April 3, 2019 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
01:00:48
| 
| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| Joining me today is a comedian, a writer for the Daily News and The Spectator, the former sex columnist at Playboy, and a woman in the midst of taking off Twitter for Lent. | ||
| Bridget Phetasy, welcome to The Rubin Report. | ||
| Thank you for having me. | ||
| You are in the midst of taking off Twitter for Lent. | ||
| As I just said, you are on a break from little characters and attacking people and owning people and destroying people and getting attacked. | ||
| I know exactly how Jesus felt. | ||
| I can see why you're smiling. | ||
| How's it going? | ||
| Before we get into anything else about you, I mean, so first off, how long, you've been doing it for a couple weeks now. | ||
| Okay, yeah, so I inadvertently didn't know that this was the longest Lent ever, so it's normally 40 days, but because of the way Easter falls, it's 46 days. | ||
| Oh, man. | ||
| And there's 26 days left, so I'm 40 days, or sorry, 20 days in of my 46, which is... So why Twitter? | ||
| Why giving up Twitter, of all things? | ||
| So I have not many vices left. | ||
| I've given up drinking, I've given up smoking weed, I've given up... I mean, if there's something you can quit, I pretty much quit it, other than coffee and Twitter. | ||
| And I thought that I would give up coffee, because that was the easiest of the two, and I tried to do that and I wanted to kill myself. | ||
| And so I decided that I would give up Twitter. | ||
| And I'm like you. | ||
| I take weekends off sometimes. | ||
| I try. | ||
| And I felt in February really addicted to it. | ||
| I remember there would be days where I'd say, OK, 9 a.m., you're off. | ||
| You shouldn't even be doing it in the morning. | ||
| But by 9 a.m., get off and go do something. | ||
| And then it's 11. | ||
| And I'm like, well, I'll just do until 11. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And then it's noon. | ||
| And this is very addictive thinking. | ||
| Oh, well, I've already ruined my whole half of my day, so now just until the rest of the day I'm just going to tweet. | ||
| And I can feel myself that refresh, refresh, refresh, like a little rat. | ||
| What was that like when you realized that the kick that you're getting, the dopamine kick or whatever it is, is sort of like some of the things that you've quit because you've been sober for about five years? | ||
| I'm going to stop at five and a half a little bit. | ||
| It wasn't necessarily noticing the kick, it was noticing the inability to the lack of | ||
| power, feeling kind of powerless over being able to stop when I wanted to stop. | ||
| If I put an end time, not being able to meet that end time, having it, it's very much like | ||
| my life started feeling a little bit unmanageable. | ||
| And even just seeing how much the most interesting thing that's come of the two weeks or a little | ||
| more than, I guess almost three weeks now, is how much physical energy I have. | ||
| So how... | ||
| This and this I haven't really found the science on because I'm a nerd so I went down all these science holes and now I'm looking at reading this book Irresistible which is all about screen addiction and all the studies and it's brilliant but why do I how is something so passive taking so much energy actual physical energy? | ||
| So you physically feel better right? | ||
| Oh, physically I have so much actual energy. | ||
| And is it just because the adrenals, you're getting kind of fired up when you have that adrenaline? | ||
| I don't know how you feel when you're on. | ||
| I generally step away if I start feeling reactive. | ||
| If I start feeling my heart racing, and even when I'm kind of addicted, I'm like, okay Bridget, step away. | ||
| What about the mental clarity? | ||
| So that's been, the productivity is, I've written, I've been doing a daily writing prompt on my Patreon. | ||
| I've written, just that alone I've done 15,000 words. | ||
| I wrote a 12-page book proposal. | ||
| I did, I've been keeping Diary of a Twitter Junkie, just a daily how I feel and whatnot, and that's another probably 20,000 words. | ||
| I've pretty much written a book. | ||
| Yeah, good. | ||
| I mean, that's why you're doing it, right? | ||
| That's about the same amount that I probably would have written on Twitter. | ||
| Right, exactly. | ||
| So, it's interesting because when I've done this, and as you know, I do the weekends and I do the August thing, what I found is, especially when it's not just the weekend, when it's the longer one, is that I'm just generally calmer. | ||
| Like I'm not that neurotic or whatever in general, but I find that like my patience level, | ||
| like if I'm at the supermarket, normally you're like checking out | ||
| and you're maybe looking at your phone or whatever, where now it's like I'm more inclined to say hello | ||
| to the person that's checking me out or just like a little more present. | ||
| I am so much more present, definitely. | ||
| That has been a remarkable difference in everything and even people in my family, and my sister, | ||
| we were joking about the other day, and she said, "Hey, you are more present." | ||
| Even just on the phone with her. | ||
| And in my life, and I-- | ||
| I feel like even my dog notices it. | ||
| My dog seems more connected to me. | ||
| I'm like, is this because I'm just not on my phone all the time? | ||
| But I'm a maniac. | ||
| I have an addictive personality and I'm just a maniac in general. | ||
| And so the first week I would say I went through real withdrawal. | ||
| And it was interesting because I went to I went to mass on Ash Wednesday because I figured if I was | ||
| going to do it I might as well partake in my ritual. I'm not some great Catholic. But I | ||
| went and I was feeling kind of ashamed that I was quitting something so stupid as Twitter. And the | ||
| priest, or the monsignor, gets up and he's giving his sermon and he says lent means slow in French and | ||
| that it means this is a time we're supposed to go within and look at how we can help those who | ||
| means this is a time we're supposed to go with them | ||
| and look at how we can help those who are suffering and and he said we need to slow down and then he reaches | ||
| are suffering. And he said we need to slow down and then he reaches under his cassock and he | ||
| under his cassette can be pulled out his cell phone | ||
| pulls out his cell phone and holds it up in front of the whole parish and says and put these down. | ||
| and holds it up in front of the whole parish and says and put these down yeah | ||
|
unidentified
|
And I looked around and I was like sermon and he says let me in slow and french and that it | |
| and i looked around i was like we have a problem society when a priest is this is | ||
| the fact that i don't think that he's holding up his cell phone in front of the parish | ||
|
unidentified
|
telling you to put it down as a destroying your relationships here | |
| and that was and i look over my aunties on her phone and the church | ||
| right is hilarious what's interesting because it's like we can't quite | ||
| how having access to this much information so fast, just out of nowhere, basically, | ||
| only within the last, say, 10 years, we have just no idea how it's rewiring our brain | ||
| the way we think, the way we behave, the way we connect with each other. | ||
| Well, they do all these studies on empathy with younger kids and how you need to have those. | ||
| One of the things about the world we live in, even just cancel culture, etc., I feel like there's this diminishment of being awkward. | ||
| You can't, nobody is allowed to have these awkward interactions, which is how you, you might say something wrong and then somebody will have a look on their face and you know, oh, I went, I stepped over a line. | ||
| But because everybody's living in so much fear of saying the wrong thing or there isn't | ||
| this like awkward or they're just on their phones where they can have text message interactions | ||
| and not hear tone and body language. | ||
| So there's this loss of making mistakes and being awkward and even I'm and you see it | ||
| of making mistakes and being awkward. | ||
| And you see it all across the board right now. | ||
| all across the board right now. | ||
| So that's been, it has been interesting just, if you sit in a restaurant and you are, | ||
| So that that's been, it has been interesting just if you sit in a restaurant and you are | ||
| say you and I went to eat and you went to the restaurant and I just sat there and did | ||
| say you and I went to eat, and you went to the restaurant, and I just sat there and did not look at my phone, | ||
| not look at my phone, I would look like a psychopath. | ||
| I would look like a psychopath. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Oh my God. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Everyone-- - Oh my God, she's just sitting there looking at the wall? | |
| She's just sitting there looking at the wall. | ||
| Just running. | ||
| And this, in the book Irresistible, he says that there's this inability for us to just be bored, | ||
| And this in the book Irresistible, he says that there's this. | ||
| that as humans, we used to just have this idle time. | ||
| And I look at my screen time, and you know, you'll see your screen report, | ||
| and it'll say something like, "Oh, your screen time is down 45%." | ||
| You're like, "Hooray!" | ||
| And then it's like, to five hours. | ||
| Right, to 27 hours a day. | ||
| What am I doing? | ||
| What am I doing for five? | ||
| And the number of times you pick it up, we're rats, we're lab rats. | ||
| Is the catch 22, though, that the internet and all this connectivity | ||
| has also given us, I mean, I can talk about just the two of us. | ||
| We live in a digital space, and we've created things that people appreciate, | ||
| and all those things. | ||
| It's also given us everything that we want. | ||
| Everything. - In a certain way. | ||
| Like, I'm so appreciative of my life, and it's through that connectivity. | ||
| I know. | ||
| But that doesn't mean it's not a dangerous sword to wield, I suppose. | ||
| And I would feel so isolated ideologically. | ||
| In 2016, approaching 2016, being in L.A., I started feeling like I was going crazy. | ||
| Truly. | ||
| And it was you and people, finding people like you online, and that's how I kind of came out of the space of, I would say, I was just living on Twitter. | ||
| I was really just around comedians and writers and then slowly kind of drifted into political Twitter, which was always there. | ||
| Yeah, and now you're full on all right. | ||
| Now I'm on your show and I'm a Nazi. | ||
| (laughing) | ||
| So I'm happy to be inducted into this club. | ||
| Yeah, all right, so let's go there for a second. | ||
| So one of the things that, the reason that I've wanted to have you on | ||
| for quite some time is I've sort of been watching through Twitter, you're what I would say | ||
| political awakening is, 'cause you strike me as just a sort of old school lefty liberal, whatever, | ||
| but you are seriously waking up to, or have woken up to, just the postmodern thinking | ||
| and leftist nonsense and all of this stuff about free speech, and we'll talk about Me Too | ||
| in the piece you wrote, and a series of other things. | ||
| It seems like every day I can see you getting a little more and a little more like, here we are, people! | ||
| Is anyone sane? | ||
| But this is the problem. | ||
| So I have to check myself. | ||
| And these are the questions that I would have for you, for instance. | ||
| As somebody with what I thought were liberal values, I don't like how in this tribal world it's like the left gets social justice and the right gets family values. | ||
| No, everybody should care about those things. | ||
| I know plenty of people on the right who care about social justice, and plenty of people on the left who care about family values. | ||
| Well, how would you define social justice when you say that? | ||
| Oh, gosh. | ||
| I mean, I think just caring about other people. | ||
| I feel like there's an idea that people on the right are callous and just don't care about anyone else. | ||
| Right, they only care about taxes. | ||
| Right, money and themselves, and essentially, there's a callousness, I would think, that is applied to that. | ||
| I do think that people... I found that to be completely untrue, by the way. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I agree. | |
| The more that I've met these people, I think I did think that years ago. | ||
| So my biggest... | ||
| thing that I have to check myself is am I reacting to rejection? So in being somewhat rejected | ||
| by the former party, although I don't feel rejected, I feel | ||
| like I didn't move, it just went | ||
| "Okay, bye!" | ||
| You know, like they're drifting away. | ||
| And I kind of I explain it to people like I was this customer, a regular | ||
| at a bar and I was a regular at the bar and then they took me as the | ||
| voter for instance and I just kind of went to that bar all the time, they knew | ||
| me, I grew up going to that bar with my grandpa and my dad. | ||
| It was a family bar tradition and then suddenly they stopped caring about me and they started caring about the hipsters with the beards and Craft beers and stuff and they stopped caring about just their regular customers and the normal common sense folk and started making these fancy drinks. | ||
| I like this metaphor. | ||
| I like this metaphor. | ||
| They somehow lost me as a customer because now I am a registered independent. | ||
| And you'll see the criticism on the left, I see this a lot, of well, somebody said something I didn't like and so I stopped believing in equality and women's rights and I abandoned all of my principles and became a conservative. | ||
| I don't think that's a fair assessment. | ||
| That assessment, I think, has no self-reflection, which is my biggest... People accuse me, too. | ||
| They say, oh, you don't call out the right enough. | ||
| Well, I'm not a conservative. | ||
| I'm learning about conservatism, but I didn't know anything. | ||
| I was raised a blue-blood, Yankee, Democrat, liberal. | ||
| My dad sang for the Kennedys. | ||
| That was where I came from. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And so coming, I just wasn't really paying attention. | ||
| And then suddenly I felt like that, what's happening? | ||
| How are these, how, how is it that there, you know, it's suddenly like punk rock to be conservative? | ||
|
unidentified
|
All right, all right. | |
| I want to back up to this bar metaphor. | ||
| I like what you're doing here. | ||
| So okay, now the hipsters come in. | ||
| They've got their fancy drinks. | ||
| You know, you don't know where you are anymore. | ||
| The bar that you and your dad and your grandpa are in. | ||
| Where do you go? | ||
| So you walk out of the bar. | ||
| What happens now? | ||
| I'm welcomed with open arms by the outright. | ||
| But are you shocked when you go into the other bar next door that you thought was the evil bar and you realize that, whoa, there's some decent people in this crazy, conservative, righty world? | ||
| Yeah, people are people. | ||
| I'm always like, are you... I moved every year and a half. | ||
| Growing up. | ||
| So I'm very sensitive to mob mentality in general. | ||
| I'm very aware of groups and how they like to form and tribes and I've always been the girl on the outside kind of looking in. | ||
| So this space that I'm occupying now is not really that unfamiliar to me. | ||
| But what was shocking was finding that they weren't evil, these like evil people and that their | ||
| values, you know, we can have differences of opinion and that seems to be the thing that concerns me the most is | ||
| that there doesn't seem to be any tolerance for different differing | ||
| opinions or nuance, which is what's worrisome. And so the new bar seems | ||
| to be a little bit more tolerant. | ||
| However, I'm also aware that they're more than happily, they will more than happily weaponize somebody like me as | ||
| like the disaffected liberal who no longer, | ||
| you know, who is rejected from her tribe essentially. | ||
| Right, but isn't that true? | ||
| So how do they weaponize that? | ||
| Because people will say that to me. | ||
| Well, see, you left the left and now the right's embracing you because they want to use you to show that you're not that bad or that they're not that bad or something like that. | ||
| I'm always like, well, they don't seem to be that bad. | ||
| No, it's true. | ||
| But what I mean by weaponize is that they'll happily abandon me if I don't. | ||
| It's not like they're taking me in as one of them. | ||
| So they're not taking me in to their tribe to protect me. | ||
| The minute that I express any nuance in anything that might not be in alignment with them, | ||
| there will be no defense of me. | ||
| I'm pretty... | ||
| I bet that will change. | ||
| I bet your thoughts on that will change. | ||
| You think so? | ||
| Yeah, because I go to all these conservative turning point college events and I talk about being pro-choice and gay married and pro-weed and for strong prison reform and against the death penalty, all these lefty things, and they keep inviting me back. | ||
| They love the differences. | ||
| I mean, that's really what I'm finding. | ||
| But I hear you. | ||
| It's weird to think that's possible when you're in that new bar. | ||
| But that's just what I've found. | ||
| I found they're more open-minded and I can have these discussions openly about things that I didn't feel like there was room for discussion and there have been just the most My awakening really came when I started noticing that I was self-censoring. | ||
| So I just started recognizing that I was not speaking freely. | ||
| And even when I went and did Michael Knoll's show, I remember we were all just in makeup and talking, and I was like, oh, it's so nice to be able to just speak freely and not be walking on eggshells and afraid | ||
| that I'm going to use the wrong term or what wrong anything and | ||
| Just that Recognizing that that was happening was something that | ||
| pushed you know I would say was Where not only was I ignored at the bar, but suddenly I was | ||
| not sure I wanted to be in that bar anymore Yeah, because I felt like I wasn't really welcome and part | ||
| of me is am I just old You know is this thing that is this just progress and maybe | ||
| I'm like the old lady That's like this isn't the way things like are | ||
| and... | ||
| I seriously hope not. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I think I'm only two years older than you. | |
| There is a certain amount of stuff that I've learned from younger women. | ||
| The whole stuff with consent culture, for example. | ||
| I think that, again, it's eroding a lot of awkwardness. | ||
| And they're like, can I touch your hair? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And just human sexuality, trying to put that much control on it. | ||
| Crazy to me. | ||
| However, the younger women are like, just because you old bags put up with somebody smacking your ass while you're waitressing doesn't mean that we have to, and that's okay, fair enough. | ||
| But that's different than consent culture, right? | ||
| I think most decent people, I think probably, most of those scary conservatives in that bar, | ||
| they're probably not slapping the waitress's ass in that bar. | ||
| Actually, you know what, they're secretly doing it in the first bar you were in, | ||
| but at the same time, they're pretending that they're all about women and all that. | ||
| I think it's all across the board, though. | ||
| I mean, I've experienced that. | ||
| That's just, I would say, yeah, it's, I think my point was really that | ||
| I just probably turn my head to a certain amount of sexual harassment, | ||
| like that the younger generation just doesn't accept, which is not a bad thing. | ||
| So where do you, how do you, you've written about this a little bit. | ||
| How do you draw the lines on all of that? | ||
| What you're describing is just sort of basic human emotion with each other and that we need a certain amount of freedom and ability to make mistakes and push each other and that we have certain desires and that, you know, but they can't be just like unbridled desires and all of that with a culture now where, you know, they want you to sign documents before you hook up with people. | ||
| Yeah, there's apps. | ||
| And there's apps where you both have to consent. | ||
| We're gonna do this, this, this, and this. | ||
| But then consent can be withdrawn retroactively, I think. | ||
| You can still look back and say, oh no, I didn't consent. | ||
| What's the point of consent if you can take it back? | ||
| There's that ridiculous story from like a year ago, I forget what school it was, where both students, the male and the female, after accused each other of rape. | ||
| They both accused each other because they wanted to get the leg up on the other one quick. | ||
| So how do you manage? | ||
| I mean, as someone that writes about sex and all this stuff, how do you negotiate that? | ||
| I mean, this is part of the reason that I think, again, when you want to talk about but we can have is the girl who is ready for playboy like | ||
| it was still the nineties me | ||
| and i didn't go to college and so i didn't have the indoctrination of a lot | ||
| of this woke culture | ||
| i'm not welcome all and that i would say things like in my first article uh... | ||
| it was uh... | ||
| women date assholes because you're a pussy *laughter* | ||
| And it did not go over well with the left or the right. | ||
| That was the first time that I was mutually getting... So what was the hate you were getting from each side? | ||
| The men's rights activists and stuff were saying that men don't generally like being called pussies if you can't... I mean essentially they're like, oh so if I can't get laid I'm a pussy? | ||
| Screw you. | ||
| And then it was like toxic masculinity from the extreme feminists. | ||
| And that happened to me a lot. | ||
| The extreme men and women often, I don't think they realize how close in the circle they are. | ||
| What do you make of that whole situation right now? | ||
| That it seems like at some level we're entering this low-grade war of the sexes. | ||
| This sounds like a bizarre dystopian story. | ||
| No, I know. | ||
| And it's... I don't think that... | ||
| So, I don't think you need to emasculate men in order to empower women. | ||
| And I feel like this is kind of the... There's so many double... It's like... Okay, so you're talking to me about toxic masculinity and you're saying, toxic masculinity this and men can't show their emotions. | ||
| Oh, but sit down and shut up. | ||
| Actually, we don't want to hear from you at all, guys. | ||
| Unless you are... | ||
| A trans man, or unless you are a person of color who's gay. | ||
| If you check some boxes, you're allowed to speak. | ||
| But other than that, if you're a white male, like, shut up. | ||
| Well, where does that fall into your toxic masculinity? | ||
| And how is that helpful? | ||
| Because from my experience writing for men, And hearing from men. | ||
| Cishetero men. | ||
|
unidentified
|
The bread-blooded American male. | |
| The alpha male men. | ||
| My kind of dude. | ||
| Struggling. | ||
| Some of my favorite pieces are pieces like Unbalding or Premature Ejaculation. | ||
| And men, I'd say, hey guys, what do you think about this? | ||
| And it would be essays, thousands of words. | ||
| No one's really asking them questions, how they're doing. | ||
| And when you do ask them, hey, how are you doing? | ||
| It's like a fountain of Pain, essentially. | ||
| Yeah, it's so fascinating to me, because as you know, I've been on tour with Jordan Peterson for the last year, and it's like, people always say it's angry young men coming to his shows. | ||
| And first of all, I don't find them to be angry, but they are people that are trying to put their lives together. | ||
| But I always think it's such an odd criticism, because let's pretend it was 90% angry, white, cisgender, toxic men, and he was helping them deal with some of their issues. | ||
| That would be a good thing. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| So the blanket accusation of, oh, you're just writing for straight white men, or that it's mostly straight white men that show up to these things, and I'm not even saying that's the case, it's such a low-level argument, because everyone needs help regardless of their gender or their skin color. | ||
| Yeah, and people are, you know, women have been given, I feel, more tools and they just are allowed to express themselves emotionally in society and men really aren't and so they don't have tools. | ||
| They just don't have as many and they don't feel as comfortable opening up. | ||
| I don't feel like men particularly feel comfortable opening up even to other men, although they might be getting better at that, but it does seem like they'll open up to me because they feel comfortable. | ||
| I also I just don't really judge anyone for whatever they come to me with and I'm certainly not judging someone by the color of their skin or by whatever their politics might be because I feel like first we have to meet as humans and I feel like we're all just on the same kind of sinking ship together. | ||
| It's like fighting over the last seat on the Titanic. | ||
| How is this helpful? | ||
| are we what is how is this helpful I don't see the discourse right now being | ||
| helpful and I don't see how you basically taking an entire group of | ||
| people and saying sit down and shut up is is helpful How is oppressing a whole other group of people, how is doing the same thing that was done to you, how does that help? | ||
| How? | ||
| I was having a lunch meeting with somebody who was about some business stuff, but he didn't actually know that much about my politics other than what I do. | ||
| And we had this really good meeting, and then at the end, something about politics directly came up, and he started saying this thing about how it should be all women, we should just get rid of all men in politics, and it should be all women, and blah blah blah. | ||
| And we have to topple the patriarchy and everything. | ||
| And I thought, A, you're talking about, he was a white man, so you're talking about taking yourself down. | ||
| He also struck me as very successful, probably a millionaire. | ||
| You're like, want to take all that down, but also, what are you actually saying? | ||
| It's not inherent that if you just had all women doing things that things would be better, but that seems to be the weird place that we're in. | ||
| I don't think things would be better if we only had men doing it either! | ||
| No, and again, to go back to your point about the war of the sexes. | ||
| We are, which is also a weird thing, too, just because of all of the gender stuff, too. | ||
| It's like this weird war of the sexes that's occurring under the idea that gender is a social construct. | ||
| I'm like, it doesn't even make sense. | ||
| I feel like I'm losing my mind. | ||
| And I think a lot of people do. | ||
| Just normal people. | ||
| I mean, I did a piece, or I'm working on a piece, and I asked people to email me like, how are you self-censoring what's happening? | ||
| I saw it when you did this on Twitter, yeah. | ||
| Yeah, and immediately everyone was like, don't write this piece! | ||
| Right, you started getting attacked by blue check verified journalists saying don't write this piece. | ||
| Journalists telling other journalists not to write a piece. | ||
| It's crazy, but it's like comedians policing other comedians for jokes. | ||
| This is another thing that I'm like, are you kidding me guys? | ||
| When did you become like... | ||
| I remember when everybody on the right was getting mad about rap music. | ||
| Like, how is this the... How are you the new, like... Yeah, you literally have lefty comics calling for books not to be published. | ||
| Oh, I mean, it's nuts. | ||
| And a lot of these mommies are getting shamed out of mommy groups because they're not playing by the gender thing, or they don't understand it, or they're just trying... People are just trying to catch up and change in, like, one year. | ||
| and so one woman was writing me that um... | ||
| she went to get a birthday present and she walked into the store she lives in a liberal you know i | ||
| think she's on the east coast in new york somewhere | ||
| and she said oh i can you wrap this for a girl and the woman oh my god | ||
| she said you would have thought i asked for and the woman was like we don't do | ||
| that here Excuse me. | ||
| We have brown. | ||
| We have white. | ||
| We have gray. | ||
| We don't rap for a gender. | ||
| And she was rude to her about it. | ||
| And the lady said, uh, white? | ||
| She didn't know. | ||
| And this is turning, and I think this is why I scream to the left the most, is that they don't understand that they're How much of it do you think is just that they have this thing where it's like if you don't accept what they accept as true the second they accept it, | ||
| You're the bad guy. | ||
| So if you don't come around to exactly how they are on trans issues right now, you know what I mean? | ||
| Even if you're respectful of trans people and you're really trying to understand these issues and understand gender and sexuality and all of these things, but if you don't do it the second they do it, if you don't come around to gay marriage the second they do it, you know, let's not forget, Barack Obama was not for gay marriage the first time he ran. | ||
| History will not be too kind to him by these people's estimation. | ||
| It's, I don't, most people don't even know. | ||
| They're just, and they kind of stumble into these, into these inadvertent, my friend for | ||
| example who did my makeup, she said, she said, "My kids are coming home with fully formed | ||
| opinions about Trump." | ||
| They're 8 and 11, that she's not giving them. | ||
| She said, so where are they getting these opinions? | ||
| I had a family member who... Is she freaking out about that? | ||
| I mean... She just, she says, you know, everybody, they have conversations about it in their home. | ||
| She did makeup for somebody. | ||
| She posted a picture of her. | ||
| Herself and Ann Coulter, just like, hey, look who I did again, stumbled into. | ||
| And she said she got completely eviscerated on Facebook and didn't even see it coming. | ||
| So I think a lot of people have when they see this, you know, these kill shots that they always go, everybody swarms and other people observe this and the public shaming and then it silences them. | ||
| so every time these little and we don't know how many of these little micro | ||
| shamings are occurring all across america and what worries me well not worries me but what's | ||
| interesting to me is how many people there are like me | ||
| who have and you know we people are coming from the right as well for their | ||
| own reasons uh... | ||
| and now they're you know independence | ||
| They're basically like, well, there's crazy stuff on both sides. | ||
| And I believe in common sense and reason and nuance and free speech and the, you know, scientific method. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Some radical shit, that's what you're trying to tell me. | |
| I had a dream last night, actually. | ||
| I think I was nervous. | ||
| And I had a dream that I was on the show. | ||
| And I said, I'm coming in hot, Dave. | ||
| I haven't been on Twitter. | ||
| And it is liberating, because I don't have to hear anything. | ||
| And I can say anything. | ||
| Like, boys and girls are different. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And you won't know. | ||
| And you in my dream were like, don't say that. | ||
| Well, you're welcome to say it in reality. | ||
| But the beauty of this is, so when we post this episode, God only knows what you've said already that will have offended the masses and you won't even know for weeks, but your cousin, what's her name? | ||
| Maggie. | ||
| Your cousin Maggie is running your Twitter account right now and sharing some stuff and all that. | ||
| So, do you think there's any chance that some kind of new center can develop here? | ||
| I think there, I'm optimistic, I run optimistic. | ||
| I generally think that I hope. | ||
| I saw Claire's interview, and she was saying we have to share the risk, and I love that idea. | ||
| I love that idea of sharing the risk. | ||
| But I also have nothing to lose. | ||
| I don't have children in school who will be punished by my politics, by their teachers. | ||
| I mean, one of my family members during the election, she had to tell her kids that her teachers were insane because of the stuff they were coming home and telling her, and they were crying. | ||
| These are adults who are supposed to be teaching children. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And she just thought I had to tell them, like, your teachers are insane. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| You're basically sending your kids to a mental institution all day long, and then you bring them home and you go, all right, what a whackout crap did they come up with today. | ||
| And so I don't have, and I'm not working in a corporation where I have a job that I could lose. | ||
| I don't deal with HR, thank God, because that sounds like a nightmare. | ||
| But you don't have nothing to lose because you've got writing gigs and you've got other ways that you support yourself. | ||
| I mean, the mob can come for anybody, right? | ||
| So it's not nothing. | ||
| But people... I guess I'll probably never know... Somebody like me will never know what I've lost. | ||
| So, for instance, I don't know what doors have shut. | ||
| I know that my politics on Twitter will keep me out of writer's rooms for sure. | ||
| And I actually know that for a fact, that even somebody looking for someone who is somewhat centrist thought that I was too far right. | ||
| Right, well that's what they do to everybody. | ||
| Crazy! | ||
| So I don't know that some showrunner won't see my Twitter and say, no, forget that girl, she's a Nazi. | ||
| I do know that I had a really brilliant editor, Joe Donatelli, he was my first editor at Playboy, and he said, die on your own sword. | ||
| And I love that, because that really is all that I can do and all that we can do, and the great thing about the Twitter hiatus has been Really being able to step back and look at the big picture and perspective and the bigger themes that keep coming up within these little mini micro outrages and news cycles that we get all juiced up by and One of those is free speech. | ||
| I will die on that hill. | ||
| That is a hill. | ||
| I will die on I'll be right there with you. | ||
| Yeah, I will die on that hill. | ||
| And that was the biggest thing that I saw. | ||
| You know, I have Art Tavana. | ||
| He has amazing profiles of people that nobody will publish because they're just considered | ||
| toxic or whatever. | ||
| Oh, he's just the best. - We were talking about it right before, he wrote a, he happened to write | ||
| a really nice piece about me in Playboy where he was also critical of me, | ||
| and, but it was, but he's an actual journalist, and I thought, it took a lot for me to be willing | ||
| to let him spend a day with me, because I've been thrown under the bus by these guys | ||
| who've been in my home many times. | ||
| But like, I watched him for a while, and I was like, he seems decent enough. | ||
| He's just, he was on my podcast, and he's great. | ||
| And he's been checking in with me during this Twitter hiatus, and said, | ||
| I was essentially bananas, but Art was the one who, we were talking about this, you know, | ||
| do I have anything to lose? | ||
| And I said, well, I, the hard thing for me being off Twitter | ||
| is that I really can trace every single dollar that I make through Twitter, | ||
| whether it's through an editor who found me, that's how Playboy originally found me, | ||
| that's how I, most of my patrons come through Twitter. | ||
| And he said, well, you're just a drug addict that started cooking meth in your basement. | ||
| (laughing) | ||
| I was like, oh no! | ||
| But I do, I wouldn't have met Art. | ||
| And so there is this, again, I'm optimistic. | ||
| I think that we, there's this double-edged sword of like, we are connected and we have, the conversations that are happening on podcasts that you have, that Joe Rogan's having, I know you guys are, I'll pain the price for it. | ||
| I cannot tell you how many men have told me Jordan Peterson literally saved their life. | ||
| Whatever they want to think about him, he's helping people in a really tangible way. | ||
| And that is hopeful for me. | ||
| However, when I see that there are less and less outlets for this, that the gatekeepers seem to be shutting down Like, no conservative columnists if you're a leftist publication. | ||
| The stuff I've seen in terms of deplatforming on Patreon, I mean, I shed lots of people. | ||
| You've left. | ||
| Sorry about that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's okay. | |
| I know, we hurt all our friends. | ||
| I've had a lot of my, because some of my friends are still on there, and Brett's still on there, and Colin Moriarty's on there, and you're on there. | ||
| It was a big hit. | ||
| And it's like, in that regard, I kind of feel bad because Jordan, Sam, and I leaving did cause this thing there. | ||
| For little guys like me? | ||
|
unidentified
|
But I can promise you, my friend, there's some things coming. | |
| There's at least two things coming. | ||
| I hope so. | ||
| And they're going to be big and hopefully solve some of these problems. | ||
| Yeah, that's what worries me is that I do believe that Being able to have hard conversations, talk about things, hear those things that you don't want to hear, but be able to listen to them. | ||
| Know who is saying those things. | ||
| I want to know. | ||
| I don't want them to have to go underground and start groups and, you know. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. - Whatever they need to do. | ||
| Go have your crazy YouTube channel. | ||
| But then again, I question what recently happened in New Zealand, these things that would generally | ||
| be contained, two small little groups in like basement somewhere, now do have a platform | ||
| to kind of spread these ideas quickly. | ||
| Well, it's so interesting because in the manifesto, he's basically saying he wants to start this war. | ||
| Right. - And then what does everyone do on both sides? | ||
| They just start handing it to him and people blaming this person, blaming this person, | ||
| and blaming this person, and everyone calling each other Nazis, and it's like, you guys literally, | ||
| you're outsourcing your brains to people that are truly, truly dangerous. | ||
| You're saying to anyone that's out there, do something crazy, write something crazy, and we're all gonna pay attention to it. | ||
| It's like the worst, it really is the worst possible thing you can do. | ||
| And it's self, there's a lot of, what I worried about, I wrote this piece for Playboy actually, they let me write it, and it was Donald Trump is already making America great again. | ||
| And I put it out on inauguration. | ||
| It was probably a little too soon for people to hear the message. | ||
| But essentially it was looking at the silver lining. | ||
| And I said in it, I worry about the self-fulfilling prophecy. | ||
| There's a great quote in that show, Deadwood, and the doctor says, I've seen more harm done with A man trying to justify themselves and a man seeking to do harm. | ||
| And this is what worries me and what I see where it's like, you would rather have him be in collusion with Russia? | ||
| You would rather have him be a Nazi or whatever so that you can be right? | ||
| That's dangerous. | ||
| Because, in effect, you're saying you'd rather us be in World War III, right? | ||
| Because the truth is, if he had colluded... So that you can be right. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Like, guys, some of these things are good that they're not true, but that's, that, and, you know, I, again, I'm very much about doing work on yourself and keeping yourself in check, and that is something I constantly have to keep, even with, like, the Jussie Smollett thing, it's always, all along, I was like, eh. | ||
| Something ain't right about this. | ||
| But the media goes all in on it. | ||
| The candidates, the Democratic candidates all said what evidence of our evil racist country this is. | ||
| I'm sure some of them haven't even deleted the tweets. | ||
| But then today's news is basically everything dropped. | ||
| So we're holding this for a couple days. | ||
| So it was a few days ago that the charges against him were all dropped. | ||
| And it's like, What? | ||
| How are these charges dropped? | ||
| There's the guys! | ||
| There's the video of the guys picking up the noose! | ||
| But I had to check myself during that process to make sure that I wasn't just excited, that I wasn't so excited to be right. | ||
| That I wasn't overlooking the fact that maybe he was actually, this thing did actually happen. | ||
| I still don't think it did. | ||
| But through that whole process, you know, I think this is where I think each individual, it falls on us to do our due diligence on not just the news and our sources of news, but on ourselves and how much are we hoping for something so that we can be right. | ||
| Something I think we all have to, especially I would say to my friends on the left, really look at that. | ||
| It's good that even when it came out that he maybe faked a crime against himself, it's good that these guys aren't walking around Chicago beating people. | ||
| That's a good thing. | ||
| But in a weird way they need Trump to be a Russian operative. | ||
| For the narrative. | ||
| Right, for their narrative. | ||
| They need the Jussie Smollett thing to be real, to prove that America's racist, and these things consistently prove not to be real. | ||
| But let's shift a little bit, too, because you write all sorts of things. | ||
| I'm all over the place. | ||
| And you usually dive into the topics that are the most controversial. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That'll get you off Twitter pretty quick. | ||
| You just wrote this piece about you don't have to go to college, basically. | ||
| Stop wasting your money on college. | ||
| I don't think that was very popular. | ||
| You did that in The Spectator pretty recently, and the idea was that there are ways to get jobs in the future, trade schools and all sorts of other things, that maybe you don't need this brainwashing experience for four years. | ||
| I was speaking with Carol Roth, and she's brilliant and very into finance. | ||
| You know, we were talking about this and she said, just the idea that it's like the return on investment for six figures for a five-figure return on investment just doesn't make sense. | ||
| And I can only speak from personal experience. | ||
| And for some people, college is what you need to do if you're going to specialize. | ||
| My argument is that the automatic just go to college. | ||
| and then getting out with this enormous amount of debt so that you can figure out what you want to do, | ||
| that's an expensive way to figure out what you want to do. | ||
| And I realized this pretty quickly into my first year of college. | ||
| After my first semester, I saw my loans and the debt that I was already in after one semester, | ||
| and I always wanted to be a writer. | ||
| And I was like, well, I know how to write. | ||
| So I don't need to spend four years doing this and then get out and have debt | ||
| and then have to take jobs that I hate taking and be miserable so that I can pay off my debt. | ||
| Or, when I was working up on a goat farm in Northern California, there was a girl who had... Wait, why were the quotes around goat? | ||
| Goat farm. | ||
| Green goats? | ||
| Green goats. | ||
| Gotcha, gotcha, okay. | ||
| It was like this long-term joke. | ||
| I told my family I was working on a goat farm and they, you know... Like a Humboldt County goat farm? | ||
| Is that what you're telling me? | ||
| Gotcha, gotcha. | ||
| And there was a lot of people there who basically, it was not in their benefit to go into the workforce above, you know, they were working under the table, obviously, because then it didn't trigger their student loans, so there's like the deferment. | ||
| And I'm like, what? | ||
| You're an engineer! | ||
| Why are you sitting here with me? | ||
| And I think that there are a million ways to skin a cat. | ||
| We need trade workers. | ||
| We need... | ||
| We need just so many different laborers. | ||
| And I've gotten a lot of criticism for this article, and a lot of it is fair. | ||
| But is it also that we just don't need certain things that people are being taught? | ||
| It's not only that we need people that have certain skills, like physical skills, but it's also that a lot of the stuff that people are majoring in college, if you're majoring in, you know, feminist dance or lesbian badminton or... | ||
| You know, any of these things, it's like, okay, well, what do you think you just paid for | ||
| for all of those years? | ||
| Yeah, and I think I said it, and maybe it's like, if you go get a degree | ||
| in gender studies, you're really only good for writing blogs on the internet. | ||
| Like, that's it. | ||
| What else are you gonna do with that? | ||
| Maybe go teach. | ||
| But what really, what-- | ||
| You teach gender studies, that's what you do. | ||
| What do you do, though? | ||
| I mean, what do you do with that degree? | ||
| So, be practical about the... I generally, because I have had to pay for... I didn't have... If someone's paying for college or whatever, go to college, get a degree. | ||
| There's a lot... The pushback I've received that has been the most thoughtful is that, statistically, people die sooner if they don't go to college. | ||
| Now, I think this probably has a lot to do with socioeconomic factors that are not necessarily being Take it into consideration. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right, there's a causation correlation thing going on there. | |
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| Everybody went to college, so it's also a study that you're like, well, there's an entire generation of people that went to college. | ||
| What about a generation of people who maybe went and became trade workers and maybe they went and whatever, taught themselves how to code online, which is what another family member of mine did. | ||
| It also sounds like a new version of, like, servitude to me. | ||
| Like, when Bernie gets out there and he's like, free college for everyone, which we know, of course, Noah's not free, and then he says, a guarantee of a federal job. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That sounds horrible to me. | |
| I mean, in effect, you're going to force everyone to go to college because the few people who won't want to will be shamed into doing it and wasting their time when they probably have all sorts of other skills and can do all, you know, they can write without going to school, they can learn how to do coding or whatever else, learn to code, I don't know if I'm even allowed Can we say that? | ||
| Boys and girls are never allowed to code. | ||
| I just got demonetized. | ||
| Yeah, you're done. | ||
| And then the guarantee is that you'll get a federal job. | ||
| That sounds horrible. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, God, kill me. | |
| So you can be a pencil pusher for the government with no real chance of ever growing, but you know you'll never be fired, so you just stay there forever and just suck money off other people. | ||
| That sounds terrible to me. | ||
| Oh, I'm not a genius by any means, but I know I don't... It says you're a genius here. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I don't want... I thought I had something here that said... | |
| To work for the government. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I don't want them to have much of my money to do things with. | |
| They just don't seem to be that effective from every government institution I've had to deal with. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, you gotta love it. | ||
| The lefties. | ||
| Trump is Hitler. | ||
| The government's evil. | ||
| The patriarchy. | ||
| Patriarchy. | ||
| What's their answer? | ||
| More money. | ||
| Give them more money. | ||
| I got into it with a friend about this the other night and I felt bad because we hadn't talked in a while and I didn't realize that he was as fully Indoctrinated in the approved message as he was. | ||
| And I really just tend to ask questions and it's amazing how angry he was getting at my questions. | ||
|
unidentified
|
He said, you know, I'm tired of all these white supremacists talking. | |
| They can all just shut up. | ||
| And I said, okay, but why do you want to take their gun? | ||
| Like, why do you want to give away your guns? | ||
| And cause then he went off on a tangent about that. | ||
| And I'm like, I just want to know the logic. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| Do you find that it ever gets to a logical point? | ||
| Because I've had these conversations with friends and now sometimes former friends. | ||
| Yeah, he might be a former friend. | ||
| But do you ever find that they always move the goalpost, they always change the definition of words, or they change how history is? | ||
| Do you ever find in one of those conversations you can get it to something that has some shape? | ||
| You know, the conversation started because I made the mistake of telling him that I was doing the Glenn Beck radio show and I didn't even think twice about it because I'm used to now I occupy a space that's a little bit more centrist and so I got lazy. | ||
| Glenn is a good man, by the way. | ||
| He's a friend. | ||
| He's a decent fella. | ||
| He doesn't want the government to take over. | ||
| I didn't have my guard up, and I was sloppy. | ||
| And so I was talking to him, and he just like lost it on me. | ||
| I was like, you're going on... And I said, I will have this conversation with anyone who's willing to have a conversation with me about this. | ||
| What was his implication of Glenn Beck as a white supremacist? | ||
| Well, yeah, obviously. | ||
| Anyone, now that the whole, and this is why I'm not sure how we escaped from this binary, and I was writing about this yesterday in my journal, because I can't write on Twitter anymore. | ||
| If you want me, at the end of this, if you want me to tweet out something very powerful for you. | ||
| screenshots of my journal. Please help me. No, I was writing about how, because I'm | ||
| making sure, I always try to make sure that I keep myself abreast of the, of | ||
| whatever is being written on the left as well. And I, I'm not sure how you escape | ||
| the binary of essentially the Republican Party is the party of white supremacy | ||
| and if you are conservative or Republican you are basically doing everything to | ||
| uphold white supremacy. | ||
| You're not saying that's true, you're just saying that's what people are... I'm not saying that's true, I'm saying this seems to be what the messaging is, as I understand it. | ||
| I could be wrong, but this seems to be what I'm reading and what I'm hearing, and I don't know how you escape that binary. | ||
| Well, I think you relentlessly have to call these people out, right? | ||
| I mean, that's all you can do. | ||
| It's just not the case. | ||
| It's just not true. | ||
| But they own so much of the media and so much of academia and everything else that these messages keep coming through, and now you've got a friend of yours. | ||
| Probably telling you you're a white supremacist because you're talking to Glenn Beck. | ||
| I was a white supremacist for doing Ben Shapiro's election special. | ||
| I mean, that was... There's nothing a white supremacist likes more than an orthodox Jew. | ||
| Apparently. | ||
| Apparently that can be the case. | ||
| And so, that's... I recently... I mean, I stepped into it and it was my own fault. | ||
| I hadn't had coffee. | ||
| I was tweeting recklessly and I um I said something, I came in defense of that white kid that was on the GQ cover and I was and I said like the war on white men and I meant to put quotes on it because and I didn't have coffee and this is not an excuse and it was like early and I was like ah there's not enough space what could possibly go wrong and not thinking and I got it was like two days of your garbage, essentially. Your garbage. I got called a | ||
| grand wizard. And it is weird when you're, you know, being called racist used to be like the worst | ||
| insult. And I grew up learning that that was a horrible insult. And so to have | ||
| that, and somebody kind of stepped, James Lindsay actually stepped in and he was like, Bridget, | ||
| I see what's happening here. | ||
| You are up against, you know, like critical theory and you need to just like log out and say nothing because it will all be used as proof that you are. | ||
| a racist, essentially. | ||
| And it was, you know, there's parts of it that were upsetting, obviously, | ||
| and then parts of it that I was like, this is nuts. | ||
| Why are you calling me garbage? | ||
| Would you say that to my face? | ||
| Yeah, well, they're anonymous and they're on Twitter. | ||
| These were blue checks, like, they weren't anonymous. | ||
| Oh, you got some of the blue checkers, too? | ||
| Oh, it was a, yeah, it was a-- | ||
| What do you make, let's just back up to this point, 'cause I saw this happen to you on Twitter, | ||
| that there were journalists actually trying to stop you What do you think about just the state of journalism? | ||
| Because to me, at the moment, especially after the last little time with the Mueller investigation, it's over. | ||
| It really, like CNN and MSNBC, whatever shred of remote, The credibility they have left, they've destroyed. | ||
| The New York Times has basically destroyed itself. | ||
| I don't say any of that with pleasure. | ||
| People think I'm saying it like, ha ha, I'm not. | ||
| If those guys could just be a little bit better, but they can't. | ||
| Or self-reflective. | ||
| Or just instead of doubling down every time. | ||
| Like now they're all trying to throw Mueller under the bus, because he didn't do exactly what they wanted. | ||
| And now we've got to investigate him and just more government everywhere. | ||
| And it's like, what are you guys chasing? | ||
| You're chasing your own shadow. | ||
| The state of journalism is very worrisome to me, and I do sometimes wonder about journalists on Twitter, because you need it in one respect, but in the other respect you see everyone's politics, so how could anything they wrote be unbiased? | ||
| You know where everyone's coming from. | ||
| I do wonder, did you, you know Matt, um, how do you say his last name to be? | ||
| Taibbi. | ||
| Taibbi. | ||
| He wrote a piece, a couple. | ||
| Oh, about the, the other thing, yeah. | ||
| About, yeah, and just the state of journalism, and he's been doing some really great reporting, actual journalistic reporting, and he listed all of the links to every single thing that all of these organizations, CNN and the New York Times have said, and he compares it to the WMD, um, you know, he, I think there are still journalists who are critical of their fellow journalists. | ||
| And the criticism that came to me when I reached out for self-censorship was like, oh, here comes Bridget writing another piece about how Trump supporters are self-censored. | ||
| No! | ||
| Actually, quite the contrary. | ||
| That's not what I'm looking for. | ||
| I'm wondering how liberals are self-censoring. | ||
| And they don't want to hear it. | ||
| Generally, somebody said, you know, you get the most flack when you're over the target. | ||
| And I definitely, just the fact that everyone piled on, they do not want to hear how they might be pushing their own party away, people in their party. | ||
| And these are the people that they need. | ||
| There's no more votes to the left. | ||
| To the far left, you've gone as far left as you can go. | ||
| Boys and girls aren't different anymore. | ||
| We can't go any farther left. | ||
| Well, that's why they want to lower the voting age to 16, though, because, no, I mean, really, that's it. | ||
| Lower the voting age, change the electoral college, add members of the Supreme Court. | ||
| I mean, these are all ideas that are being floated by them right now, because yes, there's no, that intersectional competing interest cacophony can't hold forever. | ||
| You run out of people to destroy. | ||
| Or you could just come back a little bit and be somewhat reasonable If only somebody had been talking about this for these last five years. | ||
| The ship has sailed, my friend. | ||
| Do you feel like people from the left are kind of... | ||
| waking up as well, or do you feel like they're just, is the cognitive dissonance just like, I need to just double down? | ||
| Yeah, the core of the left, where the energy of the left is, so like, Cortez and Omar, and that whole new crew, and the Democratic Socialists, who are only holding on to the word Democratic for another year or two, and then they'll just be Socialists, I think they've got all the energy, they feel like they have the young people, they certainly have the woke media, and what's happening is, and this is why I'm actually hopeful, Because you said you were an optimist. | ||
| I always say I'm a world-weary optimist. | ||
| It's like, I believe that, yeah, they can keep doing that and it will implode on itself. | ||
| You're gonna have to take down Bernie one day. | ||
| He's an old white man. | ||
| You'll destroy each other. | ||
| But what I think mostly will happen is the decent liberals like yourself will just more and more realize that there is something happening center right right now that is not racist, that is based on freedom and liberty and individual rights. | ||
| And is respectful of differences, and there's some pro-choice people there, and some pro-life people, and some gay people, and straight people, and I think that's where the, I think that's, if America will continue as a great nation and a free nation, that's the future of it. | ||
| The other thing, they're not gonna stop. | ||
| They can't stop. | ||
| They've had so many chances to stop. | ||
| Trump's president. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That seems like it would have been a reason to reflect. | ||
| No, this is the crazy thing. | ||
| The conversation with my friend, who might not be my friend anymore, he said, well, he's not going to win. | ||
| I'm like, I hear this all the time from people. | ||
|
unidentified
|
How can you say that? | |
| He won. | ||
| You're saying to me the exact same thing that you said in 2016, that you said was impossible. | ||
| You're saying it's impossible again. | ||
| How are you saying this? | ||
| Cognitive dissonance. | ||
| I don't understand. | ||
| I don't understand that. | ||
| That's where I'm, that's where I just, I'm like, okay, bye. | ||
| Bye. | ||
| I try to be, I listen, but there are certain things where I'm, I'm like, I don't understand how you can think that's a logical thought to have. | ||
| There's no chance it's impossible. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| The thing that just happened. | ||
| The thing that just happened that you said was impossible. | ||
| And he said, well, you have to understand Bridget, that when you say that to people, you are basically shitting on all of their hope. | ||
| And I'm like, well, okay, so now it's my responsibility to take care of everyone else in the world's feelings, and this is the new thing, where you're supposed to just manage everyone in the world. | ||
| One of the first things I learned in rehab when I was 19 is that it's none of my business how anyone feels about me. | ||
| And now it's like, apparently, I have to make sure everyone around me is okay. | ||
| Because then you can never think about yourself, and that's really what they don't want. | ||
| It's interesting. | ||
| Or that's what they really want. | ||
| They don't want you to be able to think about what you really think. | ||
| So they keep you focused on everybody else all the time. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, I think we're living in, I like, most people are like, oh, these times that we live in. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I love it. | |
| Yeah, me too. | ||
| I think it's exciting. | ||
| Me too. | ||
| And I think it's dangerous and terrifying as well. | ||
| And there are days, you know, when I was getting these emails about how people self-censor, it was, I was in a dark place, and my cousin came over, Maggie, and she said, we need to get you the F out of this hole you're in. | ||
| Because it was hundreds of hundreds of emails, but the language people are using, thank you for giving me permission to speak freely, thank you for allowing me to... I don't know if this will end up anywhere, but it just feels so good to get that out. | ||
| And they assume there are these things of people saying, You know, some of the people on the left trolled me and had, they were like, these intentionally racist things, but most of the emails I got were very thoughtful and very, you know, places... there's... people are... | ||
| Well, it's not people that are staking out far-right positions, I think, is what you're saying, right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
No. | |
| It's people that are just saying, maybe I'm for low taxes or something, and they're afraid to say it because, oh, you're a conservative, you're gonna lose your job. | ||
| Yeah, and also just the way that it's infecting policy, like you say, has been said on here, and people say that politics are downstream of culture, so just the way that one man was saying, "Well, we really are afraid | ||
| "to criticize the code of certain hires "because it could end you up in HR." | ||
| And he's like, "And this is code that's kind of important. | ||
| "These are the soft effects on the marketplace "and in the world of ideas that we can't see." | ||
| And you can really only see if you ask for people to be truly honest and fearless | ||
| or if people start speaking up, but you're not gonna see that. | ||
| because it's so subtle, it's so insidious. | ||
| That's the thing about self-censorship. | ||
| It's so, it starts, you know, it starts in the mind and then-- - And once you start doing it, | ||
| you just keep going. | ||
| It's almost impossible to remember that original person. | ||
| And it's easier to, for instance, you can't burn a book if you get it banned | ||
| before it's even published. | ||
| I mean, these are things that deeply concern me. | ||
| More concerning, I feel like there's a lot of corruption and stuff that We have to take aim at, you know, I feel like it's our job as citizens and this is really my my big where I stand now is kind of with you I guess in the middle and saying like the center must hold. | ||
| We, I had abandoned my job as a citizen of looking critically at everybody and the fact that somebody like | ||
| myself or you who might be looking critically at things on the right and | ||
| critically on things on the right that's controversial is is very bad news for | ||
| democracy because that is our job as citizens not to be loyal to some party it's | ||
| It's to be critical of our leaders and all the people who want to be leaders, not just like on some team. | ||
| This isn't like the Red Sox and the Yankees. | ||
| You mean you shouldn't automatically vote for whoever Katy Perry likes? | ||
| I mean, Taylor Swift's silence is deafening. | ||
| It really is deafening. | ||
| We are going to do this many times more. | ||
| I have no doubt. | ||
| I'm glad we finally did this because we need people like you out there doing this stuff. | ||
| We need straight, white, heterosexual, cisgendered chicks, if that's basically what you are. | ||
| I just think people need to know they're not alone. | ||
| I think a lot of people, what I've realized from the self-centership, people think they're alone. | ||
| They're not alone. | ||
| If you're a reasonable person out there and you're feeling like you're going crazy, you're not alone. | ||
| Reach out to you. | ||
| Email me, whatever. | ||
| If you're in the dark place, reach out and find others who you can speak freely with and have conversations with because I think that is important. | ||
| Yeah, well, that's why I'm doing stand-up again, and we gotta go, we'll do a gig together. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah! | |
| Let's do something together, because that's the point of it, is really I'm just messing around with the crowd. | ||
| We get in that room and we just kind of have some fun. | ||
| Oh, that would be so fun. | ||
| And it's like, I want people to look around the room and be like, yeah, guess what? | ||
| That guy likes Trump, you like Bernie, it's okay. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| We're not killing each other, you know? | ||
|
unidentified
|
No. | |
| All right, so we're gonna do that. | ||
| Yeah, that'd be great. | ||
| Yeah, all right, well. | ||
| I love it. | ||
| You guys can follow Bridget on Twitter. | ||
| It's at Bridget Phetasy. | ||
| Although you will be talking to cousin Maggie, but she's a lovely woman. | ||
| She's amazing. | ||
| Amazing. |
Export Selection