Tim has on Seattle-based journalist Katie Herzog to discuss CHAZ, her exile from the gay community, Furries, and many other things that if I typed them here would take us out of the algorithm. In this episode there are bulldog puppies and stories of friendship and cereal. Enjoy. Bonus Episodes every week: https://www.patreon.com/thetimdillonshow Merch: https://www.bonfire.com/store/the-tim-dillon-show/ Katie's Plugs: https://twitter.com/kittypurrzog https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/blocked-and Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Katie Herzog and Blocked Podcast00:13:52
Katie Herzog was a writer at The Stranger.
She's no longer there because she was furloughed and she offered herself to be furloughed.
And now she's independent.
She has a podcast called Blocked and Reported.
And you should go and join her Patreon.
She's a breath of fresh air.
All the things you would say about somebody who's canceled all the time.
That's what you say.
When someone's canceled, you go, they're a bro, what a breath of fresh air they are.
But she's great.
I was in Palm Springs and we tried to do this interview, but we could the Wi-Fi wasn't working.
Now it is much better.
We wanted to have Raz Simeon, the leader of the Seattle Autonomous Zone, because they had reached out to us.
You know, they had contacted me on Instagram.
Raz had retweeted me.
Maybe they had in the interim found some of my earlier work, or maybe they had just gotten called feet, or maybe Raz is reading emails from the CIA about what he should do next.
I don't know.
But they are welcome to come.
I hope we have Raz in the future.
But Katie Herzog is here with us now.
What is your read on the Seattle Autonomous Zone?
Are you going to go and explore it?
Well, first of all, you're getting the name wrong.
You are dead naming the Seattle Autonomous Zone.
It's actually the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone or Chaz, which is probably the funniest part of all this.
It sounds like a tennis coach.
I find this whole thing extremely funny.
So what people from outside Seattle might not know is that the capital, the area where this is happening, where they have declared an autonomous state outside the jurisdiction of the United States, is in a really highly gentrified neighborhood.
And my former office is actually in Chaz.
So if I were still working at The Stranger, I would be entering, you know, entering the zone every day, which would be sort of ironic because right now, apparently during the protest, someone graffitied fuck Herzog on the door of The Stranger.
So it might be a little bit awkward for me to try to get to work through Chaz at this point.
Luckily, that doesn't happen.
So this area is super highly gentrified.
It's the historic gay neighborhood in Seattle, and it still has like rainbow crosswalks and lots of gay people and stuff like that.
But it's also really expensive.
It's mostly like, you know, like chain ramen shops and $3,000, $4,000 studio apartments.
A lot of Amazon workers live there.
So I keep imagining what the like well-heeled upper-middle-class Amazon workers think about their new overlords.
And there's also, so they've taken over this park and the park is surrounded by multi-million dollar condos and townhouses.
And so I just, I'm really curious about what the residents of Chaz think about what is happening to their neighborhood.
And I'm sure some are totally supportive and I'm sure some are just absolutely terrified.
Why is the Pacific Northwest historically been a bastion of a lot of activism and a lot of anarchists who are out there?
What is going on over there?
Is it the rain?
Is it the weather?
Are you on some type of is it an energy vortex?
What is happening with Portland and Seattle and these places that make them such a hotbed of this type of activity?
That's a great question.
I don't know the history of this, how long this has been going on.
I mean, you know, like 20 years ago where the WTO riots in Seattle, which were the World Trade Organization, had a meeting there and the city just erupted into total chaos, much like we're seeing now, although a lot of it seems to have calmed down.
And Portland, of course, has its own fair share of activism.
The cities are different in some important ways.
And what's happening in Portland to a lesser extent in Seattle is that, so both of these, these are very blue cities that are surrounded by more conservative suburbs and rural areas.
And so in Portland, what you will have is like Proud Boys or Patriot Prayer or something, these conservative groups come in from the suburbs or the rural areas and just sort of stage their marches there.
And, you know, it's a lot of American flags and pro-Trump stuff.
And then Antifa and other like affiliated anarchists and just people who like to fight in the streets will just come and respond to them.
And there's this clash.
And it feels very much like, you know, like LARPing, like cosplay, sort of revolution cosplay where nothing actually changes.
Nobody's mind is changed.
Just some like shit gets destroyed.
And then everybody, you know, the Proud Boys go back to their suburbs and Antifa goes back to their, you know, their, the co-ops that they live in or their parents' basement or whatever.
Yeah.
So it is interesting.
Both areas do tend to be hotbeds for this sort of political activism.
I mean, also, both areas are sort of the cities at least are politically very homogenous.
So you have basically no presence of a Republican Party.
And I think when you have an ideologically homogeneous area, what happens is extremism.
You know, if you don't have anyone to sort of check your ideas, they just sort of naturally flow to the edges of acceptable thought.
So I think that's also probably a part of it.
You know, we hear a lot about Antifa.
You know, you see them and you see the things they do and they're absurd.
And then we see like, you know, they're directing traffic and they're not letting people go back.
You know, who like is Antifa, is there any organization?
Is it just a ragtag group of, I mean, what is it?
Is it in your estimation a terrorist network?
Like, what is it?
And does it deserve that type of designation?
I mean, I don't know.
What is it?
I don't, I do not think Antifa is a terrorist organization.
I don't even think Antifa is a big threat to cities like Portland or Seattle that do have a larger presence of Antifa.
It's just a group.
I mean, anybody can join Antifa or Black Bloc or whatever.
You just put on the, you put on the outfit and you go hold up a protest sign or cover your face with a with a balaclava.
Although these days everybody's face is covered.
So a little bit harder to pick Antifa out of a crowd.
It's not, there's no hierarchy.
It's, you know, it's anarchist in nature.
And Antifa sort of appears at moments and then disappears as soon as the fight is over.
It's not, this is not, they don't have much political, they don't have any political power.
They're not a democratic group.
They're, I guess they're far left, but they don't have political ideals in the way that we think of those sort of like get people elected, go through legislative process.
I think their aims are much more about dismantling the state, dismantling capitalism.
And I'm sure there's lots of, you know, people who are committed to the cause.
And there's also lots of people who just like to, you know, like to play pretend, like to sort of get all pissed off and go break some windows.
We were going to do a sketch called Fat Antifa, where me and my co-host Ray Comp were going to dress up in all black.
And it was guys that were going to a march but kept getting sidetracked by different fast food places.
And then at the end, we just attack like a Trump supporter, like a 14-year-old, and they beat the shit out of us.
And it's, we never filmed it, but it was an idea that we had.
When you look at these protests and there's such valid anger, right?
I mean, there's such righteous, justified anger.
Dave Chappelle did an amazing job at like articulating it.
Is the major disconnect with a lot of these protests, how any of them lead to political change?
Like how does a group of angry people who are very justified in their anger, how do they affect the political process?
Many people believe that.
That can no longer happen, that we're living in a time where elections, you know, don't matter at all, even local ones, and that this chaotic energy will just be a means and an end where these systems will all somehow magically be remade.
I don't know, but is that one of the issues that you're looking at this and going, you have this anger, it makes a lot of sense.
It's very justified.
But then a lot of it seems to be like directed at like ending isms and racism and capitalism.
And it seems like, well, wait a minute.
Why don't we focus on one thing at a time, which is like ending police brutality?
And then people say, well, that's a function of your privilege.
You're talking, but it's just a function of my logical brain going, how are you going to end an ism during a pandemic and an economic meltdown?
So how do you, what do you see as the biggest issue with these protests really enacting any type of real reform or change?
Well, I think the problem is that the loudest activists are oftentimes out of touch with the American people.
And so even if people who support the protests, who recognize that police brutality is a problem, that corruption in police forces is a problem, that racism is a problem.
And the two things can be disconnected.
You know, police brutality, white people, Asian people, Hispanics, everybody is affected by police brutality.
Specifically, actually, Native Americans are the group most affected by it.
And so if you divorce it from sort of the cause of Black Lives Matter, I personally think you would have more legislative success because you can build a bigger coalition if you say police brutality and bad policing affects every community in this country, every race in this country.
And that's not going to alienate white people, particularly conservative white people, I think as much as the current sort of protests have the potential to do.
And so you have that problem.
And then you have the problem of sort of the sloganeering, right?
So what you see in the streets and what you see on the news, if you turn on the news, is people chanting things like abolish the police, defund the police.
These are not popular positions among the American populace.
The protesters, as righteous as they feel, and I do think they have just reasons to be angry and to feel righteous themselves.
But these radical policy positions like abolishing the police are not popular, even among black communities that suffer from the highest rates of violence.
What they actually, when you poll, when you look at polls of black communities, typically what they say is, we don't want to abolish the police.
We want functional police.
We want the police to help us when they call them, to not ignore us and not to brutalize us, not to defund them and not to, and there is some irony here when you talk about defunding the police.
Well, if you defund the police, that means there will be fewer policemen, police people on the police forces, which means that response times when somebody calls 911 are going to go up.
And according to Seattle Police Department, this is already happening right now.
And they also have spewed a fair amount of bullshit.
So we have to take everything that they say, I think, with some skepticism.
The police chief, for instance, this week said that in Chaz, businesses were being shaken down for money.
And basically the residents of Chaz were exhorting the local, Their new tenants, and it turns out that this doesn't appear to be true.
So, we I think we should be skeptical.
Um, that said, once you talk to people, if you talk to protesters and you say, like, you know, uh, or the leaders of these protests, I guess, in some cases, self-appointed leaders, and you know, you might say, like, well, what do you mean by abolish the police?
And they say, like, oh, we don't really mean abolish the police, we mean like break the police force down and rebuild it up as something different, um, or defund the police and use the money for community policing.
But when you rely on slogans, it's like build the wall, you know, or something like that.
It's just sort of an empty slogan.
Um, and I think this has the capacity to really turn people off.
I mean, that said, I think they're seeing some successes.
You know, San Francisco today, the mayor of San Francisco announced some police reform, some reforms to the police department that could actually have an impact on police brutality.
Minneapolis, it looks like they are going to sort of defund the police and try to rebuild it into a community policing organization or something like that.
Who knows if that will be any different?
Did you see that Andrew Yang tweet where he goes, why don't we just call them the Guardians?
Yeah, yeah, I did see that.
I did see that.
I mean, but the thing is, like, you can change the name, and if you still have the same populace, it's not going to actually change anything.
So, I think a lot of a lot of this sloganeering is empty or it's out of touch with how most Americans feel.
But we are seeing, I think, some successes from this group, and we'll see, we'll see how long it goes.
You know, I think there's potential for leaders to emerge that maybe could have a future in politics.
Although I'm not sure that anybody, anybody that I'm aware of has particularly emerged on the national stage at this point.
Breonna Taylor's law just got passed where they're getting rid of no-knock warrants, which are, you know, that's a step in the right direction.
But there seems to be this wing of people that aren't happy with the word reform, and they don't like incremental change of any kind, and they don't like even me saying things like that's a step in the right direction.
They believe that the only way to fix this system is to tear it all down.
Now, to people like myself and others that are marginally intelligent, we realize that that's not possible.
Like it's not going to happen.
And if you defund the police, rich communities are going to hire private police forces that probably have less accountability than the public police forces right now.
Gender Transition Reversals00:09:07
That you now, you initially, you've had a lot of issues as a writer in terms of people getting angry at you.
People have called you a TERF, which means you're a trans exclusionary radical feminist or something, right?
Isn't that what that means?
That's the acronym.
I am not a TERF or a radical feminist or really even a feminist at this point.
So I guess I'm just radical if I'm not a trans-exclusionary or a feminist.
I think you wrote an article on Jordan Peterson that angered people.
What was the beginning of Katie Herzog being on the outs at The Stranger, which is, we would say, is a very left-wing publication out of Seattle.
And you became like persona non grata there.
How did that happen?
It actually happened before I was hired.
So I was a freelancer writing in Seattle.
And one of the first pieces that I wrote for The Stranger was called The Detransitioners.
And it was about people who transitioned from one gender to the other and then changed their mind and transitioned back.
And this was in 2017.
And it caused just this like massive firestorm.
Like people were literally burning stacks of the paper and sending me video of it.
Just like there are flyers up in my neighborhood calling the paper transphobic and my editors made transphobic.
Like the coffee shops that I would go to, I would walk in and there would be like flyers calling me transphobic.
So there was just a massive outcry.
I don't know how many people who were mad about the piece actually read the piece because the piece was not, by any stretch of the imagination, transphobic.
I got the voices of lots of happily transitioned people in there.
It was just about this sort of small subset and a phenomenon and something that is happening.
And in the three years since the piece is published, the community of detransitioners has really emerged on their own.
They're much more visible now, but this was sort of one of the earlier pieces about this phenomenon.
What attracted you to write about that?
Were you concerned about maybe people transitioning too early?
Did you have no agenda when you wrote it?
Were you kind of like just interested in this group of people?
What I'm interested in is heretics and people who speak out at some cost to themselves.
And I found that among the detransitioners that I spoke to, so oftentimes they felt really shunned by their own communities.
The trans and queer communities that they had typically lived in just sort of cast them out.
And they continued to speak up about it despite the own social costs to themselves.
You know, it's sort of ironic that after I wrote this piece, the exact same thing happened to me.
And I sort of knew that it would.
I had talked to other people who'd written not even critically about trans issues, but had just had written about trans issues in a way that didn't sort of parrot the contemporary party line.
And they'd all had similar experiences.
So it wasn't totally unexpected.
And, you know, I'm, so I'm a lesbian.
I've lived in queer communities for, let's see, the last like almost 20 years of my life.
And I did start to notice that more and more people were transitioning.
You know, and there can be a lot of reasons for this.
Like, for one, people know about it.
You know, it's possible now in a way that it wasn't before.
But I started to notice this like in like things rapidly accelerated around 2016, 2017 in my community, where all of a sudden you would have a household that had maybe, you know, five lesbians all transition within the same year.
And I just found it, I'm like, I won't lie, I found it troubling in some respects because it just seemed like statistically this is impossible.
How could this entire community be, you know, be deciding that they were, that they have, you know, they were born in the wrong body or they have gender dysphoria or whatever at the same time?
It just, it seemed, it struck me as trendy, to be totally frank about it.
And now that I, now that I make my money on Patreon, I don't have to worry about being canceled so I can say things like this.
So that's when I started to sort of look a little bit more critically at what was going on.
And I think that my initial instincts have been sort of proven out several years later that we are seeing this very, very rapid rise.
And it's not something I'm overly concerned about.
It's something I observe.
And in terms of adults, adults are free to do whatever they want.
If you want to change your body, I think that is absolutely within your rights to do so.
I would support anybody who does it.
I do think it gets more complicated with children, though, because this issue has been studied for decades.
And what most studies find is that children who report to gender identity clinics from a young age, by the time they're adults, between 60 and 90% of them will have decided that they don't want to transition and they are fine living in their sex at birth, which I think is preferable in some ways.
And I know there's a danger of saying that.
Like conservatives would always say, like, you know, wouldn't it be better if gay people couldn't be gay?
But I think the difference is that being gay only causes you distress if you're receiving that message from society, right?
I don't think there's anything inherently that if you didn't have sort of conservatives or Christians or any other group, not just Christians, Muslims, whatever, any sort of fundamentalist group saying that what you are is wrong, I don't think it would cause people distress inherently, you know, without that sort of social influence.
But gender dysphoria is a condition.
It's defined by distress, right?
And so I think we need to be really cautious about Pediatric transition because what the research has found is that between 60 and 90 percent of kids who arrive at gender identity clinics eventually revert to their sex at birth, feel okay about it.
So their dysphoria is alleved, or they have found a different way of dealing with their dysphoria besides taking hormones and surgery that are, you know, that cause permanent changes to your body and some side effects.
And most of the children who grow out of it end up being gay or lesbian.
And this study has been repeated over and over and over.
Are these studies controversial?
I would imagine they're controversial, but why are they ignored by many trans activists and people in that community?
Why?
What is the big push for why?
Why can't people just say, listen, when you're an adult, you should.
Now, I know it's a complex issue because a lot of people say if you have true gender dysphoria, making you go through puberty as a gender that you are not is some form of abuse.
That's the argument on the other side.
But why do people not take these studies more seriously that say many of the people who do this end up regretting it on the other end?
Well, the reason for this is because historically there have been a lot of gatekeepers when it comes to trans healthcare.
So until relatively recently, if you wanted to transition from one sex to the other or from one gender to the other, you would have to live as your preferred, your preferred gender or sex for I think two years minimum.
Before you could get hormones or surgery, you had to have a lot of meetings with therapists and doctors or things like this.
It wasn't easy.
And the model of healthcare has changed to what's now called informed consent.
And under these sort of policies or best practices, informed consent basically means that someone goes to a doctor or therapist and says, like, I'm trans, I have gender dysphoria.
And there's also, as a sort of interesting aside, a lot of trans activists now say that you don't have to have gender dysphoria to be trans.
But so regardless, and that you don't have to take hormones or surgery.
You just say that you're trans and or say that you're the gender that you want to be and you know you are without doing anything to change your body.
And that's a new phenomenon.
I don't think we would have seen this 10 or 15 years ago for the most part.
So after this informed consent model changed, all of the gatekeepers sort of disappeared.
And for trans people, specifically trans adults, this is a really good thing because they did have to go through these sort of onerous processes to get the healthcare that they needed.
And so now we've just sort of gone in the radically the other direction where you just go to a doctor and you say, I would like to have a double mastectomy or I'd like to have surgery or whatever, and they'll do it.
And I think there's, you're just, you're going to see more false positives with not having gatekeepers.
But I think there are good reasons for trans activists to push back on the gatekeeper model because a lot of them live through it and are terrified that something like this would happen again or future generations will have to go through this onerous years-long process before they're able to get healthcare.
So that's why they push back against these studies.
I think they push back against them for valid reasons.
They're concerned.
But the problem is that the data doesn't disappear, right?
These lives don't disappear.
You can ignore the study.
You can argue with the methodology or whatever.
Claim that the study is flawed in too many ways, but that's not going to change the reality, which is that the more children you have who transition at a young age, the more false positives you're going to have, and the more of them are going to regret it later on.
Furries, Depression, and Identity Crisis00:14:10
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My friend, I just took my friend's bulldog.
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And the dog is a literal terrorist.
And the dog rolled down the window in the car, tried to get out.
I mean, the dog is just, I mean, this is why you can't do anything for people.
The dog is, they said it will, yeah, it'll sleep.
When it gets home, it just sleeps.
Yeah, it just sleeps.
That's what it does.
It's tearing everything apart.
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When you see the growth of something like non-binary, where people are identifying as queer, and they say I'm identifying as non-binary, and many of them are white, middle-class college students that, you know, this seems to be, and that's not all of them, but, you know.
at schools like Oberlin and Wesleyan and places like that, people are identifying as non-binary.
How much of that, because to me, and I'm on Patreon, I don't have to, I can do whatever I want.
A lot of it to me seems like an identity crisis.
It's not really rooted in any true gender dysphoria as much as it's rooted in a socio-political understanding of the world and a desire to be maybe in a protected or a desire to be in a group of people that's not seen as the oppressor.
And how much of this is a phase?
And how many of these people grow out of that non-binary distinction and then just live either regular heterosexual or homosexual lives?
I'm not sure that this has been studied.
And I think that the phenomenon is probably too young or too new to have good data on that.
But I agree with you.
I find that personally, I find the concept of non-binaryness incredibly regressive because it presupposes that if you're not non-binary, if you're non-binary, then what am I?
Does that make me binary?
And it relies on these stereotypes, right?
So if you talk to people and you say, like, all right, and I've done this.
I have a lot of friends who identify as non-binary and trans now, more actually every day, and not because I'm meeting new people.
So, and I've had these conversations with my friends.
So, so explain to me, like, what does it feel like to be non-binary?
And they'll say, and I do say as both the singular and the plural in this case, well, you know, sometimes I, when I wake up, I, I, I feel like a man and sometimes I feel like a woman.
All right, well, what does that mean?
Or I feel like neither.
What does that mean?
Well, sometimes I want to wear masculine clothes and sometimes I want to wear femme clothes.
And so to me, that's just reinforcing stereotypes that I think both men and women would be better off rejecting.
And so that's my problem with the idea of non-binary.
I think it just reinforces this.
It reinforces the binary in this like very sort of ironic twist.
And I think, like, to be totally frank, I think it's very trendy.
It is trendy.
There's like, and I'm sure that lots of people will get mad at me for saying this, but it is undeniably trendy.
And, you know, it's like identity is such a huge thing now.
And like when I was when I was a teenager, I don't think we ever talked about identity.
We talked about sort of the click that you were in and the style that you had.
And I think there's a lot of overlap.
Like, you know, we had the goth kids and the alt kids and the jocks and the rednecks or whatever.
And now you have, you just like add another now.
We have the non-binaries and the non-binary and the activists and the anarchists and, you know.
Yeah.
And the asexuals and the aromantics and the furries.
And it's just this like, we just have more labels than I ever would have imagined.
You wrote an article about furries.
I did.
I've written so many articles.
I don't even remember doing this.
I'm sure that I did at some point.
What is the furry community and how are they helping Black Lives Matter?
The furry community.
So furries can be a couple different things.
The most interesting furries are the furries who dress up like stuffed animals and have sex with each other.
In the suits, right?
In their fursuits.
So that's what I've always thought of as furries.
But there's also, it's now it has gone from sort of a kink to an identity.
And not all furries have sex in their suits.
Not all furries are kinksters and not all kingsters are furries.
But what started out as a kink, I think, has become much more of an identity that people take seriously.
The great thing about furries is that they tend to have like anime avatars in their bios or like cartoon drawings of themselves in their fursuits.
So it's a really good signal of who not to take seriously.
Yeah, my friend Nick Mullen made a very interesting point once about a lot of the people that you see like identifying as non-binary.
A lot of them, it's either not only anime avatars, but they're kind of like nerds.
They're very, they seem to be overinvested in like these mythological worlds.
I think that's why J.K. Rowling's treason hit them so hard.
Dude, I know I have like, I have an ex-girlfriend who called me out when I wrote this D-Trans piece, like excommunicated me from her life.
We were on good terms, but just like was done with me after I wrote this piece.
And she has about six Harry Potter tattoos.
Obviously, like at this point, I can't ask her how she's feeling, but I just wonder how quickly she made the appointment to get all of her tattoos covered up.
Yeah.
What do you think it is?
What is the overlap there between nerds and people that have some type of sexual identity crisis?
And I mean, nerds, not like nerds, like people that are coders, but I mean people that, you know, whatever, play Magic the Gathering, like are love these mythological worlds.
Also, a lot of them, there seems to be an overlap with people that have sexual identity issues.
If you could stipulate, if you could guess what that overlap would be or postulate what it might be, what do you think it is?
Okay, this is pure speculation.
So I don't know if anybody has studied this.
I have no, no, like good data on this, just pure speculation.
So I think there might be two things.
And the first one, I say with a little bit of hesitation because I feel like it could get me in trouble, but I'm going to do it anyway.
I think the first connection is autism.
So there's a really high, and this is not so much about furries or fantasy worlds.
It's getting good.
We're getting good.
We're getting close to the meat.
The meat is tender closest to the bone.
Keep going.
Okay.
So there has been research on natal females.
So what we typically think of is like teen girls who transition to either male or non-binary or whatever.
So this population has spiked in recent years.
And there's some overlap between natal females who the concept is called rapid onset gender dysphoria.
So it's basically a population who doesn't have a history, a pediatric history of gender dysphoria, but sort of spends a lot of time online and decides at some point that he or she or they are trans.
And like surprisingly high percentage, and I don't know the numbers off the top of my head, and I don't know if anybody does actually, but there is some overlap with people on the autism spectrum disorder.
So I think that might be part of it.
People who maybe are more drawn to the online world, whose social skills or making human connections face-to-face isn't sort of their primary way of interacting with the world.
And when you spend a lot of time in online communities, it's just like any other community.
What's happening in the community rubs off on you.
So, I mean, I think, I think we're in the midst of a social contagion in terms of trans stuff.
That's probably not something I would have said that if I still worked at The Stranger and had an editor who could yell at me for it.
But I think anybody who's really been observing this would say that it's obvious.
What explains the rise in autism?
Oh, that I have no idea.
Oh, well, I mean, it probably, I've done a little bit of research on this.
And I think probably, well, vaccines, obviously.
But if not that, there's a true do you think that's true?
Okay.
I don't think, I don't think that's true.
No, but there's a, I think diagnosis.
So you had my audience, you had my audience and you just lost them.
You had them and then you just lost them.
It's a it's a fickle group.
When you said all trans people are autistic, they were like, they pressed subscribe on your Patreon.
They pressed donate.
And then when you said autism didn't come from vaccines, their finger went off the button.
So you got to be very careful.
But so if it's not vaccines, and I'm not saying it's vaccines, what do I know?
I was vaccinated.
I'm fine.
You know, what?
More or less.
More or less.
What do you think it could be?
Oh, I think I probably like better diagnostic tools.
I mean, it's possible that people are.
I did see.
Okay.
There's a book called by Johan Hari called, I'm forgetting the name of it, but the latest book by Johan Hari, who's a journalist, wrote a book about the causes of the root causes of depression and anxiety, specifically depression.
And if I ask like most people on the street, what causes depression, what I think they're going to tell me is there's a chemical imbalance, right?
And it turns out that that's not true, according to Hari.
That really was like the idea that there's a serotonin imbalance in your head and that's the reason you're depressed is based on like a very small study in the 1960s that was never replicated.
What he argues, and I'm not an expert on this, so I'm just like repeating his findings.
So if anybody gets mad about this, yell at him instead of me.
What he argues is that depression and anxiety are much more a response to living in a disconnected world.
People are depressed because our lives are shitty.
And it's actually a natural response.
And there is evidence that SSRIs, things like, you know, Paxil or Lorazepam or whatever, these drugs that are used to treat depression and anxiety are mostly effective as placebos.
And so I bring this up in the context of autism because there's one line in his book that I don't know if this is true.
Please, like, this is, this is just like anybody who's listening to this, research this yourself before you take this at face value.
He says that there is some evidence that there may be a correlation between taking birth control and autism.
I mean, I'm sorry.
I'm sorry, not taking birth control about taking SSRIs and autism.
So we've seen a spike in the uses of antidepressants at the same time that we've seen a spike in incidences of autism.
I am not an expert on this.
So nobody consider what I'm saying.
I think what Katie is trying to say here is don't take the medicine, folks.
You don't need it.
My mother, who's a schizophrenic.
She probably needs it.
She, well, she, I mean, to be honest, the way the world's unfolding, I wonder if we're going to have to go apologize to my mother because everything she's saying is happening.
She said there were people.
You know, listen, it's very interesting, right?
When you talk about anxiety and depression, because a lot of people have this, again, as an identity.
Like, I grew up with genuine mental illness.
My mother was genuinely paranoid schizophrenic.
She thought people were following her.
She thought members of the family were stealing from her.
She had nothing to take.
She had beanie babies.
She thought, she said at Christmas dinner once, Elvis might have been her father or her father might have been a big celebrity.
I get to that.
Yeah.
I mean, if you flipped your hair back, you could be, how are your hip gyrations?
Yeah, they're not bad.
They're not great.
So I was very skeptical of what I, when I, when I looked out and I saw people that were diagnosing themselves with anxiety off Instagram.
Like they were, you know, so it seems like the rise in these, not to say that these things don't exist, but like, again, it feels very tied to the need to have an identity and a way to put yourself in a box and say, hey, I suffer from this.
I suffer, you know, a lot of men in comedy, straight white men in comedy, have to go out now and say they're anxious or they're depressed.
I struggle with depression.
I'm anxious.
Even though I'm white, I'm anxious.
I go through things too.
So it is interesting to talk about that.
And of course, now these pharmaceutical companies are making billions of dollars marketing solutions to these problems.
Right.
I do think anxiety and depression are real, but I think that the cause might not be what we have always.
We have always assumed the cause to be these chemical imbalances.
And that's where I've sort of hung up.
And I do think you're on to something about, you know, your pathology becoming your identity.
And also it seems undeniable that victimhood and culture is sort of zero.
The cause could also be poor diet, right?
I mean, we eat white shit.
Well, I mean, you know, think like my least favorite thing to do in the world is exercise.
I know that if I exercise, I would be less anxious and less depressed, but that's hard.
It is hard to get up and like move your body and sweat and it's not fun and it doesn't feel good.
So what is easier?
Going out and doing these things that actually will make you feel better about the world or taking a pill.
I can totally see the appeal of taking the pill.
It's just easier.
But I mean, there's also lots of evidence that the pills are mostly effective as placebos and they don't work long term.
You know, people have to continue upping the dosage of their medication all the time.
And there are really serious side effects, which is the problem.
You know, if you were just taking a sugar pill and it relieved your depression and anxiety, it wouldn't have any side effects.
But if you're taking something that, you know, makes your boobs grow bigger or smaller or makes you go bald or makes your ball shrink or whatever, you know, whatever it is, well, that's a problem.
Devil Horns in Academia00:15:15
I mean, I do think people are genuinely anxious and depressed because we live in a world that is actually safer in some respects than it's ever been, you know, 2020 aside.
But we still live in these ways that are pretty unnatural for humans, you know, especially in the midst of a pandemic.
Like how many people have been stuck in their apartments alone for three months?
And now you can go out and protest.
So that's like your get out of apartment free card.
But it just humans aren't meant to live like this.
And it makes us kind of crazy.
And we're also not meant to spend all of our time staring at fucking screens all day.
No, we're not.
What do you think what's happened in academia and the type of ideas that have thrived in the academic space for more than a decade, but certainly it become really contentious in the last decade, are now bleeding out into the media.
You're seeing it at the New York Times where the editor, James Bennett, the editorial editor, whatever, resigned because they published an article by Tom Cotton, Senator Tom Cotton, with a position which was if the cops can't contain the chaos, you've got to bring in the military.
At the time they published the article, I think that in polls had support of 58% of people were supporting Tom Cotton's position.
They ran it in the New York Times.
There's been essentially like a coup.
You see it's happening and James Bennett resigned.
There are other newsrooms.
Reportedly, Andrew Sullivan, gay writer at the New Yorker, cannot publish an article.
Andrew's at New York Magazine.
New York Magazine.
He cannot publish an article about the riots.
And every article that he does publish has to be vetted a bunch of times to make sure that it doesn't trigger people.
So a lot of these ideas that were confined to classrooms and confined to the universities have now bled out into the media.
And people are saying, you know, it's a matter of time before they enter the government or they enter the court system.
What are these ideas?
How would you, because they've been called a lot of things, right?
Jordan Peterson has said it's post-modernism.
A lot of people said it's neo-Marxism.
Some people say it's the excesses of political correctness.
How would you qualify these ideas?
And why is their spread seemingly, you know, why are they now so popular?
And why don't more people recognize that these ideas inherently lead to a more divisive society with more violence than the one that we have now, which is what I see.
I see that when I read the way that people want people to interact and the amount of stresses you're putting on people in these social situations that are of different races and different genders, the attack on humor, which is huge, which is the, and by the way, nobody in the Ivy League realizes this because they've never had a shitty job.
When you work a shitty low wage, minimum wage job, the jokes that you do to each other are race jokes.
They're base level humor that makes people laugh because the only things you guys have in common and the only things that you can really isolate about each other are our characteristics.
So if you're fat or if you're gay, I haven't been either of those two things.
But if you are Irish, I've suffered for that.
So people end up and in the Ivy League or in the tech companies or places like that, they've never worked a shitty job where everyone's kind of miserable and you're blowing off steam.
So I just look at the way that they want to configure the world and I say this leads to more alienation, more isolation, and ultimately more violence.
I think you're right.
There is a lot of argument about what to call this moment or the genesis of this moment.
I mean, as you mentioned, a lot of this comes from academia and these sort of postmodern critical race studies, critical, you know, critical theorist, excuse me, theory studies, theories.
Lots of things that cannot be proved.
They can only be postulated.
And you have seen this really break down in the past or break out into the mainstream over the past couple of weeks since the murder of George Floyd, which has frankly been a little bit refreshing to see because I've been talking and bitching and warning people about the excesses of the social justice left and what's happening in colleges for years.
And people have said things like, oh, it's just, you know, it's campus.
It's college kids being college kids.
College kids demanding trigger warnings, trying to de-platform speakers, basically rejecting all notions of free speech and free expression and diversity of thought.
Just this narrowing of liberal values.
And I don't mean liberalism democratic, but sort of enlightenment values.
And we've been seeing this.
Those of us who've been paying attention have been seeing this for years.
And now it has broken open into the mainstream, which is in some ways a relief.
And I think you're right.
This something that started in academia has really spread out and it's everywhere in media.
As you mentioned, Jim Bennett got forced to essentially step down from the New York Times for basically publishing a problematic op-ed by a sitting U.S. senator.
There have been firings over the past couple weeks and or the past week or so at Bonapeteep, Refinery 29, the Philadelphia Inquirer.
A journalist at the CBC was fired for saying the N-word.
She was quoting somebody.
She was, you know, the same thing that happened to Papa John last year, where you can't say this word even to quote somebody.
The CEO of Second City sat down, CrossFit.
There's been lots and lots of these firings.
I think probably the most egregious one was a guy named David Shore who tweeted an article.
It was not an article.
It was a study that had been conducted by a black man that looked at public perception of violent versus nonviolent protests in the 1960s.
And what he found is that violent protests tended to make voters drift to the right.
Nonviolent protest, increased democratic turnout, and so this basically analyst, um tweeted this out and there's a massive outcry.
A study by a black man, so he tweets this out.
There's a massive outcry and he got fired from his job right, and so this is going to continue happening.
Someone in my DMS referred to what's happening right now as Me Too for microaggressions, and I think that's a very apt way of putting it, and one of the parallels is that you're seeing these purges in the same industries that affected the Me Too, that were affected during Me Too.
So media tech academia, these sort of elite institutions mostly dominated by upper, upper middle class and wealthy people, where you're not seeing it as much and where I don't think you're going to see it as much, is in, you know, in the working class, right.
So restaurant, the places where you're actually more likely to be, you know, to experience actual racism, not microaggressions, but actual overt racism um, or overt sexual harassment.
And this is not to minimize the experiences that people have, you know, have gone through at sort of the upper echelon of American culture, but you know, I worked at uh, I worked in cafes, I worked at restaurants I, I was a dishwasher, like that is actually where you get sexually harassed, and that is actually where you hear like overtly racist comments, and I do not think you're going to be seeing these purges in that and that sort of class, in sort of the underclass, and I also don't think they will.
The underclass will benefit um, and as much as sort of the upper.
The upper classes will, um from this, or at least some people will benefit.
How much of this do you think is the excesses of the kind of gangster capitalism that we have now, where you have lots of wealthy institutions and corporations avoiding taxes and essentially creating a parallel world for themselves to live in.
They are now using the language of social justice to communicate their commitment to changing the world, but largely it's aesthetic, and that they're still.
They're still running out the back door with a pot, with a bag of money right, there's a lot of irony in seeing somebody like Jeff Bezos like lauded as a hero for making a Pro Black Lives Matter statement when like, if Jeff Bezos actually gives a shit about Black Lives, he could make sure that his Black employees get bathroom breaks at his fulfillment centers or healthcare.
Same thing with companies like Uber and Lyft and all of these tech companies or the NFL, any of these companies that have come out and made their statement.
But it also right now, the pressure to conform is so high that it is not surprising to me at all that brands are jumping on this.
For one, not doing it would be terrible PR.
There's been a list circulating among like in the LA theater scene, like a crowdsourced list that notes which theater companies or whatever people in this in this field haven't come out and made a you know a pro Black Lives Matter statement.
And so if you're worried about the LA situation, the LA theater scene has always been a little weak.
It's always been in New York.
It's been in New York scene.
Yeah.
The LA theater scene.
Come on.
Yeah, so maybe that's their issue is not feeling up to up to the ruling.
What is the ruling class other than the paying the lip service?
What are they are there people right now sitting in the smoke-filled rooms going, this is good for us?
Keep them divided.
Let's feed the flames.
Are they like, hey, let's figure out a way?
You know, I'm talking about the people that are at Davos, the people that go to the Bilderberg group, the people that own these media companies that are, you know, government, intelligence, you know, national security apparatus, call them deep state, call them whatever, permanent political class of people, largely unelected, there because they have a lot of money.
What are they doing?
What is their, what are they going to try to do?
How do they, are they going to try to wield this anger that you see right now?
I have to admit, I don't have any connections in the deep state.
So I'm not sure I'd be able to really answer that question.
But you know, historically, how many of these protest groups have been co-opted by the FBI?
I mean, look at Cointel Pro.
I mean, look at all of these things, right?
I mean, we know that a lot of times things are pushed in, and maybe we don't even need, you know, the infiltration anymore because people are just ready to push things further than they should go by themselves.
But like, you know, you have a lot of billionaires in this country.
You have a lot of wealth and you have a lot of people.
What do they, if you could speculate, what do you think they are feeling at this precise moment?
Are they seeing things come?
Are the wheels coming off or are they not coming off?
And are we all overreacting because we're paying such hyper-close attention to all this?
I think there are a couple of different issues here.
I mean, what are they feeling?
I bet some of them are feeling a lot of white guilt, if they are anything like the people who I'm following in my social media feeds and the friends that I'm talking to.
A lot of white guilt, probably.
Will that actually change anything?
Like, Jeff Bezos feels some white guilt.
Is he actually going to change the policies about Amazon?
I don't think so.
I don't think that he will.
I think that the reason that companies and brands are engaging this is because to be perceived as racist will kill your brand.
I have no idea what the people pulling the strings at Davos or behind the scenes think of any of this.
I mean, you make it sound like they're, you know, sort of, they've got devil horns sticking out of their heads.
And I don't, and I don't know whether that's true.
It sounds a little conspiratorial to me.
But you said you said devil horns.
I didn't say devil horns.
What I'm saying is that what I've read about the fine folks at these places, the ones that frequented Little St. James, the ones that cut the sweetheart deal for Jeffrey Epstein, the people that, you know, get us into wars all over the place that we need not be in.
I'm a little skeptical.
I'm just, I'm curious as to what they think about this.
That's all.
I'm not saying they all have devil horns, but I'm saying they have entrenched interests.
Right.
You know, and you wonder in a period of chaos like this, what they feel.
I wonder if they've soured on Trump.
I wonder if, because they're not a monolith, by the way.
I mean, nobody that's read about this stuff that's sane thinks that these people are monolith, but they do exist.
I mean, the reality is like, you know, these things are real.
Obama gate is real.
Brennan and Clapper, these people are real.
You know, they have interests.
They have the capability to do lots of things behind the scenes.
And I'm just, I'm, do you, and this is a question for you as a journalist, do you ignore that dimension of power completely?
Do you feel that that dimension of power is just a fantasy of Yahoos on Twitter?
Do you don't give any credence to the idea that there are very wealthy, very powerful people that operate behind the scenes?
No, I think that's probably likely true.
It's not something that I follow and probably because, you know, I'm not an investigative journalist in that particular way.
You've got enough problems.
I mean, you're being canceled in a coffee house.
The last thing you need is a CIA hijacking your car.
I mean, what I'm more worried about is, okay, so I'm worried about a couple things.
I'm worried that the protests now are going to lead to a backlash in which Donald Trump gets elected.
And I'm worried about that, not because like I like, I don't think I have, I think Trump derangement cinema is real.
I don't think I personally suffer for it, but I do think, like, I do think Orange Man is bad.
And not because, like, and I actually think that the president has too much power.
So if you have a total bungling idiot in the White House and he isn't actually able to get anything done, I'm, I'm like, I'm okay with that.
I mean, he just told a black news anchor on Fox that Lincoln may not, did you see that?
The clip where he goes, what Lincoln did was mixed, freeing the slaves.
He goes, you don't really know.
And then the black anchor on Fox News had to go, well, we're free.
And he goes, yes, you free.
No, I mean, president of the United States.
He's also doing a rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
There's the scene of a massacre of black people.
I mean, he's doing it on Juneteenth.
Are all of these things, you know, I mean, I don't know.
I mean, is this guy a white supremacist?
I think it's red meat.
I think he's just trying to rile up his base.
I think he's trying to capitalize on what happens now on what's happening now.
And from, you know, from like not even never Trumpers, but Republicans who have been more supportive of Trump, they have criticized them.
The sort of intellectual Republicans have criticized his handling of this crisis and the pandemic.
They have criticized him.
I don't know that they represent the base.
And Trump needs his base to come out.
And he doesn't need them to come out everywhere, but he needs them to come out in a few select districts and a few select states to win, you know, because of our electoral college, to win just a few states and he'll have the election.
And I'm very terrified that the backlash is going to lead to that.
That said, I'm also scared and not equally scared, but I am also scared, concerned, let's say, that if Joe Biden wins, Joe Biden is not woke, right?
And Joe Biden, he's, you know, he's old as shit.
He, I sort of, all of his like, his, his gaps and his missteps, I sort of like them because what they show me is that he is unintentionally not politically correct.
But I think right now the pressure to appoint people to his cabinet who are representative of these sort of illiberal liberals, I think we're going to see that.
And so my concern is that Biden gets elected and he appoints Robin D'Angelo to lead the, you know, the new like Department of Reparations or something like that.
Whiteness Rhetoric and Biden00:03:42
Hopefully he wouldn't appoint a white woman to do that.
But these sort of critical theorists that we were just talking about, I am worried about that being entrenched in government.
And you're already seeing this in education.
So education systems, specifically in cities like New York and in Seattle, I'm sure this is happening in San Francisco, probably LA, sort of the big metro areas, but all over the world.
They teach this critical race theory that is basically, it's essentialist in nature.
And it focuses everything on race, right?
And I don't actually think that that's good for the Republic.
I think the more you focus on race, the more you're going to have resentful white people responding to that in a negative way, because people don't like to feel guilty because of their race.
They just don't.
And so I'm concerned about Biden getting into the office and appointing a bunch of like, you know, university cuckoos who are then going to be dictating policy.
Like Elizabeth Warren, do you remember, did you watch the LBGTQ town hall last year?
I'm ashamed to say I did not.
Oh, well, you really messed out.
It was only about nine hours long.
And there was a lot of like crazy rhetoric.
Like at one point, there was a lot of like outbursts and protests, which was sort of funny because mostly it was happening during Mayor Pete, the one gay guy.
They did not like him.
So these politicians, like at one point, and you've probably heard this, Elizabeth Warren said that if she is elected, she would appoint or she would vet, she would allow a nine-year-old trans kid named Jacob, who was in the audience to vet the next Secretary of Education.
And maybe that was just rhetoric.
I think it's like utter insanity.
For one thing, it's a campaign ad for Donald Trump, but it's also just stupid on its face, right?
We don't let children, we don't let children dictate who's going to be the next Secretary of Education.
I don't care how trans they are or how cute they are.
We just don't do that.
So that's my fear is that this current moment is going to force Biden to adopt some of the identitarian, the like far-left identitarian policies that some of his opponents, like Warren and Castro and Booker and Harris, basically everyone else, even Marion Williamson, were advocating for that I don't think Biden really believes in, but just the pressure has built, the momentum has built.
And even if it doesn't reflect the, you know, the dominant perspective of the American voter, what it does reflect is a dominant perspective of the media, Twitter, the loudest, most powerful voices.
What is the end game for the critical race theorists?
People that push this narrative.
What is their end game?
What would they like society to look like if they had their way?
Um, I think they would.
They want power.
I think that's.
That's the end game, and this makes it sound more sort of duplicitous than I think, than I think it really is.
I think a lot of these people are true believers.
Um, they're anti-racist, and anti-racist is not me, not racist.
It's an actual set of values um, that are sort of very essential in nature.
That whiteness is something that needs to be overcome.
Um, what is whiteness?
Somebody explain to me.
I don't know what that is.
I have no idea.
Yeah, I have no idea.
Right, I have no idea right, it's, it's more than just it's more than just your ethnicity.
It's this um, it's this, I guess this thing inside of all of us, maybe it's like a soul, that it's connected to white supremacy, the original sin.
All of this rhetoric is incredibly religious right um, but the difference between, I think, what's happening now sort of great awokening and actual religion, is that religion, most religions have some mechanism for um, for reform or reconciliation or grace, and this doesn't exist in this current dogma.
Um, so I I, you know, i've never taken a class in whiteness studies.
Maybe I should do that.
Maybe i'll go back to school and become a diversity trainer, if my podcast doesn't work out.
Childhood Friend Paul Hockey Incident00:03:42
I've never told you this, but when I was a young uh boy, I loved cereal and my best friend was a kid named uh Paul.
Okay, why are you laughing?
Because it seems like you're making this up?
No it's, it's not what's happening right now.
I'm sharing something that's very deep and personal to me and that's why it's taken me a little bit to get it out.
But I think you assuming that i'm it just shows the type of person you are.
Okay, what did I say his name was?
I think Paul.
Paul was my best friend that i've ever had.
He was a good kid and he believed uh, in the same values and ideals that I believed in, freedom democracy, the markets.
And Paul had a tough home life.
It was a hard life.
It was.
It was not easy, you know uh, his parents had a rough marriage and they were fond of the bottle and they liked to drink, they liked to throw a few back and then they would uh, mercilessly beat him and that was tough for him.
But, but there were good times.
You know, there were good times.
Do you know what he loved?
What he loved cereal.
He loves cereal.
He would come over to my house, black and blue and bleeding, and and I would say hey hey, let's have a bowl of lucky charms, and he would love it.
I mean, it would take his mind off the beatings.
I mean, they used to go at him.
I mean, there was, I went to call for him.
You know, you go call for somebody, like when you have friends, you go, can I call for my friend?
You know, parents go, yeah.
And then you go knock at the door, Hank and Paul play.
I mean, one time I went and they both had hockey sticks out and in the backyard, they were just going at him.
I thought he was dead because he was no longer moving and they were just hitting him with the hockey sticks.
And they were making a game out of it.
I don't, they were weird people.
Not without, they were fun, you know, not without their own, there were characters, but they were just, you know, hitting what appeared to be his lifeless body with hockey sticks in the backyard.
I don't even know where they got the sticks if they even played hockey.
It was a horrible thing to see.
It was a horrible thing to see.
Now, when they saw me, they looked at me and they didn't stop.
That was even weirder.
They saw me and then they just kept beating him and hitting him with sticks.
And I said, whoa.
And I went up to him.
Eventually, they stopped.
And I went up to him and I carried him.
I carried him, you know, like Christ when he went off the cross.
I carried him back to my house and I kind of nursed him back to life with Lucky Charms.
Now he's dead now.
His parents cooked him and ate him.
Socialist Tax Breaks and Cash00:15:59
Now that is neither here nor there.
Because if he was alive today, he would want to eat Lucky Charms because they reminded him of the good times in his childhood, of which there were admittedly few.
But he wouldn't want the sugars.
He wouldn't want it.
He kept himself good.
Do you see this as a way?
What is your feeling about the people that say we're trying to end capitalism?
What is that, you know, in terms of, you know, people are, I mean, there's obviously all of the, you know, the contradictions you have to breeze past.
You're tweeting that from an iPhone.
You're tweeting that in a Starbucks or whatever it is.
But, you know, most people realize the present form of capitalism is unsustainable.
So how serious are these people they talk about reforming it?
And are they the people to reform it?
And how do you reform it?
You know, with more than slogans.
My perspective on this has changed in recent years.
I probably would have called myself a socialist five or six years ago.
But what I've realized is that the version of socialism that we think of is like the ideal socialism.
So like Northern European democratic socialism, right?
It's socialism, sure.
Like there's high taxes, people are taking care of.
There's a welfare state.
But then there's the other kind of socialism, like Marxism, communism, sort of socialism adjacent, in which the state controls the means of production, right?
The state controls the businesses.
And I see nothing in America's recent history that shows to me that the state would be better at maintaining and producing goods and having functional companies than free market capitalists are.
So I've changed my mind about this a little bit.
I find myself much more sympathetic to free market values than I did before.
That said, you're right.
I mean, capitalism, as we know it, is deeply flawed.
But to me, I think what you could do is, you know, regulate capitalism a little better.
Things like to me, I care deeply about the environment.
That's sort of, I care more about the planet and the people in some respects.
And so, you know, stricter controls on things like emissions.
You know, there are arguments to be made that all people and companies respond better to incentives than they do penalties.
And I think that that is something that should be explored.
But I think socialism for a lot of people, especially young people, it's just become a sort of a signifier, right?
So you put like a little rose emoji in your Twitter bio and now you're a socialist.
And what you want is like, you know, you want free health care, which I think we should have a single payer healthcare system.
I don't know that we should totally dismantle the private healthcare system before we do that.
You know, they want free education.
Lots of them have student loans.
They want free shit, essentially, which I totally, I want free shit too.
I sympathize with that.
But I don't know how much they have thought about like, you know, Donald Trump is our president.
The federal government has, and state governments have shown over and over again that they are unable to manage industry as well as the free market is.
You know, just things like ventilators or like in Washington State where I live, you know, we have this unemployment system.
It's antiquated, you know, difficult to use.
People, an ex-colleague of mine just got his first unemployment check.
He's been unemployed for three months, just got his first unemployment check this week.
You know, the system isn't functional.
And it's these government systems that aren't working.
And I think when people talk about capitalism, one of the major issues that I have with it is this parallel world where wealthy people can evade taxes and they can, and this happens all over the world.
You know, it's not necessary, it's supranational in nature, the way that this system functions, where you can just take money and dump it into real estate in cities without putting your name on it.
You can, you do it through a shell corporation.
It drives up the cost of real estate in these cities like New York and London.
It prices everybody else out.
People like their home.
They like where they grew up.
These areas have histories and they have, and the relationships that people have to these places are deep and complex.
So when you just allow a group of billionaires from all over the world turn these cities into money laundering schemes, it fills people with that type of anxiety that then gets redirected in a very unhealthy place, whereas it's race resentment or it's paranoia or it's conspiracy mongering.
And I think a lot of that starts with people seeing places they loved kind of be taken over and being used for international criminals, really, to stash money.
And that's one example of the system.
But the other example of the system is like, you know, the amount of money and its impact on our political system is absurd.
I mean, it is, but let's think about how effective that is, right?
I mean, obviously, when you have things like, you know, massive corporations donating to senators or whatever, like we need to be concerned about how this is impacting their votes.
But you have someone like Michael Bloomberg, right?
How many billions of dollars did he spend on his campaign?
He fucking lost.
You know, like, the Koch brothers, you know, right.
So I'm not like who spent who Joe Biden spent almost every time.
The Koch brothers sit out 2016.
Didn't they have a war chest of like $80 million that Jane May wrote about?
I don't think they, I don't think they supported Donald Trump.
They didn't support the president, but they went to local elections and things like that.
So when it comes to at least the presidential, the presidential race, I'm not convinced that these massive influx infusions of cash, whether it's Bernie Sanders style $5 at a time, or it's Michael Bloomberg spending his own fortune, or if it's big money packs, I'm not saying it may not matter as much as the ability to manipulate things on a local, even state level.
Sure.
So I think that like that concerns people like me where I'm not a Marxist and I don't believe that the government's going to be good at producing goods, but I'm saying if you don't regulate people, and none of it has to do with America, this is my other thing with capitalism.
Like we've married the capitalism and America so closely together, it's like, this is the way we do it.
But how many of these people don't give a fuck when a city like Detroit collapses?
How many of these people don't care that the rust belt of America is been hollowed out and they're dealing now with an opioid addiction?
How many of these people care about the south side of Chicago and the shootings that are happening there?
Or do these people maintain residences all over the world and their loyalty is to an economic architecture more so than an actual country?
That to me seems unsustainable because I don't want to live in a technocratic surveillance state, which is, I think, what these people want.
I think they want to treat people.
They want to strip people of rights, surveil them, and then they're going to have all the best real estate.
You know, you drive up the California coast, all of the prime real estate is owned, all of the good real estate.
If you like the environment, you know, go to, you know, the Puget Sound to tell me how much of that has been taken over by insanely wealthy, powerful people.
But you also have to, I mean, you do have a point.
I mean, in places like Vancouver, Vancouver, BC was for a while the most expensive.
I go on this show from Marxist to fascist multiple times throughout the episode because what we do is we got to max, we maximize it.
And if you want to do well at this, you and who is it, Jesse Pinkman who you're writing with?
But the point is, if you want to do well with it, you got to honestly, you got to give them a look, give them a right, then you give them a left.
Because everyone that listens wants, all my audience wants the guillotine.
Who goes in the guillotine?
It depends.
Okay.
Well, I don't think anybody should go in the guillotine.
Wait a minute.
Well, enjoy the poor house.
Keep going.
Okay, but there's also, so I think you're right about this.
I mean, foreign speculation is a big deal on local markets.
I mean, in Seattle, they've tried to cut down on foreign buyers buying essentially second and third condos because you end up with cities where, you know, basically you have these, you know, multi-million dollar high-rises per unit and nobody living in them, right?
It's just, it's money marketing.
But one of the reasons there's a housing crisis in the United States is because it's just a supply and demand issue, right?
So there's just not enough housing.
Well, why would people be, why would developers want to build cheap single-family homes when they can build these massive skyrises or whatever?
It's just more expensive places.
So I think you're right.
I mean, is regulation the better way to get there or are market incentives the best way to get there?
I mean, to me, that's the question between socialism and capitalism.
I'm not giving tax abatements to luxury condo developers.
Aren't we giving?
I mean, that's we're incentivizing that activity.
Yeah, absolutely.
Or you have things like, you know, just like the insane tax breaks that they get.
Like some company like Foxconn will get to go to a place like Wisconsin and bring in 500 jobs or whatever.
You know, and like I live in a city with, I don't know how many billionaires live in Seattle.
I mean, there's a fucking ton of them.
And we don't have an income tax in the state.
It is unconstitutional to have an income tax in the state, which is exactly why Amazon and Gay, this is why they live here.
Jeff Bezos initially wanted to house Amazon on a Native American reservation because the tax law, they have even, you know, even more relaxed tax laws on reservations than they do in places like Seattle, which are just like incredibly regressive.
But that's the thing.
Like last year, there was a huge debate in Seattle about instituting a head tax, right?
So there's no, so we have incredibly high property taxes and incredibly high sales tax, and we'll have levies all the time because there's no, there's, this is like an incredibly wealthy city and there's no income tax anywhere in the state and no capital gains tax, which is, it's a constant, it's in the constitution, right?
You have to amend the constitution to change this.
So the city has tried to do little kind of workarounds.
So they were going to institute what's called a head tax or a per employee tax on businesses.
And so Amazon was so opposed to this that Jeff Bezos just like was like, I'm not going to build another tower.
They were in the midst of building a tower.
We're just not going to build this tower.
We're going to move.
He was going to take his ball and go home, which he can do.
I mean, he did the same thing in New York when AOC basically extorted him into, or she attempted to extort him and basically decided not to house this Amazon 2 headquarters in her district.
And so there's this really, there's this really funny image.
So we have a, Seattle has a socialist city council member named Shama Sawant.
And there's this video, I think.
What?
Her name's Shama Sawant.
She's Indian.
She's Indian American.
I thought you said Shamaswan, like your last name was one.
She is the one.
She thinks that she's the one for sure.
You will see her oftentimes on national or like cable news shows screaming loudly.
So Shama Sawant, there's this great video of her.
She's the real proponent of this head tax.
And Amazon, she wants Amazon out of the city.
So she honestly couldn't give a fuck if Amazon takes her, if Jeff Bezos decides, like, we're leaving Seattle.
She wants Amazon.
She doesn't care.
She wants them out.
She wants like, she wants a socialist, a socialist reformation.
So there's a great video of her standing in front of what's called Bezos Balls, which are these two big glass structures that he built in the middle of Seattle.
And so she's standing there and she's screaming like, you know, like workers' rights or what, I don't remember what the slogan is, but something about like an Amazon head tax for like to provide, you know, they're going to use the money to deal with a homelessness crisis.
So something about like helping the poor, helping the working class.
And then behind her, there's a couple dozen dudes in like construction uniforms, like hard hats and their like high visibility vests chanting no Amazon head tax.
So you have you, so the problem is that the socialists, especially this, this particular socialist, proclaims to stand for the working class, while the working class itself is basically like, fuck you.
And that's part of identity politics, right?
And I think one of the problems we're seeing now is, as you mentioned, there's been this divorce.
Everybody's focused on their sort of on their racial group, their sex, their gender, their whatever they identify as.
And there's much less cohesion among the working class.
Whereas if you wanted to have an actual movement to raise the minimum wage or to improve conditions for workers or address income inequality, it would be, I think, much more effective to have a, to coalesce among the working class and it would just splinter into these separate groups based on this color of our skin, which I think is what Bernie Sanders was trying to do.
I wasn't a Sanders supporter because I thought he was going to get just trumped by Donald Trump.
But I think that was his, I think, who did you think had the best chance against Trump?
Because Sanders, to me, I thought Sanders said a lot of good things about unions and workers and the rights of people, you know, to have health care and to have, you know, early childhood education and like a lot of things that would have been positive overall for our society if he could get them done.
So I really flipped back and forth on this.
I thought Sanders for a while because of the momentum that he had after 2018 and all of this popular support, particularly among bringing out the youth vote.
But he just didn't, you know, he got fewer votes in this primary than he did, you know, in 2012.
You know, that was amazing.
The amazing thing is that the Sanders like groundswell support wasn't there.
Well, I think part of that is because of Elizabeth Warren because she split the vote, right?
Yeah.
And Warren, I had been a big Warren fan, and then she just turned, she turned away from being like the champion of the consumer and the little man and the person talking about corruption and politics and, you know, in government, which is what you're talking about, talking about like, you know, like the quote unquote epidemic of murder of trans women, which doesn't exist and just this hyper focus on identity.
The trans women epidemic of murder doesn't exist.
Katie Herzog, autism is the reason people are trans.
Go into this because you said this to me the other day.
You're getting so much trouble.
No, you're not.
You're gonna get famous.
All right.
All right.
I don't know if that's a good thing or can you change your background to Charlottesville?
I'm kidding, Katie.
Tell us about you can't see that.
You can't see the cross burning at running.
I mean, this is like if I haven't seen a lesbian apartment, this is the most Seattle apartment.
Everything's gray.
It's not an apartment, man.
I live in a house.
Well, good for you.
Good for you.
Come and do it in LA.
Come and do it in LA and really impress me.
I moved to the suburbs so I could get away from all this shit.
So I'm a suburban homeowner.
He goes, all we hear is that trans women are being murdered and nobody wants that.
And we hear it, we hear it, and we hear trans women of color are being murdered.
You say no, what say you?
I mean, okay.
So what you hear about is the quote-unquote epidemic of trans violence or epidemic of trans murder.
So if you look at the statistics, and this is I'm about to tell you comes from the human rights campaign.
So this is like the primary gay and trans rights group in the United States.
And up until recently, they were considered far too regressive on trans issues, but they have since shifted from being a gay rights group to, I think, primarily a trans rights or trans advocacy group.
So this is from HRC.
HRC says that in 2019, 25 trans people were murdered, right?
So 25 of anything, like just on its face, it's just incredible to me that people continue to call this an epidemic because 25 of anything isn't an epidemic, right?
So I ran the numbers and I can't remember them off the top of my head, but it turns out that when you look at look at murder rates, and this is a little bit difficult to do because we don't really know the population of trans people in the United States is probably underestimated.
But so using like the most current data, what I found and what other people have found as well is that the murder rate for trans women or trans people is slightly lower than that for natal females and vastly lower than that for natal males.
Black Trans Murder Rates00:04:01
And it is true that black trans women are much more likely to be the victims of murder than like a you know a white trans dude in Seattle, just vastly more likely.
But when you drill into the actual cases, these particular cases, what you find is that the vast majority of these people who were killed in 2019 and 2018 and 2017 and every other year were not killed in bias crimes.
They were killed doing sex work.
They were killed in like through domestic violence, random bad luck.
There were a couple bias crimes last year, and it's all terrible.
People shouldn't be killed.
Like, let's just acknowledge that.
But this isn't an epidemic.
It's actually not even disproportionately high.
It is higher for sure for black trans women, particularly black trans women who are sex workers.
But transphobia doesn't appear to be the actual root of these killings.
And to me, if you care about trans lives and you want trans people to be have healthy, happy lives where they are not victimized, you need to get at the root of the issue.
And if the root isn't transphobia, then you need to stop repeating this slogan, you know, that transphobia is killing people or whatever, because it's just not true.
And so the other statistic that gets floated around all the time, all the time, this is like, has been like back in the news this week.
Is the argument that they're more likely to end up in sex work because they're trans and they're discriminated against at other jobs?
Well, yeah, I think that's that's that's probably part of the argument.
You know, and there are certainly socioeconomic factors at play here.
If you're black, you're more likely to be poor.
If you're poor, you're more likely to be doing sex work.
There are, this is like real intersectionality.
You know, there are these like interlocking, interlocking, you know, characteristics dependent on these populations.
But so this other statistic is even crazier.
And that's that the life expectancy of trans women is 35.
And sometimes they say like, no, it's the life expectancy of like black trans women or trans women of color, but you see this repeated all the time.
Trans women on average only live to be 35 years old.
So I looked into this last year and that number comes out from basic, like almost nowhere.
So there was a human rights organization based in South America, and they polled different like LGBTQ advocacy groups and they asked them, they asked them, they basically got data on like on rates of victimization.
And what they found that in like very specific populations like sex workers in Brazilian flavilas or however you pronounce that word, the average age.
Yeah, yeah.
So the average age.
Of a murder victim, of a trans murder victim, and actually not even average so in this particular population.
So 80 of uh, trans murder victims in this population were under the age of 35, which is not actually uncommon.
I mean, most people who are murdered are young.
But this has nothing to do with the United States.
This is extrapolated from the most, some of the most dangerous areas in the world, doing the most dangerous job in the world.
So it has nothing to do with your average trans person in the United States.
And also, a lot of trans people don't come out until they're well after the age of 35 years old, right?
So it just on its face.
It just doesn't make any sense.
But people continue to repeat it and I think this is really bad because it harms trans people, right?
I mean, what do you think it would be like to like wake up every day and think like i'm never gonna live to be to see my 36th birthday, i'll never be able to be president, because trans women only live to be 35 years old?
It's just not true um, and it just gets repeated and that's what drives me crazy about the media.
So what happens is like a study will get published or some advocacy group will commission a study and then they'll issue a press release and then the media picks it up and doesn't do any sort of digging into it, doesn't look at the numbers, doesn't ask for the data, just assumes that it's true and just starts repeating it.
And then, you know, celebrities pick it up and start repeating it and then it just passes like a virus through culture and all of a sudden, people think that, you know, trans women are being hunted in the streets.
This came up Kamala Harris at the Lgbt town hall.
Biological Health and Obamacare Rollback00:07:02
Someone interrupted her and said, like we're being lit, we're being hunted, and she said, I know you are and it's just not true.
There's like there's not a serial killer going around terrorizing trans women.
What's happening is that they're being trans, they're being terrorized by misinformation that typically well-meaning people continue to spread because they're just not skeptical.
So, in closing, because you you've you, you're so smart and you people should follow you and read everything you do.
You're one of the best followers on twitter.
Kitty Perzog on twitter um, you are somebody that I think has.
You know, you've ruffled a lot of feathers and and I I I, do we get back to facts ever in this country do we get back to objective information?
Or is anybody going to be able to say what you just said without you know your intentions, being uh challenged and being called a Nazi and a racist and fuck her zog, you know, spray painted on the outside of the stranger?
Is anybody able be going to be able to have these conversations ever again?
Do we see any?
Is anything positive culturally happening right now that might lead us back to a more fact-based, rational uh discourse in this country?
No, There it is.
And I agree.
And by the way, agreed.
I agree with you.
Okay, wait.
Yeah.
Here's what I think is going to happen.
I think that we're in the midst of a mass hysteria.
And it's not just what's happening.
It's like in Salem witch trials, but many of those women were witches.
And it's, oddly enough, being a witch is also very trendy right now.
So I think we're in the midst of these things happen in American culture or not just American culture.
They happen all across, all across the world.
You see things like the Cultural Revolution and communist nations and the difference between with lots of the same sort of social strictures, right?
So in like Romania in the 70s and 80s, 60s, 70s and 80s, they would have these, what were essentially like struggle sessions, these like mandatory self-criticism sessions where people would get together and publicly proclaim how they had been enemies of the working class.
And usually what they had done was some sort of thought crime.
And we're seeing this now, but instead of it being sort of a top-down directive from the government, this is coming from the bottom up, right?
So this is coming from the culture where people, particularly like, you know, sort of elite middle class or upper middle class, highly educated white people are voluntarily sort of taking place in these struggle sessions because of a like real sense of guilt and a real sense of like profound shame about what people with our skin tone did before we were alive in many cases.
So I think that's where this is going.
I hope that I'm wrong.
And I think it's going to last for years.
I think that we're going to, we're seeing something break open now that is going to spread farther and wider throughout society.
And people are going to get scareder and scared to speak their minds and to be honest.
And I'm deeply concerned about it.
I don't think this is how like the end of the world.
I think that we're in a moment.
We're swinging back.
We swung to Trump and now we're going to swing back the other way now.
I keep wondering, like it would be very interesting to me.
You know, there's all this panic about Trump sort of issuing authoritarianism into the United States, which he has absolutely not been able to do as much as he would like to.
And I keep thinking like, what if we do, what if he does issue authoritarianism and, but it's not the federal government.
It's coming from the resistance, right?
It would be sort of like perfectly ironic if we do devolve into this authoritarian society where nobody can say what they believe.
And I'm not talking about, you know, like I think that norms should exist in society.
I don't think that we should have no rules and people should just go around, you know, screaming racist shit or whatever.
I don't think that the problem is that what is acceptable thought, what is acceptable to express, has become increasingly narrow, right?
So I'm talking about just like talking about the realities of biological sex, these things that are basic mainstream opinions.
That's what I'm worried about being put on.
Did you see the thing today where somebody said Trump just enshrined biological sex is defined to men and women in the law?
All trans health care is now wiped out.
This is what you see on Twitter.
And people are saying that's why what J.K. Rowling said was so detrimental and dangerous.
Is any of that true?
I haven't looked into this.
I saw this floating around Twitter.
I think what they did was, just from like reading a headline and really not reading into it at all, I think what they did is roll back protections under the Obamacare, under the Affordable Care Act for trans people, which I'm against.
I think that insurance companies should cover trans healthcare.
I think that's probably what it's about.
But their argument is that J.K. Rowling's expression that men and women exist is the reason that dude, this has been in the works for a long time, and I highly doubt that Trump is dictating public policy based on J.K. Rowling.
Not that particular tweet, but they're saying that's the problem with biological essentialists is that they're which it's so funny, biological essentialists.
I mean, even to just say that word, but when you have those types of opinions, they allow governments to take away healthcare from trans people.
I just, I think that's on its face.
I don't think that's like two issues that are unconnected.
Yeah, J.K. Rowling, she wrote a piece called Like Turf Wars or something, and it's sort of an explainer about why she came out recently and sort of dipped her toe in the conversation about trans stuff.
And she's referring to something really specific that's happening in the UK, this Gender Recognition Act, which would move from a process.
There's basically because of the NHS, the National Health Service there, if you want sort of trans health care, you have to basically go in front of a panel.
I think I'm getting this right.
You basically have to go through, there's steps that you have to go through to get healthcare.
There's sort of more of a gatekeeper method there.
And then in like 2018 or something, ironically, the Conservative Party introduced this Gender Recognition Act.
And the reason they did this was because this was on the heels of gay marriage.
And gay marriage was such an overwhelming popular success that they thought like, hey, we'll just like, we'll, we'll like jump on this bandwagon and do something for the trans people and everybody's going to love us.
And so what they proposed was this law that would make a sex change would be basically self self-declaration, right?
So if you say right now that you're a woman, legally you are female and you have access to women's spaces.
If I say I'm a man, I have access to men's spaces.
And so the Conservative Party proposed this.
And then there was a massive backlash, not just between like radical feminists who don't want trans women in their spaces, but like Catholic women and mainstream normies, just women who said like, we, we are uncomfortable with this.
So she's talking about something really specific and not trans healthcare.
And I think she like affirmed her, you know, her belief that trans people should have access to healthcare.
Right.
One, one last question.
You said you got into writing about detransitioning because you were interested in heretics and now you've kind of become a heretic.
Do you think you manifested that?
Did you want to always kind of live on the outside of mainstream thought?
Eighth Grade Nuance and Detransitioning00:07:41
I mean, I kind of do, which is why I'm a comedian, right?
Like my job, I guess other than prostitution, it's like the second oldest job.
Like I'm like the town crier.
I'm the fool.
I'm the whatever.
Like I'm the guy that's in the public square just shouting and then people come by and throw him change or whatever.
But what about heretics so fascinated you and you seem very comfortable being one?
I guess that's probably because I haven't left my house in three months.
And so I'm like, I no longer have people screaming at me.
Yeah, I mean, there's probably an element of self-reflection there.
I don't think it was conscious at the time, but I would say that the writing that I've done before and after that piece tends to, I try to find the unexpected in things, you know, and I've learned that almost nothing you see is as it appears to be.
And so I think that's in part why I'm drawn to these things.
And the more I read, the more I realize that everything I think I know about the world is more complex than I thought.
Yes, the more and more informed you get, the less you feel like you have any clue of what's going on.
And the less you realize you can trust institutions.
And I don't want to be like, you know, I'm not Donald Trump.
I don't, unfortunately, I don't have his money or his tan, his spray tan.
But, you know, I don't believe in like the, I don't want to be like the fake news person or whatever, but I will say like a lot of mainstream and I mean, we saw the Covington thing.
The Covington thing happened was completely fake.
Jussie Smollett.
I mean, there's a lot.
We've seen a lot.
Okay.
I got a question for you.
Yeah.
As a gay dude.
Yeah.
How long did it take for you to think like, oh, Jesse Smollett is bullshit?
Well, you know what bothered me about the Jussie Smollett thing?
And this is what always bothers me.
And I've spent my life in New York City, LA.
I've been to Chicago a bunch.
I've witnessed very few things that I would consider, you know, and I've been in places where everybody's drunk.
I've spent a lot of time with drunks in comedy clubs and things like that.
People have yelled things out at me.
I mean, it's part of the fucking contract you sign up for when you're a comedian.
I've been on subways late at night and all that stuff.
The idea that there were these Trump supporting gang of people in a metropolitan city committing hate crime seemed very weird to me.
Impossible?
No.
But it seemed odd to me that that, when I heard that, it made me go, huh?
Really?
At 2 a.m., there's just guys with Trump hats on going after Jussie Smollett, who's getting a Subway sandwich at 2 a.m.
Yeah, that was the thing that got me.
I was like, aren't you rich?
Why are you eating subway?
Why aren't you postmating or grubhubbing something?
Why are it freezing?
And I, and I, and I did a video about this several weeks later.
I was, I was attacked by Elizabeth Warren supporters.
I was hit with feathers in a headdress, and I was attacked.
And so I understand what it's like.
But yeah, did they come back and apologize to you after it turned out that he was bullshit?
I'm sure that they did.
Well, you know, the weird thing about me is I came out late in life.
I came out at 25.
Then I started stand-up comedy right away.
I quit drinking the same year.
So you had all of these things happen at once.
I became essentially another person, right?
I never had the time to just be gay for two years and like just party and drug it up and fuck.
I came out.
I had to stop doing drugs and drinking and I started doing comedy.
So it was this weird, but I was an actor as a little kid.
Like I had a lot of traditionally gay experiences, right?
I'm insanely talented and gorgeous.
So when you have a ballerina.
I do.
And you know what?
I look like how they do when they don't do as well because I've seen older ballerinas.
So the reality is you're wrong and right at the same time.
But I always, you know, here's the thing, man.
I hate groupthink.
I've always hated it.
It's so weird to me.
It's the antithesis of humor, like this weird kind of cultish.
I was a drug addict.
I understand what it's like to live this binary existence of like, I'm either high or I'm sober.
I'm getting drugs.
I'm not getting drugs.
And so to me, when I got rid of drugs and I stopped drinking and I went into comedy and I was doing this and I was following the path that I should be following, like I just, I really started to get weird about people that had, you know, no room for nuance because I'm like, that's where everything lives.
Everything lives in nuance.
Jokes live in nuance.
And I've always a fan of like, you know, people say, I don't present as gay, so it's easier for me.
100% true.
They're 100% right about that.
But like being gay is the 10th most fucked up thing about me in terms of the life I've lived.
I mean, I bought a house when I was 22 with a subprime mortgage on cocaine.
I mean, you know, most people wake up.
You know, gay people will wake up or straight people wake up next to someone and go, how did I get here?
I woke up in a $700,000 home and said, how did I get here?
And then there was a statue.
There was a title beside you?
Yeah, and I owned the property.
So I had done all this weird shit.
I mean, I dropped acid on eighth grade stage of my graduation.
You know, I was doing acid when I was in eighth grade.
I was doing cocaine in eighth grade and ninth grade.
I was hanging out at crack houses.
I was like doing wild stuff.
And then I was selling subprime mortgages for a long time, trying to help the country, really.
And I was just involved in all this weird shit, man.
And to me, sexuality is a part of the story, but it's not the whole story.
For most people, it is their whole story.
For most gay people.
For most gay people, it is.
There's nothing wrong with that because it's like...
It is.
Yeah, there is.
I mean, you're completely right.
I mean, I find it like very, I find it aggravating.
And I don't find it, I don't find it interesting at all.
But, you know, and like I lived like mostly in queer in sort of queer circles for most of my life until I basically got excommunicated in the last few years.
And when I think back about that time, it's like all we talked about was being gay.
That's all we talked about.
Right, right.
So fucking boring.
Everything was gay.
Somebody would be like paper or plastic and I'd be like, I'm gay.
It was just fucking.
It's boring.
It's weird.
And now that's everywhere.
Everyone's gay now and it's weird.
So I always felt like, yeah, I'm sure I had internalized homophobia, this, that, and the other thing.
But then like there was a time in comedy when I started doing comedy, when I said I was gay on stage, people would say, ew, or like people would be like openly hostile to it.
But then it turned to where like I even like in longer sets, I say it.
In short sets, I stopped saying it because when I said it, people would clap.
And that's like the worst thing in comedy.
People be like, good for you.
Good for you.
And then I'm like, oh, enough.
What a weird fucking thing.
But people are heavily invested in that which makes them unique.
And if what makes you unique is your sexuality and otherwise you're a basic bitch person.
If what makes you unique is your sex, which is what I love about all these people.
They're like, I'm queer and I love the real housewives and I love, you know, Frappuccino.
And I'm like, you're just a basic bitch.
It doesn't matter who you sleep with.
You like, you, you have nothing unique about you.
Groups of queers are conformist like every other group.
Houseboat Tribes and Conformity00:03:45
They are.
I mean, they are.
Any group you have any, these sort of, we break up into these tribes.
It's not that different from high school.
And they're all like each other.
And, you know, that's, I guess, an offensive thing to say, but this comes from like long observations of hanging out with these communities.
Yeah.
I mean, how does it affect you?
Like, are you, when you say you're extra communicated, do you just not get the invites anymore?
Oh, dude, no.
Yeah.
I don't, I like basically live a pretty friendless existence.
And I do have, I have like three or four friends.
I mean, most of them are older.
I have friends in like their 60s and 70s now.
And part of it.
Someone like just some old mountain lesbian you talk to who just she lives on a houseboat and she chain smokes inside of it.
But see, this is what you want.
You don't want a lot of friends.
You want, I want a houseboat chain smoker.
Yeah.
Yeah.
She like moved to Seattle in the fucking 70s to learn how to be a pilot.
I mean, she's just fascinating.
Or I could hang out with queer people who only talk about being queer.
Right.
So yeah, I would say I don't have very many friends, but I do have a wife and a dog.
So I'm still.
You're an adult.
You know, I think it's like when you're an adult.
When you look at the 60s, Camille Pagani talks about this.
When you look at like what the, because there was a lot of similar ideas happening, but it was all about sensory experiences and LSD and the body and people fucking and free love and Hinduism and like, you know, expanding your mind.
And then you look at this revolution and it's all about like nitpicking language and like a very churlish, secretarial, you know, weird, bureaucratic, sexless, fearful existence.
And you're like, whoa, they got everything wrong.
They took like everything from the 60s and now it's like the bad shit.
They took all the bad shit.
Now it's people just chewing their tongues on Adderall, going on tweet threads.
It's like crazy.
And what's scary is what's next.
That's what's always scared me.
I'm like, is violence next?
Because it seems like everywhere in the culture, from celebrities to the media, there is just a, it's violence is being excused and even like in certain corners of the media, agitated and like requested.
Right.
It's justified because it's violence in the name of a righteous cause.
You know, it's, I don't think people have, are very aware of like recent history around the event around the world.
It's not, it's not like any of this is new.
Yeah.
Which in some ways it's good because we can see how we can see sort of these patterns.
You know, humans, these mass panics, these hysterias, they come and they go.
And I think we're in one and you can't really see it until it's over.
Tell people where to find you.
Where can they support you?
Where can they read your stuff?
So my podcast is sort of my main thing now.
I decided I don't want to be a writer anymore.
Words are over or writing is over.
I'm just going to be a speaker now.
So my podcast is called Blocked and Reported, and we're on Patreon.
It's like Blocked and Reported at Patreon.
I don't know what it is.
You can Google it.
I'm on Twitter at Kitty Perzog.
And I guess that's the only places I want you to find me.
That's where she wants to be found.
She's a one-woman wrecking crew doing battle against autistic trans communists.
And if there's not.
If you don't see the value in that, well, I don't know what to tell you.
Thank you for doing the show.
I appreciate it.
You're not a retweeter.
She never retweets what I do, but I enjoy her anyway.
She doesn't retweet.
I keep big tabs on that.
She never retweets, but that's okay.
But she's a follow on Twitter, man.
If you're not following Kitty Perzog on Twitter, she's a great follow.
I love the way her mind works.
It's very, very fascinating.
And good luck, man.
Listen, Patreon and all of these things are the future.
One of the things, and I'll kind of close with this.
What bothers me about people in my industry is that they're supposedly super progressive, but they're all married to these archaic institutions.
Cartels, Social Media, and Admissions00:01:14
They're like, let's reform Hollywood.
It's like, what are you saying?
Create your own avenues.
You have the technology to do your own thing.
I've made 100 sketches in the past two years.
They're funny.
They get millions of views.
They've never been on television.
We put them on Twitter and Instagram and YouTube.
You know, we put out two podcasts a week.
Nobody inhibits us from doing this.
There's no editor.
Nobody's telling us what to say or what to do.
And we live and die on basically the response of the audience.
And yet, so many of the most progressive, most evolved minds of my business still refuse to do that because they don't really want to put their talent in the hands of the audience.
They want to basically, they like these cartels.
As much as they don't want to admit that, they love these cartels of people that will either green light something they want to do or not.
So it'll be what you're doing right now, what I'm doing, I mean, this is just kind of it.
This is kind of it.
Yeah, and it's actually working out.
It's shocking.
Yeah, it's shocking.
Well, listen, good luck with everything.
Thank you.
You're welcome back anytime.
I appreciate it.
I know it was an honor for you today to speak to me.