outcast because I ran the events that other people went to. So even though I was no longer outside of the hierarchy, I was on top of it. I was still not in the middle of it. Right. So I was very much an observer, and I never used that being an observer and extracting yourself from those sort of social trends.

1:36:13and the ebb and flow that happens when you kind of in a scene is a really beautiful opportunity because it gives you distance, it gives you enough distance to be able to go, okay, so what's going on over there? Do I want to be like that? And maybe I moved, maybe I moved even more quickly in a thousand universes, this is the quickest moving crest that you could have found. That would have been, and maybe that's true, but I still, I look back and those are two things that I think about. Like, I wish that I'd become I'd been a better guy to the girls that I was dating in my 20s because they deserved it.

1:36:47And I can be that. And I much prefer myself when I am that. So I've got like, I regret not being a gentleman. I don't know whether I could have been a gentleman, but like gentleman's regret rather than such a threat. And yeah, and then movies. Yeah. That's interesting. It reminds me of like why I think men's and women's meetings and recovery are so important. A lot of, and why I really loved women's meetings, particularly when you're talking about like the sex stuff that comes up in recovery, which there's a lot. Someone, I was thinking about this because I was talking to a man about what it's like in the men's meetings.

1:37:25And it seems from what I can tell that men's sexual regrets and recovery are often more aligned with what you were just talking about what they did to women or didn't do or or how they treat it, and with women, it's more of what happened to them. You know, it's like a... Reflects the sort of typical protagonist versus gatekeeper relationship that happens with much of sex. You know, it is typically men that are the ones that are being forthcoming and the women that are being the recipients. Even the women that are very open and in a party or whatever, there's still that dynamic is still the one, the way that it goes.

1:38:04but it puts a different kind of onus on each participant. Right. It's a different kind of regret in that way. Shame, yeah, yeah, it is. It's completely different. And there is, it's like Camille Paglia. Like there's just something about being you're literally being penetrated by as a woman. There's just something inherent. You're inherently the one who is being submissive, and many and most always. And I think that dynamic automatically, like you said, puts the onus in the shame in different places when you're like a lot of men are like, oh, we were both really drunk. And like, did she really want to sleep with me?

1:38:53And we were both hammered and consenting, but I don't know if she was like even into a whatever. It's just, I think men have a, yeah, there's a lot of different stuff that comes up for men, I feel. And this is the problem with trying to, the difference between trying to make men and women equal and trying to make men and women the same. Because in this situation, the challenges that men and women face on average for like everything except for the super outlier cases aren't the same. And the regrets aren't the same and the risks aren't the same. You know, for a woman, it's her like health and her body and for a man, it's his reputation and his livelihood in that way.

1:39:43And how many bodies is worth, how many livelihoods and people try to do this equation transaction thing about who's got it better or who's got it worse. And I think fundamentally it's just a misguided way to try and do social arithmetic. You can't balance this equation. It's two separate conversations. And ultimately, if the conversation is who has it worst in dot, dot, dot, you're entering the frame of this discussion in a zero -sum mentality. You're trying to work out who has the upper hand in this regard so that we can rebalance the scales because you've assumed that there is a finite amount of empathy available.

1:40:24And it's not. It's not a zero sum view of empathy. There is empathy available for both, we can have empathy for fucking everybody that's gone through difficult things. You can just bestow it in a targeted manner. And the empathy that you give to women that have regrets from what they did earlier on in their life and men who have regrets for what they did earlier on in their life is different. It's done in different ways. Yeah, this is the reaction to like the long house. And the learned what that was. It's essentially like that. Yeah, as it's been explained to me, it's like the HRification, the feminization of the culture.

1:40:58And the idea that kind of what you were mentioning just about how the world has become more attuned to the, you know, the shaped around the female and the males are being told that they're toxically masculine and that all of the rejection of these masculine energies and tropes and whatnot. But the, the, what I think is the most damaging thing that's come out of that is the whiny bichiness of men in reaction to it. It's like don't just like hearing a guy complain about how women have it so easy. It's so unattractive. It's like, okay, well, are you playing any role in this? Are you the kind of partner a woman would want to be with?

1:41:56Are you improving your life. Guys who are out there killing it are generally not whining about women at, you know, they're just not. It's fundamentally something I never hear from men who are killing it in their life. I don't hear them whining about women having too much of a share of the culture. You know, it's like, it's a very weird unsettling thing to hear. And I see a lot of men in the manosphere kind of capitalize on this new victimhood mentality amongst males. And it's so much, I'm sorry. And again, this is very sexist of me, but it is so much uglier a man than women. It's just like we're used to the damsel and distress.

1:42:48Women, that's been a trope forever. like the women being a victim, rescue her, whatever. I'm not saying the feminization of the culture, I believe me, I've written for Playboy, you know where I stand on this. If you're listening, I have pushed back against the excesses of me too. I've been just absolutely demolished by the left for often not being on the right side of this conversation. But I will say, as I've seen it progress, It really is creating this ugly victim culture and men that I find so unappealing. It's the same in some ways as right wing snowflakes, constantins, gripe in a way. You're the ones that posited yourself as the capable mastery I'm going to go and get after the conquer thing.

1:43:44And that's fine. Like if you want to go for that, if you wanna do the Andru Tate, Stan Cosplay thing, suite. But you don't also get to have the other side. Or if you want to be more like George from the Tin Men, who says it's okay to talk isn't enough for men to improve their sort of psychological barriers around opening up around emotions. We need to be more integrated and holistic and all the rest of the stuff. That's also fine. Like both of these positions are fine. But like the trying to have both, Well, does this really cool quote from Timothy Leary? I've never had chance to use it, because I always got scared, I was gonna get shouted at.

1:44:18I'm gonna use it with you. He says, women who seek to be equal with men lack ambition. And I think the reason I was scared about that is that obviously, obviously, men as below women, which doesn't redress the problem of fucking making men and women equal. But I certainly think that women who seek to be equal with men lack ambition. If you replace that to be the same as men, Absolutely. There are so many fucking things that both guys and girls can do that are better than each other. Yeah. You want to play... I came up with this idea that the soft bigotry of male expectations, which was after that article came out saying that women did just as much big game hunting as mended, ancestral bullshit.

1:45:03The way that the analysis was done was wrong. The way that the categorization was done was right. These people basically fucking created a fantasy and then reused it into a journal. And it's not right. But why, what is it like how fucking un -feminist of you to say that the things that women did of the collection of berries, nuts, the gathering and the child rearing, you've just baked into your subconscious that, oh, because that wasn't done by men, and that's not the thing that's most important. You've got a pedestal. Like built into your world frame, is this assumption that the thing that men do is better?

1:45:45Right. This is so much of the stuff when you hear this talk about whiteness. It's like you guys sound more like white supremacists than white supremacists do. Baked into so much of these assumptions is like, you're putting whiteness on this pedestal And it's bizarre because it's just not true. Like that whole thing about, I think I was very, I was always like the girl, maybe it's just a contrarian in me, but when I was learning about feminism from my English teacher in high school, I was very much like, why don't, like this seems like a trick. Why do we wanna leave the kitchen? Why can't guys open the doors for us?

1:46:32This feels like a trap and she would be like, you're gonna set women back hundreds of years. But I do, I don't know why it's so bad to, like why is it bad that we're different? That's the weird, it's like a weird thing. And by the way, from what I can see, from all of my cousins and friends, and everyone I know of my age, younger who has children, the amount of hand -and -ness of this generation of men in the house with the kids is so completely different than what I was even, even I was raised with. The guys are so, it's so like a beautiful ballet with most of the families I know where it's working, where both people are kind of working, And even if she's not working, he's still around with the kids and wants to be around with the kids and knows how to fucking Bipers.

1:47:34Yeah, they're not, it's not, it's, when I hear these things, it's either from, you know, men who are probably rightfully better because they come from like a bad divorce and that happens. Like I think a lot of the women in my in reaction to my divorce piece were Probably the women who took everything from those guys because they wanted to fuck their yoga instructor like that Happens a lot a lot more than we probably know or think The but for the majority of people that I hear talking about these when I go Enter into the online discourse about this stuff I'm like, none of these people have kids.

1:48:17None of these people are married. None of these people are in relationships. None of these people have kids. They don't know anyone who has kids. They're not hanging out at barbecues. They're not doing normy things with normal people. They're talking about whatever it is, the second shift that women do. And it's like, well, have you seen this? So I wonder how much of this is the emotionally broken, and disattached, anxious and fucking avoidant guys, just going, ugh, I have to be able to do better, surely than the previous generation. The bar was set so fucking low, and I have access to all of this content and all of these books and these podcasts, and I imagine I haven't delved into this yet, but I imagine that there's just an endless subset of parenting podcast that you can listen to about child rearing and about the best ways to let them cry out a not and what the rest of us.

1:49:14Oh yeah, I mean, it's not on fucking milk formula. I don't think you need it though. Like most of the parents, I don't know. There's I just I think yeah, you could really easily become a neurotic parent, but the I think parenting is actually much more intuitive than you know. I actually think we're reverting back to, I don't know how normal that like 1950s, the man doesn't change the diaper. He goes to work, he kisses his kid, he reads this paper. There might have been a time that that was normal and perhaps because men had to just do more physical labor all the time, but generally prior in America, there was a large portion of time where many people were working on farms together as families, huge percentages of the country.

1:50:08And you saw your kids all the time. They went to a schoolhouse where it was all intergenerational, not just separated by age. And this was something I was talking to Dr. Camille Artis about who was just on my podcast, just how the kids now play with kids their age and it's less intergenerational. And we all grew up with our cousins and we were all playing with different age groups and we learned how to take care of the little ones and get beat up by the big ones. And everything is now, you know, like these club sports instead of just pick up games in the neighborhood. So you're again, just with the same age instead of random age groups playing.

1:50:47And I see a lot more normal life here in Texas than I, you know, there's a lot more just kids playing out and out at all ages and they're running around and and the parents are all getting together at the pool and having bar like a barbecue and it feels like that I don't know if it's like the dad's trying to do better or if it's just a function of the fact that so many it requires two people to work now just because life is so expensive you often need two incomes that The division of labor is just naturally, it's going to require two people to help around the house and help with the kids. But I don't know.

1:51:35I mean, the men just seem more involved. They just seem more hands on. All of my friends are. All of my friends that I'm friends with, fucking sat in the gym with Chris Bumsteads, and we're not talking about, this is guys a world champion bodybuilder five times over. We're sat there on camera and he doesn't want to talk about anything to do with his sport. All he wants to talk about are the weird baby bucks that he's reading and we managed to find a way to make sure that there's no parabens in the bedding of the cot of this thing. And do you know how hard it is to get like genuinely well -sourced baby fucking lotion that doesn't come from whatever whatever toxic thing?

1:52:15I'm thinking, I mean, it's great. Well, congratulations, but it's not what... When I look back at Arnold doing pumping iron or Ronnie Coleman from like the late 90s, that's not what I'm expecting. And there is definitely that kind of a pivot. Bridget Fettasy, ladies and gentlemen, Bridget, let's bring this sucker home. Where should people go? They want to subscribe to your criminally under -subscribe podcast and follow you on everything else. Yeah, go to my YouTube channel and subscribe, please. It's a bridge of it's like what is it? Fantasy. Yeah, just fantasy that the name is Bridget fantasy and Go to fantasy .com and that's my sub stack.

1:52:58That's where lots of writing comes out everything's there so if you want any of my writing and get just get on my list and I post when I'm gonna be doing stand -up I'm opening for Dave Landau and and Colin Quinn soon. Yeah, it's just nuts. So Keep up with me. It's all happening. I'll be coming to see you soon when I get back to Austin. Yeah. Thank you so much for having me.