#820 - Bridget Phetasy - “Sleep Your Way To Empowerment” Has Failed Women
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Hello friends, welcome back to the show. My guest today is Bridget Phetasy. She's a writer, comedian, and a podcast host. We all have moments in life we wish we could undo, but when an entire generation has been told that all life paths are acceptable and there is no judgment, no matter how you spend your time, what happens when those people grow up?

Expect to learn why Bridget regrets her 20s, her controversial thoughts on divorce, why people have such a problem with the word regret, why everyone still feels the need to manage emotionally immature boomers, if Bridget misses using cocaine, the current state of the culture war, what will happen to the anti-woke mob if there are fewer things to push back against, and much more. This episode is brought to you by...

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modern wisdom. But now, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Bridget Phetasy. You seem to be able to publish your way into chaos or some sort of furor. It's about an annual cadence, I think, that you're able to do this.

It's not intentional for the record. It is always surprising because I publish all the time. So it's always surprising when the pieces that take off are always somewhat surprising to me because it feels like when I write them, I feel a little bit self-conscious about them because they're a little more personal and they're a little more navel-gazy and...

It's not, you know, journalism or looking outward and analyzing the culture war in some kind of smart way. And like a lot of my my, you know, I don't know. They're not co-workers like the people who contemporaries. Thank you. Like they do. I it's so it's always wild to me. And and yeah, a year ago, I think almost exactly. It was the slut. I regret being a slut.

And then just recently, it was about how I just was like, divorce never ends. Again, these are two things that feel like very common sentiments and not statements that aren't, I don't think they're like, oh my God. But for some reason, people go bonkers. Your groundbreaking policy implications of divorce might not be great and being a slut might not be great. Yeah.

Yeah, it's not these these feel like statements normies make. And then for some reason they don't. When you make them in in public, they suddenly take on this weird life of their own. But there I don't I guess the different thing about the divorce piece was that I was talking about how even as an adult and it's something I didn't have to really I don't think I had a child when the last time we talked. So it's something that I never even had to consider until I had a child.

And I've seen my siblings deal with it, just how divorce reverberates into your life forever, even when you have children, because now there are all these different sets of grandparents and you're trying to juggle and they won't often be in the same room together. And you're still managing the emotions of your parents, even 20, 30 years after they got divorced. And again, I don't think this is something...

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

It's it's forever. And don't take it lightly, because I think there's been with the normalization of divorce. I am Gen X. So my generation, I believe, has experienced the most divorce of any of the generations. And the divorce rates actually going down. I'm not exactly sure if that's because marriage rates are also going down, but.

I think there was this idea that kids are resilient. They'll be fine. You don't need to stay in a loveless marriage. And I'm not talking about abuse. A lot of people were saying, oh, this is you saying you should stay with a psycho or an alcoholic, which I would never advocate for. And it's, I say that in the piece and it's just a willful misinterpretation of what I'm writing about. I'm saying, okay,

Okay, maybe you're having problems and you have kids. I don't care if you don't really have kids, particularly if you have kids. Try and make an effort because they've done a lot of studies on the...

you know, intra familial, like intra family conflict, particularly among parents. If the parents are yelling and screaming, which is abuse and they're telling each other, they heat each other and they want them to die. Obviously that's bad for a child. If the parents are in a somewhat loveless marriage, but they can coexist peacefully, then,

Even if it might not be better for the parents, it's still generally what they've found better for kids in the long run. A lot of people might argue that and people who have, you know, a lot of people came out and said, like, I wish my parents had been divorced. But I think just from a practical, it's easy to say that if you've never had to experience the actual practical, just logistics of dealing with parents who are divorced, which are a nightmare.

I wonder if we're going to see more of a pushback against divorce by the kids of Gen X, given that they're going to be the ones that will have experienced it firsthand more.

The kids of Gen X. Yeah. So your generation's children. Our generation. I don't know if our generation is the most divorced. I think we experience the most divorce because because the boomers are the highest generation of divorce and they actually keep going up because they're on marriages two, three, four.

So they seem to be increasing with time. I think our generation did experience a pushback, but mostly we were much more aggressive.

worry about getting into marriages in the first place or didn't really take marriages as I look, I've been married before. So I'm not saying this is some I'm on my second marriage. My husband and I, my first husband and I never had kids. So when you get divorced and you don't have kids or property or anything, we shared nothing. I think we shared a bank account.

it's very easy. It's like a more complicated breakup that you have to involve a state in. It's not, you can be like, all right, well, that didn't work. Bye. And that was pretty much how that went. If you have children, it's a very different thing and property and, you know, lots of extended family and friends and it's, it's completely different. So I think my generation, um,

And what I realized even from my very simple first divorce was that I underestimated the seriousness of marriage because my parents got out of being married very quickly with five children. It just seemed like they were like, all right, well, we tried. We went to one therapist and they had five kids under the... And I do think people try and

it's tough because you, everyone's going to tell themselves that they needed to get divorced. So,

My whole point in my piece was just don't lie to yourself. Like, don't lie to yourself that it's going to be very hard for your kids. And it's never going to end in terms of it being not necessarily challenging. It's not like I'm still, you know, crying about this at night, but it's still going to have like a, even these adults who get divorced don't necessarily get over it in their lifetime or suffer consequences of it. It's not just their kids. Right.

But that's all. I was just like, don't lie to yourself. But, oh boy. What are the unforeseen consequences of divorce? Or the ones that might not be immediately apparent to people? I think...

It really depends on how the divorce goes too, because some people can do this conscious uncoupling where they're still friends and they manage to pull it off. I would not say it's the norm. Normally when people are getting divorced, there's animosity between the two people who are divorcing one another and it can get ugly. My generation was a generation that, you know, there was testifying in courts and,

against one parent or another. And I think that those are the kinds of consequences that you don't foresee in terms of how, how it's going to play out in the long run in terms of your relationship with your children and how that affects their view of marriage. How, I mean,

I mean, if you enter other non-biological people into the equation, now you're talking about exponentially raising the chances that you or your children in particular are going to suffer some kind of abuse, whether it's physical, emotional, sexual. And that's another thing that a lot of people don't foresee or underestimate or downplay. A lot of people in my mentions were like, I had a great stepfather. It's like, cool.

That's not necessarily the regular great. Good for you. I'm glad that that was your experience. Statistically, it doesn't always go that way. And I think another unforeseen consequence is just how

I mean, maybe they do foresee it, but you get so much less time with your kids and your grandkids because now their time is split between... Instead of coming home for Christmas to see everyone, you're choosing between a parent or you're going every other or you're splitting the vacation in half. I mean, some of the arrangements for kids sound absolutely bonkers, switching every other week to

to a parent's house. And by the way, the thing that people don't really take into consideration either is that when you're a family unit and the kids come home, if you're good parents, you're going to try and put aside whatever is going on for the sake of your children so that they're not, they're coming into a relatively stable environment.

emotional environment. If you're a kid going back and forth between two households, you're, as the kids these days would say, you're kind of code switching constantly depending on what you're walking into because you haven't been with that parent. You don't have that long, you know, daily knowledge that you have of their ups and downs and where they are. You just enter into wherever they are. Maybe dad had a bad week at work and

And he's fighting with his new girlfriend that you haven't met yet, but you sense that they're around because you're not an idiot. And then you go back home and there's a lot of still jealousy that occurs between people when they break up and the other people start dating. And I mean, it's...

It's tough on kids. It's just tough. I hope I will. It's something my husband and I both come. And then when you both come from divorce, when you're in a marriage, another unforeseen consequence. You get divorced. You think, oh, my kids are resilient. They'll be fine. Whatever. They marry someone who's also divorced. Now, again, exponentially, the time is split. Like my daughter has four sets of grandparents. You know, it's...

It's great for her in terms of toys, but it's crazy trying to juggle like, all right, what are we doing for Thanksgiving? We want her to know these people. They're her blood relatives and they love her, but it would be a heck of a lot easier if it was just two households and not four all over America. And this is a very common situation for families.

many, many people, apparently. I mean, my comments were heartbreaking on that piece. What did you learn? I learned a lot. I mean, really, what happens with these pieces that go like this, the same thing happened with the slut piece. And I think I've been doing this long enough that I know the rhythm of it. It's like the first wave. The reason they go big is you kind of get this

it's just a wave of people going, thank you for saying this. Thank you. This was my experience. People were crying, saying they were in my DM saying that they were, that it made them cry because I talked about what it was like to,

As a child of divorce, when my parents got divorced and when I wrote this, I'm telling you, Chris, this is the fastest I've ever written anything in my life. I'm generally, I can bust out. I write all the time. So, but this poured through me. Like it was like, I was being channeled. I was like, it was wild. I sat down, I looked at my husband. I'm like, I really could have written a book about this. An entire book. I, and I,

For my column in Spectator magazine, this was for the magazine, and then they put it online, which is the kind of system. And I think something gets lost in that medium translation, which we can talk about later. But this, you have 800, I have 850 words. So it's not much space to cover every nuance and intricacy of divorce and everything.

And I just wrote it. And when I was writing it, I really felt like I was there. Like that kid's... I could smell my grandmother's house where we used to rummage around and look for spaghetti, raw spaghetti that we would eat. And...

I think people really, it triggered all of those memories for other people, for lack of a better word that's been destroyed. It really was something that, you know, I was kind of joking with my husband. I'm like, I would put, I would have put a trigger alert on it, but Gen X doesn't mess with that, that kind of nonsense. And I learned just how many people had a similar experience.

experience or worse. The other thing that's unforeseen that I really have heard stories of and so many people in my mentions were talking about how they never knew where their father was buried because they had a bad relationship with the stepmother. And then when their father died, they didn't even know it.

Nor do they even know where their father is buried. I read some version of this story more than once. Can you imagine? I mean, it's like... This sort of weird stepmother is the gatekeeper to your relationship with your own biological father now. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And this is very common. Very, very common with these weird dynamics with people. And then...

a lot of people were just talking about this, the being shuffled around, being moved around, split places, always never really living kind of out of a suitcase or a bag. Never. And then the other one that was really interesting was people whose parents were like the kind of multiple marrying people and half siblings, step siblings. You know, this is, this is very, very common. Um,

And I think it, so that's always the first wave. Same with the, I regret being a slut piece. It was just lots of people like, thank you for saying this. I've always felt this way and didn't know how to say it. And, and it does last forever. And I, I'm still dealing with my parents and how they won't get together. You have a recital for your child and you want the parents to be there, but they, one of them won't come because they hate the other one's guts or whatever. And,

And not to mention financially, resource wise, how you're splitting resources that would just go down one bloodline. Now it does not go that way at all. It puts I think it puts kids that the kids at a disadvantage in so many ways.

The other thing that happens then is you get the after the initial like, thank you for saying this is the the blowback, you know, then then it's like and it's funny because it in an X now you can see it in the the way you can respond to a tweet. So the original tweet, by the way, it's psycho that this went viral because it was it.

During the post-debate insanity where we weren't sure if we were going to even have our president the day before the 4th of July when everyone's kind of checked out, I woke up, didn't have coffee, was like, I wrote about divorce thinking nothing of it. And then my friends were like, you're trending on Twitter, your piece, for like two days. It was bonkers. So that is just unexpected and weird. And people usually now I've noticed on Instagram

formerly Twitter, they will constantly

comment, if they kind of are like, thank you for writing this. I agree. Oh my gosh. The pylon comes in the quote tweets. That's where you start seeing the like blowback. The blowback is like on top. The quote tweets are people who are listening and don't know. You can take a tweet and basically quote tweet it. So you would kind of editorialize or write your own perspective on top of the tweet. And so that's...

It's like creating a whole new tweet out of, instead of being in the comments, you're essentially starting your own new conversation. It also pushes it to your audience specifically as opposed to the originators audience. Exactly. Lining that up. So you, you,

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

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

How is how is my experience like? It's OK that my experience wasn't reflected in it. Everyone looks at it and they say they have to be like, well, my experience wasn't reflected in this piece. Yeah, exactly. You didn't address my nuanced experience of this.

decoupling my marriage because now there's this thing like nesting where you keep the house and the kids don't have to shuffle back and forth. But the parents have like

crash pads elsewhere essentially so one parent it sounds insane to me I don't know I was talking to Louise let me give you a step up from that so Neil Strauss came on a couple of months ago Neil had his first kid with his first or second wife I think and

Then they divorced after they had the kid. He tried a lot of things. He'd worked through the stuff, but still they just couldn't make it work. And he came to the conclusion that they are great co-parents, but terrible husband and wife. So they are having a second child as a divorced couple. So they've divorced. Okay. They have one kid. They're no longer living together, but they know that they're good at co-parenting. So they decided to have a second child now. Okay.

I'd never heard that before. No, I've never heard of that. I've heard a lot of the stories I did hear from writing this piece were parents who got divorced and then got back together, which is also wild. This is something I've heard. They get divorced. They have other marriages in some cases, and then they end up back together later in life, which would be wild as an adult child. Especially if you have the kids. It's like, oh, right, so you managed to have me

leave my my own for a decade and then just as i was sufficiently old stuck after myself you get back together and everything's hunky-dory yeah and then the kids are supposed to just be like cool yeah we'll just forget that happened yeah that's another common story that the

And Louise Perry and I were talking about this and she was saying, you know, if you can like co-parent like that, if you can, if you are cool, you know, okay enough to share a house and nest or whatever they call it, it seems like you should be able to work the marriage out. But I don't know, maybe it is just like new sex. People just get bored and want new sex, you know, want to have new relationships.

new partners and stuff like that. Though the interesting thing about, go on, you were going to say something. No, I was just more interested in, I was trying to think about all of the different types of pushback. So I imagine there must have just been endless and endless. Well, because everybody, as I mentioned, you're going to reverse engineer a justification. We all justify things.

What we do, you know, especially some. Yeah, especially you're going to reverse engineer the reason you got divorced, even if it was a minor kind of lame reason to get divorced. And people have really stuck it through. The other thing that was interesting was people who thought about getting divorced and said.

saw through infidelity, all kinds of really gnarly things, addiction, stuff that people really hung in there in the marriage for the kids or for their own marriage. And on the other side of it, felt stronger, better than ever, and grateful that they made that effort, although it was extremely hard and

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

Men, I think, are oftentimes, they don't really realize how bad it is for a woman until it's too late. Because by the time a woman's like, okay, fine, I'm done. I've been asking you for seven years to do the X, Y, Z. I've been saying to you, we need changes. You haven't heard me. And then a woman says, fine, I'm done. And the guy says, no, no, no, no, no.

no, no, no, no. I'm going to change, but she's done like for a woman to even get to that point. It's so, I think it's hard for her to go back. So I feel like this is maybe just a difference in the way the sex is. That's definitely one of the things that is kind of counterintuitive, you know, being accused of being a part of the manosphere whilst being wholeheartedly rejected by it and me rejecting it. One of the common talking points is that,

Women are sort of so quick to move on, especially from marriage, and they'll happily take 50% of everything that you've got and all the rest of it. And just my real world touching grass experience of chicks in relationships is that they will put up with a lot of shit. Yeah. They are...

blindly bound to guys that are not worth, not in the first instance, getting through the door, they may have quite high standards, but fucking hell, once that companionate system sets in and women are kind of attached,

I've seen women stick with friends and partners and stuff that I would have expected all matter, like a ton of reasons for them to have left, both fair and unfair. And yet, like a William Wallace soldier in a war that just stood there with blue face paint on going, hold, hold, and they're doing it. And I think, God, look at the resilience that these chicks have against a shitty relationship.

How far, and again, some people are much more fickle than others. How far must these divorces have gone to have broken that level of attachment?

And I do. I agree. And I don't think that you can say in one argument, they will say women can't sleep like men. They get attached easier and then say, oh, they're fickle and they'll just leave you and take 50%. It's like it can't really be both, guys. It can't. Alex Datesyke put a post out the other day talking about how

There's an odd correlation between the people that deny that IQ is either real or useful, but also believe that EQ is real and useful. They're like...

I love those. It's very true. I know I'm stupid because I don't care about IQ and the people who are the people who are it's like the only time I ever hear about IQ. It's from super smart people and they're kind of obsessed with it. And then my husband and I were gone.

Yeah, like my husband and I were joking. We're like, we're idiots because we I was like, do you know your IQ? He's like, no, I've never cared about that. I'm like, yeah, I don't know my either. That's how I know I'm an idiot because everyone who's super smart knows their IQ. What no one that's over 16% body fat knows their body fat percentage either. And it's only guy it's only guys that are dialing in for this summer in Ibiza to wear a tiny pair of swim shorts that actually know their body fat to everyone else. It's just weight.

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

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

married non-mothers than ever before. Right. Which means that a lot of the people that will be talking about this discussion with you will actually be stood on the sidelines talking about divorce as someone who isn't invested in the childhood portion.

So they'll be saying, well, what's the problem with divorce? The relationship, we can break things out kind of like you and your first divorce. And it seems to me that for you, one of the, well, pretty much the entire argument is not built around what it does to you and the partner outside of kids. It's exclusively, how does this impact the relationship of your kids and then your grandkids going down? So I just wonder how many people that

commented are not really players on the field of this particular type of the game. Does that make sense? Yes. I think a lot of the pushback came from women, as I was saying, who are coping, but I do think they had kids. And I think it's, again, this is where my husband was like, this is people who are feeling guilty or ashamed, or they feel like you're attacking them for making this decision, which I'm not because I'm

nobody knows a relationship other than the two people who are in the bed. You just don't. And I'm not going to... People can... People were like, oh, you're such a busybody telling people they can't get divorced. I'm like...

That is the it's the like lack of reading comprehension for some reason that drives me the most bananas. I can handle the pushback. I can handle the criticism. I can handle all of that. It's the like willful misrepresentation or complete lack of just reading something that's not even being stated that drives me bananas.

And my husband always has to like talk me down off the ledge and be like, do not. He's like, Bridget, this is also part of it. Like being you married the right guy. You married the guy. He's just so he's so well-adjusted.

You know, he's like not impressed with fame, not impressed with he's just not. He's malice always says this about him. He's like, he just doesn't. He's like, I know your husband does not suffer fools online or off. He just is. He's very good at looking at something extremely rationally, even to sometimes my own irritation. And.

And kind of pointing out that this is a lot of projection. And everything online is projection. So much of it is just, we're just, we do it by...

And I try to be very conscious of it, but so much, most of everything online is just people projecting their own stuff as a reaction to whatever they're taking in. I feel personally attacked by that particular thing that I just read. I need to defend my position. I remember when I was first getting into personal development stuff and I was driving to some northern town to go and run one of our club nights with a few thousand 18-year-olds all fingering each other and drinking Alco Pops.

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

sphere, this very sort of neat round ball, and that's us. And as long as it's nice and neat and round, we don't need to worry about lots of other things. But if one of the assumptions that we have about the world is proven to be untrue or misguided,

well, what does that do for the rest of my worldview? What if my perspective on immigration and on birth control and on how to raise a child and on politics, what if all of that comes crumbling down too? And I always remember that to the ego, it is tantamount to destruction. And I think that

Yeah, a lot of it is defensiveness. And how many times... You see this, you feel this, like you read something and you go, ah, this visceral need to defend yourself against this unseen jury, which doesn't even exist. But you just want to not have your worldview besmirched or pushed back against because it's scary for what that means for the rest of you. I remember that this is essentially what happened to me and how I kind of got caught in the crossfire of the culture wars is

And why I say that I was a libtard because I really I was never like an ideologue or an activist. I didn't go to college and and and have some worldview installed in my head. I I just was like, I'm a Democrat because they're better the end. And I never had to think about it. So like I say, I kind of fell asleep in a self-driving car when I came to college.

analyzing anything. And when I started writing for Playboy and my audience was very red-blooded American male, I was mouthing off about a school shooting and the gun debate. And my audience, my new audience of red-blooded American males who are generally armed or at least have more knowledge about this, they came at me so hard and I stopped and I was like, you know what?

I know nothing about this. I actually know, I don't know how to hold a gun. Aside from knowing nothing about guns, I don't know. I couldn't identify a gun. If you put three guns in front of me, I couldn't tell you which was which. I don't know how hard it is to get a gun in California. I knew nothing. And that was really the beginning of me being, me recognizing, it was like a house of cards. Like, wow, if I'm this uninformed and

and ignorant and spouting my mouth off about this what else 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 like what a wonderful experience for you to go through and to do that through work as well though you know to have done this thing and then for it to have sort of cracked you open and you go fuck on the other side of this is maybe a better version of my worldview

In many ways, I have grown up in public in a small way. It's not like I'm a child star. It's more like...

When I started, this is the story I want to write. It's the book I want to write because I don't think I'm alone in this happening either. Just this idea of being quote unquote red pilled. But I do think a lot of people have started questioning everything that they were kind of raised to assume or brought up to believe, right?

Right, left, center, whatever. We just live in that. I think it's actually good until you start going down rabbit holes and you become so open-minded your brain falls out. This was something that you see with hippies and liberals, but now you see it everywhere. And in many ways, when I started this, I was writing at Playboy. I was single. I was...

I had just got sober, which I was saying to my husband, we talk about this a lot. I look at people who are really certain of their beliefs, their ideas. They, they come into the world with this sense of authority. I'm like, do you think that we aren't, 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, I've been, I,

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

I know the name. It's like Zahan. Z-A-H-A-N. He's been on Rogan. He's been on my show. He's been on Sam Harris. Me?

Sam and Rogan, and maybe tons of other people that he's been on too, all said the same thing about him retrospectively, which is he's the most certain man that I've ever met. Ever, ever. Nothing's caveated. It's not, it seems to be this way. It appears as though projections would suggest that it's, we know what's going to happen with fertilizer rates in Russia by 2050. And this is what's happening with the Chinese military in and around the South China Sea and blah, blah, blah. And I'm like,

I'm fucking blown away by this guy. The level of knowledge that I would need to reach in order for me to be that certain about anything would be so obscene. It would be so high that I think, well, he has to know what he's talking about. My inherent uncertainty and self-doubt is so strong that

that in order for me to speak with his degree of sort of certainty, I would have to know everything. So of course he knows everything. And it's the same for, but there is a bit of like, huh,

I feel like there's reliability in caveating and in a little bit of sort of standoffishness too. So yeah, that'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 about

comparing those because I can't be bothered to do the first-hand research myself. But a lot of the predictions are a little bit further out ahead. So it's stuff to do with like 2030, 2050. So they may bear fruit, but I mean, he's got a rabid... His candor was amazing. His insights are fantastic. But when you're talking about predictions, you know,

What is it about the retraction always gets less attention than the activation type thing? Right, right. I wonder, we had this idea the other day. How cool would it be if someone made a website where all of the biggest online commentators, whether it's independent media, mainstream media or whatever, that all of their predictions and proclamations were held like on chain somehow? So you could go back and see what did...

like fucking John Stewart actually say during COVID. What did Piers Morgan actually think during BLM? Because so many people are trying to retro their own 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. And he was so ardent about,

So like people that haven't got the vaccine need to lose their jobs. We need to lock them in their house. Masks, masks, masks, masks. And now, so he got all of the sort of lib...

empathetic social justice acclaim of being part of that when it was cool. And now that everyone retrospectively kind of sees that as really cringe and a bit stupid and anti-science, he gets all of the acclaim of being like, yeah, you know, COVID, we're absolutely overblown. It's not really where we need to be at. Biden's stupid and Fauci and blah. You go, dude, you don't get to... At least issue a fucking...

I'm an idiot and I will always be an idiot for having done that thing if I want to now be on this side of the fence or I get to stick to my good. You don't get to do both things. Yeah. Imagine how frustrating that is for people like myself who have been screaming that Biden is not fit and being told that I'm a right wing bigot for it. And now the entire left wing media apparatus is saying it.

it's infuriating because there were real social costs for many of us pushing back against gender, pushing back against COVID lockdowns, pushing. So, so for people to kind of be able to retroactively, we were just, I was talking about this with someone recently about how,

It's very strange the time we live in because the Internet is forever, and yet we live in this ever-present now of the Internet. So even though there's records of everything that people have said, you can still just be as shameless as

As you want to be just blowing with the wind because it doesn't matter. Just blow. It's so strange to me. It's so strange. Many people are much more blowy than others. Yeah, that's that. I've always had such a and I'm sure that I'm I've been I've fallen foul of it myself, too, but I've always had such distaste.

for people that have been ardent about one position and then in retrospect have taken another one. If nothing else, because you took up my precious life, my mind share, reading that bullshit four years ago that you now don't agree with. You should apologize to me. Apologize to me and my sanity. My favorite one of this was, you remember when those tanks were going through Miami South Beach?

And everyone was like, this is it. Martial law is going to be enforced. People are going to be held in their homes at gunpoint. And it was just it was like tanks going from one place to another place. Like it was just fucking in a military convoy of some kind. There was a photo in the UK of a single squaddy army guy walking down a street of London that was forwarded many times on WhatsApp.

I've just got a message from my brother who says that the army are going to be, and they're going to hold people in their houses at gunpoint. None of this happened. Fucking global health passports, vaccine, all of that stuff. Like it was, Klaus Schwab is coming tomorrow to insert this directly into your back passage. This, you're going to be boofing it for the rest of your life. This is exactly what's going to happen. And I go,

Well, what happened to all of that? Yeah.

If you're going to blow with the wind, that's fine. But admit the fact that you were wrong publicly and it's good for your soul. It's fucking good for your soul and it's good for your ego because it's not that scary to go, hey,

I held a position about hormonal birth control. I thought it was pro. I learned a bit of stuff. I said, no. I held a position about what I thought should be done for gene embryo selection, for polygenic risk scores. I didn't think that it was a good idea. Now I'm like, okay, I've changed my position on that too. I thought epigenetics was bullshit. I learned a little bit more publicly. I was like, look, I'm fucking...

And I'm not the savant of this. I also don't have that many interesting ideas. So I guess I don't need to apologize for that much, but if you're going to be gregarious, you need to fucking say sorry every so often. Yeah. I wrote a piece, uh, 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 elevators open and the shining, which was not true. And so that clip went viral and I was very wrong about that. I've,

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

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

I thought for sure. I thought for sure. And in 2022, there would be a red wave because I thought people would be pushing back against COVID. Turns out people kind of agreed with their governments and what they did. And they were very focused on the now, which at that moment was Roe v. Wade being overturned. And I underestimated, as I was joking on Dumpster Fire last week, how much bitches love abortion. Yeah.

No one watches Dumpster Fire, Chris.

Everyone can go and subscribe to Dumpster Fire. Everybody should because it is actually amazing the crap we've been getting away with for like five years on that show. So you're flying into the radio. Going back to something that I've seen you talk about, this is something that I'm really, really bad at. I'm unbelievably bad at working out what the standard normie Western person knows.

Or more specifically, what do I know and take as well spread fact that most normal people that aren't terminally online don't? And to say that Joe Biden's mental state is a revolutionary insight worthy of news. To me, it was so old, it was cringe to bring it up.

Yeah. 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 that would be me. Of course, that's. But you know what I mean? Like, it's like, OK, we get it. Like, but it's it's easy. It's clapped. But it's kind of old hat. Right. Like, it's not fucking revolutionary. Biden's Biden's not been. But then you're like, oh, but it is display for the whole world. You go.

Maybe I was being a bit too judgmental about that. Maybe we did need to push the narrative a bit more. So one of the things that I love about doing stand-up and why I'm so happy to be back doing it is you get that tangible normie feedback immediately. So I've been doing this joke about how I'm a geriatric mommy.

I had a baby at 43. I'm like this. 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 your uterus moved to like a retirement, Florida, whatever. So, and then the next joke after that is essentially, I'm like, no, they've changed it to something less offensive, which is geriatric birthing person. And I,

You get it. But normies don't get it. I'm like, oh, so now it's just me finding out who's terminally online and an audience. I don't even think I can do the joke anymore. There's one guy over the far side that's got a Reddit account. Yeah.

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, the common, the knowledge of the common. And it is absolutely not. I've done that joke in many different venues and it's like, I, I just have to abandon it or it's going to be something that I need in five years time. Exactly.

Exactly. It's one of those things where I'm like, wow, people don't know that this is like a thing. I'm too online. I just spend too much time online. I asked Mike Solana about this, and I know that you've been tracking this too. I'm particularly interested in kind of what the main factions of the culture war are now. Like what...

happens to the anti-woke fewer woke things to push back against because most normies are kind of in agreement with your position in any case and this sort of

first mover advantage of having crazy social justice positions has sort of been lost quite a bit, I think. So how do you conceive of the troop positions on the map of the culture war? Yeah, that's interesting. I've been talking to... There's a lot of journalists who have been asking me my opinion about this as well, who are trying to write articles and figure out... Because Austin does seem to be, in particular, this...

It's a weird, like very liberal, but also it's, you know, there's this kind of joke about Austin, keep Austin weird, but keep Austin surrounded. So it's still in Texas. It's still surrounded by red. There's a lot of people who I think are moving who are purple or red, you know, center, right? I'm not sure because...

I do think in many ways, comedians held the line throughout a lot of this. There was a moment where it was like, oh, you know, you can't say anything. People, it was very strong. There was a strong push to silence people. I think Elon taking over X has, you know, been another massive win for being, it's just opened things up a lot. They're in the past four years,

There's a lot more infrastructure for that dissident left or whatever you want to call it, anti-woke. They've created their own institutions. You see Trigonometry in UK. You see Free Press in the United States. Glenn Greenwald is Pivot. All these people kind of perfectly timed their pivot out of...

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 the normie view is better represented. Shane Gillis is massive. There's the kill Tony, 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 are. I don't want it to be like, oh, you can still say retard and gay. But it's there is something kind of free speech about. I'm like, some of us never stopped.

That was the, the word retard and gay, that was the like absolute waterline. Yeah. And the Overton window has dipped below and back out of it a couple of times. It's sort of been doing this for a little while. He's like, okay, this week it's okay. Next week it's not so good. So I think that seeing those trends, like there's definitely been a reaction. I also think that

When you have things like Roe v. Wade being overturned, then you get this. I don't know. It's weird because I feel very much like this in this politically homeless, like just there's a recent study that somebody was posting online about how they're finding more and more independents are polarized and that they hate both sides.

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

Yeah, I can sense which way the vibe is shifting. And that's why I was so surprised when Trump didn't win. But I again, that 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 power.

a lot of media from all sides. I'm still surrounded by a certain type of person. But now it feels like more and more, 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. 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 of people that are stuck in that middle ground at the moment because you need to be...

a very sort of particular kind of person to be, I stand with Joe, but he's our guy. Either one of them. He fucking introduced Vladimir Zelensky as President Putin, referred to Kamala Harris as Vice President Trump. You know, it's almost like someone's writing these lines to purposefully do this.

And yeah, I mean, conspiracy theories about what the Democratic Party is trying to do abound. There's lots, it's very easy. It's a very easy position, a totally costless position to say Biden's not fit for duty. Absolutely costless position. And you can do that and then still end up voting for him. Yeah. Because you can say, look, you know, he's better than the other guy because the other guy. Totally. Orange man bad. So total like dickless position to hold largely from that. Okay, well, what are you suggesting that happens?

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. Now, it's not like a negative. At least now, most of the Biden supporters are simply anti-Trump supporters. Right, right.

which fair enough. I mean, I kind of find it darkly amusing to watch everyone have to defend either one of these people. And there's just such an irony to me that if they weren't running Biden, the nonstop thing they'd be harping on other than everything else about Trump would be his age. If they had somebody, that's what's so funny to me. 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 fucking, is it a 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 will get a bit of pushback. If you talk about a woman's age with regards to the way that she looks, like that'll get you a bit of pushback. But if you talk about somebody being old or being past it or whatever, you're

It seems to kind of just be like, yeah, we know that that's the way that entropy works. And I'm slowly declining toward the grave and it'll happen to all of us. And it's kind of like a weird type of equality in a way that everybody is going to be. It would be like if everybody started off white and was going to end up black. You're like, well, you know, you were racist when you were younger, but everybody's going to be black when they get old. So you know what I mean?

You just reminded me of this guy came up to me after my set and he was really drunk, I think, on drugs. And he's like, I'm moving back to Japan. He was this Asian guy. And we were talking to him. 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 so 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. So round out for me, your position or whatever your predictions are on what do people who have made a career out of being anti-woke do when there's no more, or there's a less woke to push back against?

Like me? No. I've always... It's funny. I talk about politics, but I really consider myself more of like a lifestyle brand because I just want people to get out of their own way and laugh while the world is burning and not take themselves so seriously. My little Buddha quote today, my daily reading was all about reducing self-importance, and I just love that. It's like...

that there's, there's something so humbling about having to constantly do that. And I do think putting yourself out there in the way that you, you do. And I do your con. I don't know, maybe you're not, but I'm constantly humbled by something dumb. I said something dumb. I find that I used to believe or say, I mean, you're, you're in the arena. Um, I'm not really humbled by how much smarter all of the guests are than

I mean, yeah, I'm permanently the most stupid person in the room, which which is that's good. Hasn't been able to get out of the way too much. I don't know, actually, because, again, I think a lot of it is dependent on like what I guess what happens if Trump wins. You know, they they can kind of go back to that would be the best case scenario for Trump.

The anti woke because the left will go back to being completely insane. So I actually think it's been a worse time for people pushing back against the woke during Biden because they it's like people forget.

I don't forget because we documented it all on Dumpster Fire. People forget how bonkers everybody went during that time. And so is your insight that people on the left don't need to throw Hail Marys if they're the ones that are in power? But if they aren't 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, they're really, they really went, it really broke a lot of people's brains. It really just, they, and it will be, I don't, I'm not sure people are quite prepared for that if, 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? Will all these things that the anti woke people had to kind of fight against?

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

institutional movement and power around the 70% of people who are fed up with all of this, which is like the exhausted majority. I think there's room for that if they can look to the future of what America needs.

Which is, I do believe, some of these institutions that haven't been completely captured. You just need someone who can call balls and strikes. Like, anyone, please.

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

I would hope that they would... That's what I would hope, is that you would kind of go... It wouldn't just be anti-woke. You know, 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, you know, totalitarianism and authoritarianism and wanting to control everything and everyone, that's just human nature. I think you have to...

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

Run in America. I would 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 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. Our lord and savior, RFK, didn't manage to get on the debate ticket. Did you have him on? No, I haven't. I've been to a few dinners with him and stuff, and he seems like a nice guy. I wonder how different that debate would have been if RFK had been on stage, the only guy with the worst voice than Biden. That's interesting. I'm glad he wasn't, though.

Because we couldn't actually... It would have dampened down pretty much everything that was exposed from that. Yes. I think people needed to really see... I don't know. I still think he's going to run, and I have been wrong about everything. And so now I just assume that whatever I assume is going to be wrong, and I assume...

Trump will probably win just based on the vibes. But I I'm guessing Biden's going to 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.

Sonny Bunch actually said the most absurd situation will be if Trump wins the popular vote and loses the electoral college. Fucking dancing through the final days. We all right. We never got to talk about your slut piece. We never got to talk about that article. For the people that didn't get to read it, can you explain what that was?

I mean, it's a piece I had been trying to write for a long time, probably since 2017. And I posted it last August of 2023. So it was quite some years in the making, just trying to express it. But when Louise Perry wrote her book about the, um, the chaos,

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 like very academic, like, you know, conversation. And it always, it felt a little bit to me, like those sluts over there, you know, like those sluts over there, they, they regret it a little detached, you know, that like academic,

academic detachment from something that they were all discussing. And I was like, slut here, reformed 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, 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, um,

tape up my broken soul and demoralizing experiences by telling myself that I was empowered and I was this boss bitch and I was 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.

Until I was in a loving relationship with a man who respected me and truly I feel like loves me unconditionally in many ways and in a way like I've never really experienced. And until I... It's like the... So another recent experience of this was having a child. And I couldn't... I didn't realize how much of my...

Like, I'm childless. I'm free. I don't have the family. Like, I don't have the trappings of a family. How much of that was just me coping with not having this experience of being a mother because you can't know that experience until you're actually a parent. So it's weird because what you don't know, you don't know. And I think the sad thing for me about...

telling women that they can kind of sleep their way to empowerment. I think the most upsetting thing in the wake, like the comments and what I heard from that piece was there is, there's a, there's a high body count and I'm not talking about the body count. The manosphere talks about, I mean, like,

There's a lot of dead women in that wake in terms of women who got addicted to drugs, women who lost themselves in ways that were irreparable. I heard really harrowing stories from people about their moms, about women who really got lost in 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 top. I would want to write everything. And my editor would be like, don't burn more than one. When I was writing a weekly column, he'd be like, don't burn more than one topic in one column. You write a weekly column, save it. That piece I wrote specifically about my own experience of being a slut, why I regretted certain things about it. And...

There was a lot of other stuff that I didn't cover. It's hard for me to extract how much of that behavior was tied up in drinking and drug addiction, because those two things, what I have slept with, a lot of the people that I slept with, had I not been drunk or drinking or whatever, they

Probably not. Which direction is the arrow of causation going? Right. And then it's like you try and bury those feelings of shame and waking up and not knowing where I was. So how much of it is...

People rightfully pointed out, I don't drink and do drugs, and I love being a slut. And maybe it was just that you were a drug addict, drunk, and that was the real problem, not the sluttiness. But I was... Yeah, this is kind of like a chicken or an egg. I was sexually...

I was raped when I was like 18. So how much of that hyper promiscuity comes on the heels of sexual abuse? How much of it is just like, I'm also just a sexual person and it was never really healthy.

I was raised Catholic, so there was a lot of weird stuff put in my head about sex before I even had sex. And I felt ashamed of it before I even had it. It's like, how do you untie all these things? But again, this was another thing where I wrote about it and just 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, I think you always kind of know when you're lying to yourself somewhere, somewhere. And I think that I would just smoke a bowl or drink or

Go. And was some of it fun? Absolutely. This was something. What's her name? Ayala? Ayala. Ayala. Thank you. I always mispronounce her name. Ayala was kind of, we ran into each other at this event and she was like, how much of this was just you reverse kind of engine, like,

just remembering this differently now that you're a mom and you have a kid. I'm like, well, I started writing this essay long before I was even in a relationship and had a kid. So that's kind of a moot point. But there are some that I don't regret. Like there are some, you know, like sexual dalliances that were fun and flings and I don't regret them. But the vast majority of them are

Yeah, I'm mad that they ever. You know what also pointed this out was going on Rogan. When I went on Rogan, the amount of men who reached out to me and were like, I was like, oh, I fucked that girl. I was like, oh, my God, this is fucking horrible. This is a problem with our being a slut who goes on Rogan. Suddenly, every fucking dude you had a one night stand with crawls out of the woodwork.

I can been there. The women in your DMS four and a half foot table away from being Eskimo brothers with Joe Rogan and fucking nearly did it. Oh God. It was, that was, that was really the, the worst part of, uh,

going on that going on that podcast was just the guys were like yeah I was like said to my mate I fucked her once I'm like I regret this you're like an island just above Antarctica that's been claimed in the mid 1800s or something see that over there went there so the Aayla thing is interesting obviously she did that post about her birthday did you read that one

I heard about it at a Shabbat dinner of all things. For the people that don't know, Ayla's a sex positive sex worker. I don't know whether you can have sex negative sex workers.

That would be amazing, though. I want to write that sketch. The sex negative sex worker. I'm sure there's someone who has a kink for that out there. Yeah, yeah. I mean, you hate it. And I think she had sex with maybe 50 guys on her birthday or something like that. And did this big flow chart. There's a big flow chart that she put together that explained...

Like who came in who and like how many people? Oh, it was. So, you know, the question there is it seems ridiculous.

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 lots of casual sex thing. Like that would be so, but another interesting thing, I remember there's two, two definitions of happiness, both done by Dan. So Daniel Kahneman and Daniel Gilbert. So Gilbert talks about how if you 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, you might not be particularly proud of the things that you've done and you might not say that it was time well spent. Each individual moment was quite pleasurable. So you've sort of optimized for the now. In retrospect, you haven't, but it doesn't matter because each individual time unit was enjoyable. Then Daniel Kahneman's point is that he optimizes for the other thing. And the other thing is something that in the moment can be sort of either enjoyable or not enjoyable, but in retrospect, you're glad that you did.

So he is much more living for sort of a reflective life, whereas Daniel Gilbert is living for a little bit more of a hedonic side of a life. And I think about this a lot, and I wonder whether it doesn't really matter...

If you enjoyed it at the time, if you regret it in the future, future you lives with the decisions of past you for way longer than present you gets to enjoy them. Right. And it kind of almost like I have this, it's written on my fridge. It's written on the whiteboard in my fridge at home, which is what would you tomorrow want you today to do? And that just projecting a little bit out into your future self is,

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. Last chopper out of Saigon. It's not something...

I'm proud of, you know, there's not even if even if it was fun at the time for me, whatever I was telling myself at the time, that wasn't the person I ever wanted to be when I was young. And that's not the person that I would be proud of, particularly now having a daughter to, you know, be.

It's funny, after that article went mega viral. I mean, it's got probably half a million reads now. And Ben Shapiro read it on his platform in his voice, which is a very strange experience for anyone to have. Imagine writing about what a slut you are and then having Ben Shapiro read it in his voice. It was traumatic. So then the thing about...

That going viral as publishers will reach out to you and say, oh, is there a book here? What kind of book? And one of the things we were tossing around an idea of was there's many more stories where that came from. There's a lot of... The thing that people kept saying to me was, I don't know if my daughter should read this. I want to share this with my daughter, but I don't know if she should read this. 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. It seemed like a good idea, but it feels now I'm not sure that I want it out there. What is it that's... Oh, personally about you? Yeah, because there's a lot... I mean, the thing about...

A lot of my story is 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. The digital hijab. Yes, yes. She thinks I need to be under a burqa. No, a digital burqa. Put it on, Bridgette.

Um, 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, those,

Those experiences would probably be things that people could relate to and would... You know, there's something... The thing that I get from writing those pieces when there is a big reaction is just... It's obviously cathartic for people. And I really...

It really was one of those moments with the divorce piece and the slut piece. I'm like, this truly is the power of writing. It is wild when you get that kind of emails, emails, emails, people telling you their whole story, comments. 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 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 look at those painful, traumatic, horrible parts of your life and laugh at them and also process them. You can't just like

They say in sobriety, when you get sober, getting sober is like going 90 miles an hour down the freeway and then slamming on the brakes. And all the garbage from your car comes flying forward. And it is that process of just like, oh, man, all the wreckage from my past is here. And you kind of have to sift through it. And then you can drive your car again. But it takes...

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

I don't know. I find it very... It's moving. You know, it's like seeing... Having people feel like they can share that, those dark memories and...

I mean, regret. The biggest thing that was interesting to me in the pushback against the slut piece was how it was like they rejected the premise of regret. And I don't know if this is an American thing, a modern Western thing. Have you talked to anybody on your podcast about this kind of concept of regret? People seemed offended by the idea of regret on just like a philosophical level. Yeah.

So I've had, there's an entire book, I think it was Daniel Pink wrote a book about regret. It wasn't about the sort of social signal that it plays, the role that it plays for people, existentially kind of how it feels. It didn't talk about anything to do with that. So two questions.

What was it that you regretted? 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?

Well, I'll answer your second question first. The the I think we live in a like YOLO 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 now.

And there's tied into regret is this sense of shame. I think they're definitely interconnected and people really don't want to feel shame. They also are like, I did that. It made me who I am. YOLO, like you only live once. I'm not going to regret something I did because it was interesting. You know, I think regret is...

It's like atonement. What I regret is how little I valued myself. I regret how little I valued my body and how little I valued my essence that I gave away so freely to these men. I regretted that they could say that I slept with them.

just so callously and crudely. And I regret that I really underestimated the damage that that caught. 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 I get that.

I don't think they're saying the same thing, but I do think there's something that happens when you are on like a spiritual level. It felt like I was damaging myself. Like it was doing something to my soul. Now I'm not speaking for everyone. Go hoe it up if that's what feeds your soul and makes 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 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. I could have probably tried to stay sober. I mean, granted, what happened after rehab was even more insane than anything that happened before. So it's kind of a miracle I didn't do heroin again and kill myself. But again, like

The other thing that drove me crazy about the divorce piece is that I people were coming at me and they were saying, you are saying stay in an abusive relationship. My husband was like, why are you getting so mad that people are misrepresenting this? Who cares? Something in you is being triggered by them saying this to you. And I said, you're right. And it's that

My mother married a guy who I kind of allude to in the piece who was mentally ill and crazy. And we went, we lived in a situation that was, I went from a marriage that probably shouldn't have broken up so quickly to a marriage that should have broken up and didn't. So I was, it was like, I, I paid the cost of both of those decisions and I, and I didn't write about that decision. I don't know if the second half of my marriage,

experience of my parents' divorce. And I don't know that I will fully, not probably until I'm in my 60s or something, but that experience

It was so bad that it almost made me feel, I think that's why that piece felt so visceral because it overshadowed even the divorce. It was like, oh, my parents got divorced and then it was an actual crazy shit show, the likes of which I can't even get my mind around. And it made the divorce seem like no big deal. Yeah.

So that was why that's where I think I get, you know, it's always like the things you don't write. Some of the things I shared in the slut piece, there was one that I didn't want to share, but it was an anecdote that to me was so indicative of like my slut rock bottom.

Because it was in sobriety. I've had many rock bottoms, Chris. So many. My slut rock bottom was this text I received from a guy who 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 in the gut. I'm like, imagine getting that from someone that you're sleeping with. It was like,

That was it really was like my slot rock bottom. I really had to start a whole new recovery after that, because even after getting sober, I was still sleeping with like guys that didn't really value me. Yeah. Yeah.

And I didn't necessarily want to put that in there, but I was like, no, this is the crux of it right here. I know I'm not alone. Why did other mothers say that they didn't want their daughters to read? It was often fathers, but...

I think because they weren't sure if they were old enough. You know, they were like their daughters were generally late teens, early 20s. I'm like, look, if they're in college, they should read this. If they're late teens, they've seen way worse online than anything that you're going to share with them. If they're middle school, yeah, that would be something that I don't know, depending on how...

mature they are or how 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 the regret is very powerful if you use it to motivate.

But when you get sober, one of the reasons people have such a hard time staying sober is because of the massive amount of regret that they have to face when they get sober. The truth about what they did to their life, their body, their money, their family. The list is fucking endless.

And it is much easier to just drink again than have to face any of the damage that you cause to yourself and everyone around you in society. And God forbid, if you're one of those people who killed someone when you were drunk driving or even the very extreme versions of that. It's a miracle anyone gets sober, truly, in order to face a lot of that stuff.

The hardest thing for me to face was the loss of potential. Just years spent drinking at a bar and not going to college, not finishing college when I wanted to go to an Ivy league, not some of the, a lot of that was my own decision, which I can completely take responsibility for. A lot of it is like, well, what could have been because my husband and I do say the moment both of our lives changed and we became my husband and I met in recovery for people who don't know. Um,

Um, which is probably everyone listening, because why would they know that? Um,

So we both talk about how the moment our lives, we were both like kind of shy, good kids who got straight A's and then became drug addicts. And it was when our parents got divorced that that shift happened. We can, if you said, point to the moment in your life that everything changed. So, you know, a lot of parents who read that piece, they don't want to hear that. They're

Rightfully. I wouldn't want to hear that either because you don't you take you get divorced. You're telling me I'm going to condemn my child to being a future drug addict. Yeah. They're like a lot of people were like, these are just neglectful, bad parents. I'm like, the other thing that really struck a chord with people was becoming like a third wheel in both your parents' new relationships.

because your parents get, you know, some parents are good and they'll be like, I'm not going to introduce new people. I also don't think that's the majority. People get lonely. People are, people hate being alone. And if you've been in a marriage, you're not used to being alone. And it's like they start dating. And my first book that I ever wanted to write that I still want to write was when I was writing for Playboy.

It was like this whole round of men were getting divorced, but they got married pre-social media and dating apps. And they were like baby seals being entered into the shark-infested waters. These guys had no idea. The game's changed, boys. Guys. Guys.

She doesn't love you. She wants your bank account information. She's got an OnlyFans. Like they just had no idea. It was wild. They'd be sending me these things. So yeah, I don't know. It's been like,

I think I'm suddenly kind of very fascinated with regret and why there's this weird aversion to it. You know, that reaction to something... Whenever there's a reaction to a piece like that where I'm like, oh, I didn't know that this... It's interesting. It's like throwing sand on, you know, some string 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 should fold around you and you are already as perfect as you are. That any challenge that you come up against is because of the men that don't believe in you or some sort of structural problem that's going on. And you are...

immutable you are already formed brilliantly and the world is mutable and it should fold around you that's in contrast to male self-development that says the person is mutable and the world is immutable the world's not going to change pick yourself up by your fucking bootstraps like david goggins and jock are willing to go way through it i think that what that causes is a bunch of

fragile and sometimes narcissistic women because it's literally like the source code to narcissism because it says if there is ever a challenge in your life, it is not your fault or your responsibility. It is because of something and someone out there externalizing that sense of that locus of control. So if you're to say to someone something that you did that you can no longer change,

was something that you shouldn't have done. You shouldn't have done. Not because of the structural inequity, not because of Trump's America, not because of fucking whatever. 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

Like you have to transcend and include that you have to integrate that into your being. Okay, who am I now that there's this bit of me? And if you've not gotten used to disagreements and overcoming challenges, this is a big challenge because you can't, you can't unfriend yourself.

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

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?

What do I regret? I regret not being a better boyfriend to a lot of the previous girlfriends that I was with. So just a classic party boy. 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, it 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

that I would want to and that I'm proud of. And I wasn't proud of that. I wasn't proud of the person that I was when I was behaving in that way, disregarding and not playing games, but understanding, being able to play games in a way that didn't seem like I was playing games. Just all of this sort of 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 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 people born work live and die in the same 50 mile radius and you know that's kind of all that it is and I always knew

that I was a little bit of a square peg in a round hole, but I just accepted that as like the buy-in to life. I'd been an outcast in school. I'd been an outcast in the sport that I'd played to a very high standard. And then I'd gone to university and I'd made myself into an outcast because

I ran the events that other people went to. So even though I was not no longer outside of the hierarchy, I was on top of it. I was not in the middle of it. Right. So I was very much an observer and I never used that like that being an observer and extracting yourself from those sort of social.

and the ebb and flow that happens when you're kind of in a scene is a really beautiful opportunity because it gives you distance. It gives you enough distance to be able to go, okay, so what's going on over there? Do I want to be like that? And maybe I moved even more quickly in a thousand universes. This is the quickest moving crest that you could have found. And maybe that's true, but I still 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 twenties because they deserved it. And I can be that. And I much prefer myself when I am that. So I've got like, like I regret not being a gentleman. I don't know whether I could have been a gentleman, but like gentlemen's regret rather than such regret. And yeah. And then moving. 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 and,

particularly when you're talking about like the sex stuff that comes up in recovery, which there's a lot. Someone, I was thinking about this because I was talking to a man about what it's like in the men's meetings and

It seems from what I can tell that men's sexual regrets and recovery are often more aligned with what you were just talking about, what they did to women or didn't do or how they treat it. And with women, it's more of what happened to them. You know, it's like... It 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, but 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 in here. You're inherently the,

one who is being submissive in many and most always. And I think that dynamic automatically, like you said, puts the onus and the shame in different places when you're... A lot of men are like, oh, we were both really drunk. And did she really want to sleep with me? And it's

And, you know, we were both hammered and consenting, but I don't know if she was like even into it or whatever. It's just, I think men have, yeah, there's a lot of different stuff that comes up for men, I feel. And this is the problem with trying to,

um the difference between trying to make men and women equal and trying to make men and women the same because in this situation the challenges that men and women face on average for like everything except for the super outlier cases aren't the same

And the regrets aren't the same and the risks aren't the same. You know, for a woman, it's her like her health and her body. And for a man, it's his reputation and his livelihood in that way. And how many...

bodies is worth how many livelihoods and people trying to do this equation transaction thing about who's got it better or who's got it worse. And I think fundamentally it's just a misguided way to try and do social arithmetic. You can't balance this equation. It's two separate conversations. And ultimately if

if the conversation is who has it worst in dot, dot, dot, you're entering the frame of this discussion in a zero sum mentality. You're trying to work out who has the upper hand in this regard so that we can rebalance the scales because

you've assumed that there is a finite amount of empathy available. And it's not, there'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, the reaction to like the long house. Um,

I never learned what that was. It's essentially like the, as it's been explained to me, it's like the HRification, the feminization of the culture. And the idea that kind of what you were mentioning, just about how the world has become more,

attuned to, 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 bitchiness of men in reaction to it. It's like, don't,

Just like hearing a guy complain about how women have it so easy. It's so unattractive. It's like, okay, well, are you playing any role in this? Are you the kind of partner a woman would want to be with? Are you improving your life? Guys who are out there killing it are generally not whining about it.

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 thing

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 in men than women.

It's just like we're used to the damsel in distress. Women, that's been a trope forever. Like the women being a victim, rescue her, whatever. I'm not saying the feminization of the culture. Believe me, I've written for Playboy. You know where I stand on this. If you're listening, I have pushed back against the excesses of Me Too. I've been just absolutely...

demolished by the left for often not being on the right side of this conversation. But I will say, as I've seen it progress, it really is creating this ugly victim culture in men that I find so unappealing. Yeah.

I mean, it's it's it just the it's the same in some ways as right wing snowflakes, Constantine's gripe in a way. You're the ones that posited yourself as the capable mastery. I'm going to go and get after the conquer thing. And that's fine. Like if you want to go for that, if you want to do the Andrew Tate Stan cosplay thing. Sweet.

But you don't also get to have the other side. Or if you want to be more like George from the Tin Man 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 this stuff. That's also fine. Like both of these positions are fine. But like the trying to have both, there's this really cool quote from Timothy Leary. I've never had chance to use it because I always got, I always got scared. I was going to get shouted at. I'm going to use it to,

use it with you he says women who seek to be equal with men lack ambition and i think the reason i was scared about that is that it obviously obviously posits men as below women which doesn't redress the problem of fucking making men and women equal but i certainly think that women who seek to be equal with men lack ambition if you replace that to be the same as men absolutely there are so many fucking things that both guys and girls can do that are better than each other yeah

I came up with this idea, the soft bigotry of male expectations, which was after that article came out saying that women did just as much big game hunting as men did ancestrally. Bullshit. The way that the analysis was done was wrong. The way that the categorization was done was wrong. These people basically fucking created a fantasy and then reposted it into a journal. Yeah.

And it's not right. But why, what is it? Like how fucking unfeminist of you to say that the things that women did of women

the collection of berries, nuts, the gathering and the child rearing, you've just baked into your subconscious that because that wasn't done by men, that's not the thing that's most important. You've put it on a pedestal. Built into your world frame is this assumption that the thing that men do

Right. This is so much of the stuff when you hear this talk about whiteness. It's like you guys sound more like white supremacists than white supremacists do. Baked into so much of these assumptions is like you're putting whiteness on this pedestal. And it's bizarre because it's just not true. That whole thing about, I think I was very...

I was always like the girl, maybe it's just a contrarian in me. But when I was learning about feminism from my English teacher in high school, I was very much like, why don't... This seems like a trick. Why do we want to leave the kitchen? Why can't guys open the doors for us? This feels like a trap. And she would be like, you're going to 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...

The amount of hands-on-edness 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 baby. Yeah, they're not. It's it's not. It's when I hear these things.

It's either from, you know, men who are probably rightfully bitter because they're 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.

But for the majority of people that I hear talking about these, when I go enter into the online discourse about this stuff,

I'm like, none of these people have kids. None of these people are married. None of these people are in relationships. None of these people have kids. They don't know anyone who has kids. They're not hanging out at barbecues. They're not doing normie things with normal people. They're talking about whatever it is, the second shift that women do. And it's like, well, have you seen this? So I wonder how much of this is the emotionally broken, disattached,

uh, anxious and, uh, fucking avoidant guys just going, uh, I, I, I, I have to be able to do better surely than the previous generation. I it's 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. Uh, but I imagine that there's just an endless subset of parenting podcasts that

that you can listen to about child rearing and about the best ways to let them cry it out or not. Oh yeah, I mean, it's nuts. And what the research is on fucking milk formula. I don't think you need it though.

Like most of the parents, I don't know. There's I just I think, yeah, you could really easily become a neurotic parent. But I think parenting is actually much more intuitive than, you know, I actually think we're reverting back to.

I don't know how normal that like 1950s, the man doesn't change a 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 and

as families, huge percentages of the country. And you saw your kids all the time. They were, they went to a schoolhouse where it was all intergenerational, you know, not just separated by age and

And this was something I was talking to Dr. Camila Ortiz about, who was just on my podcast, just how the kids now play with kids their age and it's less like intergenerationally. We all grew up with our cousins and we were all playing with different age groups and learned how to take care of the little ones and get beat up by the big ones. And everything is now...

you know, like these club sports instead of just pickup games in the neighborhood. So you're again, just with the same age instead of random age groups playing. And I see a lot more normal life here in Texas than I, you know, there's a lot more just kids playing out and out at all ages and they're running around and, and the parents are all getting together at the pool and having like a barbecue and, 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, uh, it's going to require two people to help around the house and help with the kids. Yeah.

But I don't know. I mean, the men just seem more involved. They just seem more hands-on. All of my friends are. All of the women that I'm friends with fucking...

sat in the gym with chris bumstead and he's we're not talking about this guy's a world champion bodybuilder five times over um 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 books that he's reading and we we managed to find a way to make sure that there's no parabens in the bedding of the cot of the this thing and do you know how hard it is to get like genuinely well-sourced baby baby

Fucking lotion that doesn't come from whatever, whatever toxic thing. 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 the late 90s, that's not what I'm expecting. Right. There is definitely...

that kind of a pivot. Bridget Phetasy, ladies and gentlemen, Bridget, let's bring this sucker home. Where should people go? They want to subscribe to your criminally undersubscribed podcast and follow you on everything else. Yeah. Go to my, go to my YouTube, just go to my YouTube channel and subscribe, please. It's a Bridget Phetasy. It's a, what is it? Phetasy? Yeah. Just Phetasy. The name is Bridget Phetasy. And,

And go to Phetasy.com. And that's my sub stack. That's where lots of writing comes up. Everything's there. So if you want any of my writing and get just get on my list and I post when I'm going to 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.

My pleasure. I'll catch you later on. Yeah, thank you.