Based Camp - May 01, 2024


How the Internet Turned Illness Into Status for Privileged Women with Suzy Weiss

Topics
therapy on kids unwellness influencers spoonie language
Hosted by
Malcolm Collins Simone Collins
Mentioned
Andrew Tate Abigail Schreier Morgan Simone Snoozy Weiss Barry Weiss Jane Austen Gen Z Earl
The Biggest Lie Pronatalist Tell (The Hungary Fertility Myth) How Hippies Became Republicans (Did Our Two Parties Switch Sides？)

Episode Stats


Length

36 minutes

Words per minute

192.86

Word count

7,131

Sentence count

532

Harmful content

Misogyny

30

sentences flagged

Toxicity

21

sentences flagged

Hate speech

27

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Writer Susie Weiss joins Betsy and Amanda this week to talk about her new piece, "A Spoonie is a Chronic Illness Sufferer," and why she thinks the internet is full of "sick bros" and "porn sick bros."

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 A spoonie is a member of a community of chronic illness sufferers, what some people have described
00:00:06.020 as Munchausen by internet. What happens when your identity becomes illness? Because how are you ever
00:00:11.240 incentivized to get well? If your community identification is defined by how ill you are,
00:00:18.280 then a status hierarchy is going to begin to form based on illness. And people being people,
00:00:25.360 they are going to have a motivation to exaggerate their illness. Would you like to know more?
00:00:31.680 Okay. I am so, so, so excited for our special guest here today. Easily our favorite writer. It's on the
00:00:41.800 show today. This is Susie Weiss. We mentioned her in a number of episodes as just a writer who we
00:00:49.020 really respect and does really, really interesting, deep based pieces that explore subcultures that
00:00:57.440 are weird, which is like our favorite thing. Today, we are going to do the first piece of hers that we
00:01:05.360 really got into where I was like, oh, this changes my thinking on a number of things about how like
00:01:10.580 memetic viruses can form within current online environments. And how we're going to raise our
00:01:14.980 teenage daughters. Like it completely, like it gave us a new model for female adolescents. This 1.00
00:01:19.660 was, it was a game changer. Oh, and where we should send people. So the Snoozy Weiss, it's her Twitter 0.84
00:01:24.280 account. So go subscribe there. Although that never really converts this YouTube to Twitter. But what I
00:01:29.720 can say is the free press, her sister, Barry Weiss runs it and she is a writer there. And that's where
00:01:36.520 you can find her stuff. So you should definitely go and subscribe to that. Yeah. Thank you guys so much
00:01:41.100 for having me. I feel like when we discovered each other, it was like, there are others. I'm so
00:01:45.560 happy. And then of course I included you on a story I did about tech messiahs who wanted to live
00:01:50.460 forever, which I love your contribution. Cause you were like anti live forever, which I think is
00:01:55.720 like a weird, whatever we can get into that later, but I love that. Did you end up talking to that other
00:02:00.380 girl we introduced you to for that story? She, I never talked to her cause she just, yeah, she was 0.99
00:02:05.500 intense. She recently did a post where she bragged about how she convinced a woman to break up with 0.88
00:02:12.040 her husband for another woman and get an abortion on her three months term fetus. And this was like
00:02:19.120 a huge win for her is talking someone into an abortion. That's pretty late stage, right? 1.00
00:02:25.060 Or that early. It's on the older side of fairly. Yeah. Horrifying. We were trying to get the
00:02:33.000 perspective of an extremist antinatalist. Oh yeah. She was, yeah, she's a major antinatalist. Yeah.
00:02:37.360 I guess that's a win where you can get them. So the, the full post she wrote went one of the
00:02:42.760 grossest and most paleocentric types of misogyny to me is males who are fine with, or even encourage 0.98
00:02:50.200 their wives or girlfriends having sex with other women. Porn sick bros was harem fetishes. It's an 1.00
00:02:55.840 ugly and very clear mask off on how they see women. They feel so superior that a girl fucking their 1.00
00:03:02.400 wife doesn't even count as sex. And thus cheating lesbians are just quote unquote girls having fun 1.00
00:03:08.660 that we do to please their stinky cheese cocks. And few things are as satisfying as seeing their 1.00
00:03:15.100 wives realize they can do better divorcing them for their girlfriends and living happily ever after 1.00
00:03:20.300 without a sexist leech in their life. Two months ago, I convinced a girl who just married and was 0.94
00:03:26.440 actually three months pregnant to get an abortion and divorce and continue dating her girlfriend who 0.99
00:03:32.100 the male picked for her, but who she fell in love with. They are engaged and I am so for it.
00:03:38.660 Heart. In case you can't tell, she is a lesbian, maybe even a political lesbian and an extremist 0.97
00:03:45.160 feminist as well as an antinatalist. Yeah. She's in favor, I think of even post-term abortions as she 1.00
00:03:51.020 puts it. So murder. Yeah. So murder. Yes. Yes. But baby murder. So it's baby. It's a tiny murder.
00:03:58.940 It's murder. It's murder. It's murder. Yes. Oh God. Anyway, so. Spoonies. Spoonies. Spoonies.
00:04:06.720 Spoonies. Go. I am so excited to dig into this. Yeah. Well, first off, what made you decide
00:04:12.600 to explore this world? How did you even learn? I'm sorry. The audience needs to know what they are
00:04:17.080 first. So I'm letting her describe that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Questions like this. Okay. So what is
00:04:21.440 a spoonie? A spoonie is a member of a community of chronic illness sufferers. They're mostly women 1.00
00:04:28.640 from what I could observe. They're mostly white women. The term comes from, I believe it was like 1.00
00:04:33.440 a 2013 or 2014 blog post by this lupus blogger. And she had a well friend who asked her, what is it
00:04:40.120 like to be sick? And she took all the spoons. I just reread the post last night because I wanted to be
00:04:44.420 reminded of it. And it's strangely cinematic. She's like, with tears in my eyes, I held the
00:04:50.000 bouquet of spoons. And I don't not believe her, but it's just interestingly written. And she describes
00:04:55.300 that normal people have unlimited spoons. People who are sick have a fixed number of spoons. So
00:05:00.480 let's say you or I, we could get up and shower and make ourselves breakfast and go to work and we
00:05:05.180 don't have to think about it. Someone with, let's say six spoons has to portion them out. So two spoons
00:05:10.400 to wake up and get dressed, one spoon to make lunch. Do you have enough spoons to work? And I think it is
00:05:15.940 like an effective way for people to think about other people who have limited resources. But since
00:05:21.400 then it's been co-opted into a cottage industry, a world, a community of people who suffer from these
00:05:29.120 sort of amorphous and hard to pin down illnesses. So Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, POTS, autoimmune diseases,
00:05:36.120 ulcerative colitis, you name it. And they're called- POTS is included in that? I have POTS.
00:05:40.720 That's crazy. You have POTS? Yeah. You could be a Spoonie. Yeah. You could be a Spoonie. And you 0.97
00:05:44.700 would find a lot of like-minded Spoonies out there and you could buy different products with your
00:05:49.680 Spoonie codes and learn how to lie to a doctor, which is apparently like a moral thing in this world.
00:05:55.660 So yeah, I was interested in what some people have described as Munchausen by internet,
00:06:00.220 like where the psychosomatic, I guess what I was really interested in is what happens when
00:06:06.080 your identity becomes illness because how are you ever incentivized to get well? And I spoke to a
00:06:11.160 lot of people and doctors and that's the story that you're- So I want to talk about that,
00:06:15.100 but before we go further, I'm going to take and just word this a little differently.
00:06:18.960 Yeah. Essentially what happened and what created the Spoonies is that if you have a, either a chronic
00:06:25.860 illness condition or a short-term illness condition where you are frequently going into a medical
00:06:30.220 setting, of course, you are going to tweet about this and find other like-minded people.
00:06:36.080 Now, like any social community, hierarchy within a community is often determined by things that
00:06:43.460 differentiate you from mainstream society and make you more aligned with that community.
00:06:49.560 Within a goth circle, if I'm meeting a goth I haven't met, the more gothy they dress, the higher
00:06:53.700 status I assume they are because they are othering themselves from mainstream society in a way that
00:06:57.460 shows dedication to a community. Well, if your community identification is defined by
00:07:02.920 how ill you are, like if that's what correlates the community, then a status hierarchy is going
00:07:12.640 to begin to form based on illness and people being people, they are going to have a motivation
00:07:19.600 to exaggerate their illness, find ways to get on more visible forms of treatment.
00:07:25.960 A lot of it is about externalizing because a lot of these illnesses that I listed, they're
00:07:29.480 invisible illnesses. You can't see them. So a lot of these women will use crutches, casts, 1.00
00:07:35.100 tourniquets, not tourniquets, but like you got like ways to show, to pick lines, like food,
00:07:40.300 feeding tubes to show that they're sick. So I think it's really interesting. And it, yeah, sorry.
00:07:45.380 Yeah. Well, and then doctors will say, well, you don't actually have these illnesses. And so
00:07:48.880 then they need to make the doctors for the community, the villains. Right. And wasn't there
00:07:55.260 like a word that they used like zebra or something? Yes. So that's an old medical adage. If you hear
00:08:00.740 hooves, think horses, not zebras. So if someone's coming, it's like the real world, it's not an
00:08:06.100 episode of house. Not everyone has the like deep cut, weird disease that you can own, that no one's
00:08:11.420 seen a case of in a hundred years, but the spoonie mantra might be, I am the zebra. I am this rare
00:08:17.060 thing. And it has to do, I think, and you brought up teenage girls, like kind of this need to be
00:08:21.980 special. I was thinking about it this morning, eight or nine years ago, there were these movies
00:08:26.240 like Me, Earl and the Dying Girl, Fault in Our Stars, like that sort of romanticized illness and
00:08:32.920 being sick and dying. So there's a lot that goes into it. And what you were saying about like
00:08:37.800 hierarchies and structures, I think a lot of the spoonie world dovetailed with the Me Too movement
00:08:42.000 that kind of became really suspicious of, let's say, male-dominated hierarchies and created a
00:08:48.280 world in which patients were being victimized by doctors. It's left-wing QAnon and they're trying
00:08:54.500 to take away your agency and power. I see a lot of overlap. Yeah. Well, and it makes sense that
00:08:59.220 something like this would organically form within young female communities that are looking for 1.00
00:09:03.900 affirmation. And I think in a sense of community and they get affirmed by the community, but then they
00:09:08.640 begin to do things like you talk about in the article, like pillport, like mixing pills. And
00:09:12.880 there's like special status if you need tubes and there's- And if they up your feed, that's like a bad
00:09:18.120 thing because it means you're getting better and that you might one day get off the tube. And like,
00:09:22.360 I want to be clear, like, and this was a really hard subject to write about. I think these girls are 0.99
00:09:27.900 actually feeling pain. I don't think they go into their bedrooms and shut the door and jump out of
00:09:33.440 their wheelchair and say, hi, I tricked another doctor today. I do. I'm not sure that their pain
00:09:38.140 is a symptom of what they think it's a symptom of. I think that's the best way to put it. But
00:09:44.020 yeah, what you said is correct of the need to externalize and differentiate and make unique
00:09:48.620 according to your illness. Also, when you're looking at this from the context of young girls
00:09:52.760 who are coming at this, they're beginning to try to find themselves. They're going through puberty a lot
00:09:57.080 of the times. And I think that female sexuality is broadly misunderstood in our society. And I think
00:10:02.680 part of what we're seeing here when women first go through puberty is a need to be cherished or 0.76
00:10:08.500 treated like something special and fragile that is cared for, which this self-framing elevates.
00:10:15.940 So you almost get this perfect storm of hierarchy, affirmation, victimhood, this, and I'm unique
00:10:24.420 to such an extent where when I was reading your piece, I was like, how do I protect my own kids
00:10:29.940 from this? Right. It seems like such an effective package. So I'd love it if you could talk a bit
00:10:34.480 about the people you interviewed, people who got out of it and what you will be doing for your own
00:10:38.980 kids. Yeah. It's interesting. You bring up teen girls and this is like a theme I come back to in
00:10:43.300 my writing all the time. Like I actually think teen girls might be like the most potent, like if you
00:10:47.720 could harness the energy and like the intensity, you could power like cities. Like that is like the power
00:10:54.320 of the collective of teen girls. And I've done a lot of, I'm not a lot. I mean, I've done reporting
00:10:59.540 on eating disorders, on cutting, you'll see the different waves of what that is. I think the
00:11:04.080 conversation about gender dysphoria actually fits into this in a certain way. I think it fits into
00:11:09.660 it in every way. I think we're looking at two very similar phenomenon. And it's one of the things I
00:11:16.100 point out, I'm like, okay, kids are going through puberty and there's a community out there that says,
00:11:20.340 if you just do this, you will be comfortable with your body. And that affirms you obsessively
00:11:26.420 whenever you're around them. Like in the same way that the fact that some spoonies are being
00:11:31.460 talked into this or don't have these conditions, that doesn't mean these conditions don't exist.
00:11:36.680 It doesn't mean that POTS isn't a real condition, that there aren't really young girls who have chronic
00:11:41.380 medical conditions. But when you create a community that affirms them around this, you have the
00:11:46.120 potentiality of the psychological exasperation of prodromal or low level tendencies in these
00:11:54.220 individuals, which I think you see within different youth communities with gender dysphoria. And I
00:12:00.600 should point out, not just on the far left, but also on the far right. These Andrew Tate following
00:12:05.020 guys, a lot of them seem to have a form of gender dysphoria where they want to define who they are
00:12:10.620 based on their gender identity. I also think there's like kind of a reflex to categorize
00:12:16.060 everything. Like you can't just be tired. You have to have chronic fatigue syndrome. And like to answer
00:12:20.860 your earlier question about how you protect against this, I'm one of four girls and like female
00:12:28.100 puberty is brutal and your body betrays you and it's really confusing. And I think, and you see this
00:12:37.020 with anorexia and maybe there's like an aspect of this with the spoonies, it's the want not to grow
00:12:41.380 up, to have your mother take care of you, to go to zero, to not be so wide. And I think as much as
00:12:47.480 you, we can encourage people and accept when someone says, you know what, I'm really, I'm feeling lazy,
00:12:53.740 I'm feeling down, I'm feeling tired and not be like, you should go to the doctor and get a pill for
00:12:58.120 that. That is something that must be categorized and medicated and more deeply understood because it's a
00:13:04.160 pathology of some sort. I think that's one thing to do, but teenage girls, the internet did not invent 1.00
00:13:09.740 like teenage girls cracking up around the age of 14 or 15. That, that is going to be forever, but
00:13:15.320 the internet does do, it amplifies it and it incentivizes it in ways that I find interesting.
00:13:21.240 Well, to your earlier point too, the suffering that many of these young women feel is real,
00:13:28.520 even if they don't technically have the actual condition they may think that they have,
00:13:33.280 that a lot of it, then they psychosomatically give themselves that condition. And the same can
00:13:37.720 happen with therapy culture, or this is controversial, but we would argue with gender
00:13:41.880 dysphoria as well, where you may not actually be trans, or you may not actually have post-traumatic
00:13:46.780 stress, or sorry, post-traumatic... Trauma just generally. Yeah, trauma in general.
00:13:51.980 The community, a large one that is, I'd say adjacent to the Spoonie community, but still distinct from it,
00:13:58.260 where the hierarchy is based around a trauma or something traumatic that happened to them in
00:14:03.100 their childhood. And they begin to create these communities where there is a huge incentive
00:14:09.100 to imagine trauma that didn't happen. But then that creates real pain, that trauma,
00:14:15.520 like you are making it worse by leaning into it, but then also you end up in these communities where
00:14:20.280 people use that to your point as well, to virtue signal. And they, it's bad because you turn to it
00:14:25.760 naturally as a solution. This is a problem I want to solve. I don't want this. This is bad and I need
00:14:30.860 to get through it. But then you subconsciously, especially if you're a teenage girl, get sucked 0.99
00:14:36.060 into the social dynamics. And then you're in this like status hierarchy game fighting for higher
00:14:40.880 status without even knowing it because of the way your brain is wired at the time.
00:14:45.580 Right. And I'm sure you, you were a young girl. I was obsessed with Holocaust books and I didn't
00:14:50.320 understand trauma or horrible things happening. And so there's this want of to go on chat roulette
00:14:56.180 and see someone masturbating, even though you're scared of it. You also want to see it because you 0.95
00:14:59.780 want to know what's happening and you're afraid if you don't see it, someone's going to make you watch
00:15:03.280 it. It's so confusing and intense. And to your earlier point of, or I don't, I think a lot of how
00:15:08.580 we got here in terms of the conversation about everyone's traumatized every, I think it has to do with
00:15:13.940 the spectruming of life. So sexuality is on a spectrum, Kinsey scale. I can get behind that.
00:15:19.740 But now aggression is on a spectrum, microaggression, macroaggression, autism's on a
00:15:25.340 spectrum. So it's, if everything's a spectrum and we're all on it, we're all sick because sickness
00:15:30.540 is a spectrum. So I think as right as I think a lot of nuance is in terms of sickness, in terms of
00:15:40.340 sexuality, in terms of a lot of these human experiences, I think for an undeveloped brain,
00:15:45.960 it can also trick you into believing that you've been a victim of something and you're never not
00:15:51.120 going to be a victim of that thing, if that makes sense.
00:15:53.440 Well, and something that we have an episode on that we've filmed and hasn't gone live yet is
00:15:57.460 on the idea of how our grandparents' generation essentially lived in a teen dystopian.
00:16:03.760 Because like their boyfriends went off to war and stuff?
00:16:05.820 Well, no, like I recently read my grandmother's autobiography during the occupation of Paris when
00:16:11.420 she lived there. And she's describing like fleeing Paris while the Nazis are coming in.
00:16:16.360 The roads are being bombed. She is driving her car across bridges that are actively being
00:16:20.920 bombed.
00:16:21.200 But if you watch the episode for this topic.
00:16:23.980 Yeah. Well, and there's no food, but it gives us the impression there's maybe this need to have
00:16:30.360 difficulty in life that the hardship is also part of a good upbringing and we don't have it now.
00:16:36.420 So we crave it. And we read these teen dystopias and we subject ourselves to these stresses and we
00:16:41.380 try to find something that's wrong because we need something that's wrong.
00:16:44.420 But the point being is that I think people undersell, if you go back to our grandparents'
00:16:48.720 generation or earlier, how insanely, quote unquote, in modern standards, traumatic the average human
00:16:54.780 life was. And that the anaphobum now is people living in environments where there is not genuine
00:17:04.180 scarcity. And because of that, I think it's causing sort of psychological haywire-ness almost to the
00:17:11.500 extent of being like raised in a cage or something like that, where they are seeking out forms of
00:17:19.020 self-victimization and trauma, where that is a thing of status and allure. And they read about
00:17:25.400 it and they fantasize about it, which is just really fascinating. And I don't think that we
00:17:29.140 expected humans to be like this.
00:17:30.760 Right. And then for us to put ourselves in the cages, it's let me sedate myself and let me come
00:17:36.840 up with a justification for watching cartoons all day as like a grown woman. You know what I mean?
00:17:42.520 Yeah. Your Hercule Durkle story.
00:17:44.580 Yeah, exactly. Exactly. It all comes back. It all comes back to Hercule Durkle. But
00:17:48.900 yeah, it's, I, it's such, it's amazing because it's very understandable wands being,
00:17:57.240 I think, manifesting in a sort of, what am I trying to say? It's manifesting in a way that
00:18:04.980 it's self-sabotaging ultimately. And that's what's sad. But I think it's so interesting. Abigail Schreier
00:18:10.620 has like just such a brilliant book out of called, oh God, what's it called? I feel like we have it
00:18:16.560 here. It's about therapy culture and, and it's just really interesting and how therapy is,
00:18:22.940 it's a medical treatment and hundreds and millions of kids are getting this medical treatment through
00:18:27.360 their schools, through online, kind of unbeknownst to the parents. And it's shifting who the parents
00:18:34.100 are. Is it the state? Is it the school? Is it your mom and dad? And you see this, I won't ruin it.
00:18:38.580 We talk about this a lot in other episodes, the cult of therapy and how it transformed.
00:18:42.580 It's building dependency with his patients and it's training them. One of my favorite
00:18:46.800 lines that I just keep repeating, there was a popular online YouTuber that was like,
00:18:50.880 don't people know about the number of young people with mental health issues? This is because
00:18:56.020 we don't have enough therapists and they're not inexpensive enough.
00:18:59.440 Oh my God. Do you think that our grandparents' generation had therapists? Do you think in the
00:19:04.320 old West there were therapists running around to kids, especially being like, oh, 10 year old,
00:19:10.940 we need to talk about your feelings. Do you think that maybe that could be the problem?
00:19:16.220 This correlation you're seeing here. And they're like, no, you don't understand. I'm traumatized.
00:19:20.980 It's like, no, you don't understand. All of Europe, like all of our grandparents' generation 0.66
00:19:25.960 who was in Europe went through a form of trauma that you can't even begin to conceptualize outside
00:19:32.480 of fantasies. And they didn't go to psychologists about it. They didn't. It's wild.
00:19:39.060 Yeah. Which isn't to say they aren't traumatized. And I think the thing with kids is like, as an
00:19:42.720 adult and Abigail talks about this, you can push back on a therapist. You could say, when she says
00:19:47.440 this, Hey, it's enough talking about my mother-in-law. As a child, you want to please the adult that
00:19:52.540 you're in the room with. You don't understand that there's like a service being offered. You
00:19:56.720 think you're in trouble. And I think therapy on adults and therapy on kids are very different
00:20:00.740 propositions. Oh yeah. And especially the state sanctioned, almost ubiquitous thing that's
00:20:06.060 happening now. And I would strongly recommend parents not send their kids to therapy. I've gotten to the
00:20:10.620 point. It's not that therapy is bad. It is very useful for some people, but I think that the vast
00:20:18.640 proportion of therapy that's being practiced on kids these days is not of the safe variety.
00:20:23.980 And so it will likely on average, make things worse rather than better. Or even if it's a
00:20:28.760 minority of cases where it's making things worse, it makes them so much worse that it's not worth
00:20:33.960 really medicalizing the rest of your kid's life over. But I want to talk about some of the
00:20:38.480 interviews you did, some of the spoonies you got to know, what were they like? Describe these
00:20:42.980 experiences. It's interesting. They were so open with me, first of all, which is always something
00:20:48.060 I'm so grateful. I'm a stranger on the internet that I'm reaching out. And I'm like, and you said
00:20:51.980 this ruined your sex life. Can you talk a little bit? It's crazy. But one of them, this quote that
00:20:57.380 really struck me was that someone had asked what this girl who had this really rich life in college 0.98
00:21:03.620 is, who she is outside of being sick. And she said, my jaw hit the floor. I didn't know what to say.
00:21:09.780 And that's someone who was able to go to college, was able to leave the house. And then
00:21:14.700 it all goes backwards and everything is in reverse, which I thought was interesting. Oh my
00:21:19.780 God, it was so long ago. Who else did I talk to? Well, the main girl I talked to, Morgan,
00:21:24.640 she described opening up an Instagram page, wanting to be like a spoony influencer. I have a piece
00:21:29.880 coming out that I'm editing about unwellness influencers. Like we all know wellness influencers
00:21:34.640 with their Ayurvedic smoothies and whatever. But what about the unwellness influencers that just
00:21:38.840 encourages you to herkul dirkul and everything else? But this girl, Morgan, she was in a hospital bed. 0.96
00:21:43.600 I think she had been there for months. She had to gain weight, but she wasn't gaining weight. She 1.00
00:21:47.880 had a pick line. She had mouths. Nothing was working. She had stomach pains every time she
00:21:51.980 ate, which got worse from the feeding tube. And then her mom came in and plucked her cell phone 0.65
00:21:56.580 out of her hand. And that became, that was the moment that she started to get better when her mom
00:22:01.040 cut her off from a community of people that she believed to be her friends. And I'm sure they were
00:22:05.540 her friends. It was a Snapchat group that she had like in a thousand day streak with or whatever it was.
00:22:10.080 And it gives you this sense of being understood, but you don't realize that you're, you're, there
00:22:15.440 are like weights on your ankles while this is happening. It's like when you freeze to death,
00:22:19.900 you feel warm at the last second or something. But yeah, she was really interesting. And she
00:22:24.140 described, she didn't say, Oh, I made it up. And I don't think she did, but she was able to have
00:22:28.380 awareness about how this community has a really dark side and a side that, that doesn't encourage you
00:22:35.040 to get better. Well, one thing also that I think is really interesting, and I was mentioning this
00:22:39.220 before we started recording is how pervasive Spoonie language is. Even if people don't know
00:22:44.880 what the community is, I had heard before I read your article about spoons. And then we were like,
00:22:49.860 Oh, this friend is a Spoonie and this friend is a Spoonie. And some of them have even used these
00:22:54.580 analogies with us and we just didn't realize it. And then once we read your article, we started
00:22:59.560 seeing this culture and bits of it everywhere. What scares me is that I think a lot of people
00:23:06.220 fall into it without knowing what it is. And I think most Spoonies fall into it without knowing 0.99
00:23:10.300 what it is. When you discovered it, because you really write about it as a cohesive thing. And
00:23:17.440 from this very sober minded perspective of an outsider, how did you manage to not just immediately fall
00:23:25.480 right into it and fall for it? Like I think most people do even people who are like, otherwise
00:23:29.800 we'll say very critical of maybe we'll say like therapy culture or trans culture or anything.
00:23:34.420 I think a lot of people still totally fall for this. Right. Is there anything that? Yeah.
00:23:39.320 Cause it's such a taboo thing to doubt someone's experience of their illness. Yeah. That,
00:23:44.400 that horrible thing that I had to do. It's a good question. I think everyone always says,
00:23:50.180 follow the money. And when you have someone saying, Hey, if you wear compression socks and you
00:23:55.460 have to drink salt water all the time and your doctor says, do you faint? Even if you haven't
00:23:59.540 fainted, maybe just tell them you fainted. And also buy these $40 blue light glasses. I really
00:24:04.360 have no problem getting into it when I feel that there is like quackery and people wasting their
00:24:10.640 money on things that are ultimately harmful to them. Not to say that every person who identifies
00:24:15.580 as a Spoonie is trying to sell you like weird electrolyte tinctures, but I think that's part of it.
00:24:19.940 And then I think throughout the whole internet, there is this like trauma porn or horror porn
00:24:24.520 masquerading as raising awareness, the two most abused words in the English language. 0.99
00:24:29.260 And I don't know, I call bullshit. I love, because I'm thinking about this in a historic 0.91
00:24:33.820 context. Like this historically just would have been described as hysteria. Like why is it that
00:24:38.760 these women have this affirmed in them? And what you said at the beginning is why this has been allowed
00:24:44.600 to get out of control like this is doubting someone's lived experience is a sin within the shadow
00:24:50.900 religion or whatever you want to call it. This alternative religious and theological system
00:24:54.860 that exists within our society, because there's no reason for that to be an intrinsically wrong
00:24:59.200 thing. I call BS on what you're telling me. It sounds self-indulgent, but you're not allowed to say
00:25:04.200 that, but that's like a totally reasonable thing in a historic context to say to a teenage girl.
00:25:09.140 I think you're being a bit of a drama queen.
00:25:12.140 Go back to Jane Austen novels and like a common feature in them, like a common trope. It like the
00:25:17.660 gay best friend of its time was the sickly mother or something who was just always had taken to her 1.00
00:25:23.880 beds and swoonies. And that was a thing. They were totally spoonies. There was a spoonie flare up 0.82
00:25:29.640 during Regency era England among wealthy people. And again, it was wealthy white women doing it too, 0.98
00:25:36.880 which is hilarious.
00:25:37.620 But I want to elevate something else you said that I thought was really interesting,
00:25:42.140 which was the thing that broke her out of it is what is your identity outside of being sick?
00:25:46.880 And I think that this is where what you discovered in the story, I think is so useful to people,
00:25:52.740 even who would never be at risk of becoming a spoonie, because as our society has moved to
00:25:58.600 a secular place or a post-religious place, when people think about who they are, we are not given
00:26:06.240 a good framework for determining that within our educational system. And so some individuals like
00:26:11.900 Simone, I yourself probably thought a lot about who am I, what do I want to be in the world? Like,
00:26:16.800 how do I define which actions I take versus which actions I don't take? Like I built some sort of
00:26:21.500 like core moral framework that I'm living around. But some people, if they're just walk into this
00:26:27.440 without thinking, it's very easy to accidentally say, who am I? Like, how do I define good action?
00:26:32.940 I guess I'm this illness, because this is what I get affirmed for in my community. Or I guess I'm
00:26:37.300 a woman, right? And therefore-
00:26:38.920 But this Andrew Tate thing, like you were pointing out earlier, right? I'm just a manly man.
00:26:43.040 I'm a manly man. And I be myself by being a manly man. But this can also be political parties. A
00:26:49.380 person decides, I am a conservative. And therefore, all the opinions I hold, everything I do during the
00:26:54.560 day. And while not all of these communities are intrinsically as damaging to an individual as the
00:27:00.940 Spoonie community, they fall into very similar psychological loops, which we are all susceptible 1.00
00:27:07.940 to if we don't take time to have a firm understanding of what heuristics we are using to make decisions in
00:27:15.740 our lives and choose a self-identity. Well, this is why I love you guys so much and love talking to you
00:27:21.980 so much because you're one of the few people who actually believe things. And I know it sounds silly
00:27:27.920 and are willing to say what you believe. And it's like, we believe in having lots of kids. You may
00:27:32.440 not, but that is the thing we, and it's, you're not trying to say you're both. And I think a lot
00:27:37.640 of these communities, like the Andrew Tate manly men, they're defining themselves based on what they
00:27:41.800 believe the culture has done to them. It's a grievance culture. And same thing with Spoonies. And you
00:27:47.640 brought up like that this is whatever, filling the God-shaped hole in all of our hearts. I do think
00:27:52.960 there's a spiritual aspect of there is badness. It has migrated to within me. I am dirty. I am sick.
00:27:59.840 I must be cleansed, but none of it's my fault. It's like a little confused, but yeah, I think
00:28:05.320 defining yourself based on lack, based on the fact that it's harder for you to run a mile because of
00:28:11.040 your condition is not a recipe for a good life. Well, it's interesting that you mentioned the
00:28:17.580 spiritual part, because one of the things that I often say is like these evolved religious traditions,
00:28:22.220 like they came with a lot of malware, but they were the only memetic antivirus we as a species had.
00:28:28.780 They were a bad antivirus. They were a heavy antivirus. They were like old school McAfee
00:28:34.120 Norton, where it slowed down your computer by 60%, but it still fought the viruses. And when you
00:28:40.080 completely remove it, you get these very simplistic memetic viruses that certain people are just
00:28:46.240 incredibly susceptible to. Right. And certain people who I would argue are very sensitive
00:28:52.300 and open. I don't think they're like necessarily maladjusted. I just think we've taken all the
00:28:57.640 guardrails off and here's what happens. I think a lot of these women might've been in a committed 1.00
00:29:02.360 relationship if men could get it together. So there are a lot of factors that make it spin out of
00:29:07.760 control. Yeah. Well, if men could get it together. And this is interesting is that in a post-scarcity
00:29:12.240 world, finding your purpose. And I want to go back to this state because most of the developed world,
00:29:18.540 and especially the people who become spoonies are living post-scarcity lives, middle-class white
00:29:23.020 women. That is a post-scarcity lifestyle. You're not really going to starve or anything like that. 1.00
00:29:28.340 There are things you want that you can't have, but those things are primarily status symbols
00:29:33.120 that you primarily want because they have generated value based on the fact that a lot of people want
00:29:39.940 them and therefore you can't have them. A nice car? What's an example? Like a nice car or designer
00:29:44.860 clothes. Like nothing intrinsic about them. You can get clothes if you want clothes. The reason why
00:29:50.280 nice clothes are something you can't get is the very reason you want them. Like they wouldn't be a
00:29:55.840 status symbol if you could trivially get them. If you want a computer, you can get a computer from two
00:30:00.600 years ago that costs like 200 bucks. Things are always accessible to people. Smartphones are
00:30:07.040 accessible to everyone. I think, what is it? Like 89% of homeless people have a smartphone now?
00:30:11.380 We are in an extremely, housing is probably the only thing of real scarcity in our society.
00:30:16.340 Yeah. Interesting.
00:30:17.540 But we suspected as we transitioned to a post-scarcity ecosystem that people would begin
00:30:22.140 to indulge in hedonism. And instead what they indulged in was self-victimization,
00:30:27.280 which allowed the removal of personal responsibility, which is in a way one avenue
00:30:33.160 is spoonism. But indulging in self-victimization doesn't feel like indulging in self-victimization
00:30:39.000 to the individual. It feels like highlighting the parts of themselves that differentiate them from
00:30:47.380 society and thus make them special. And I think that you see this even within communities
00:30:53.840 that I consider myself, like I'm a pretty big supporter of the gay community, for example.
00:30:59.680 And what was really interesting is one of the things we mentioned is gay men, we've mentioned
00:31:02.760 this before, 45% of gay men voted for Trump in the last election. Like the gay male community has 1.00
00:31:07.840 changed.
00:31:08.680 45?
00:31:09.220 45%, yeah. So much since I was a kid. When I was a kid, you had this hierarchy within the gay male 0.50
00:31:17.120 community where you would act like more of a gay male to move up within this hierarchy.
00:31:22.100 And so you had these very flamboyant gay men that have disappeared as part of our culture. 1.00
00:31:27.980 Because being a gay male, especially a gay white male, no longer really others you in our society 0.76
00:31:33.260 in the way it used to. So there is no longer a reason to build your identity around it in the way
00:31:38.880 that many young men did when I was growing up.
00:31:41.660 Right. I think about this all the time. Like I'm the first woman in my generation,
00:31:45.480 or I'm the first generation of my family as a woman who got to move to New York City,
00:31:51.660 got my own apartment, got my own job, had my own money. Not because the women before me, 0.97
00:31:56.360 they were smarter than me. They were totally capable, but it just wasn't done. They got
00:32:00.580 married early. They had kids. They had probably a better life than me. But I like the liberation
00:32:05.200 happened so quickly. And I think with gay male culture, everyone was dying 35 years ago. 1.00
00:32:11.740 Everyone was dying. And now it's like-
00:32:13.620 Literally underwent basically a genocide.
00:32:15.320 It was the craziest thing in the world. And then it's, you shoot to the top of culture
00:32:18.960 in this way that's almost, it's incredible. It's a miracle, but it also, I think, induces some sort
00:32:25.080 of like cultural vertigo of, okay, where do we stand now? Who are we?
00:32:28.620 Taken over by marginal portions of the LGBT community. And now you are the oppressor. 1.00
00:32:33.880 Right. Exactly. But even like a, let's just say like a gay guy 25 years ago, wouldn't really 0.99
00:32:40.060 dream of having a husband and kids and a white picket fence. My, the gay dudes of my generation, 1.00
00:32:45.360 that's exactly what they want. They're getting married before me. Even the 10 year difference 0.98
00:32:49.380 has totally changed what was, what's possible and therefore changed how, what behavior you model.
00:32:56.100 Yeah. Yeah. And it really messes up the way adults are interacting with culture. Like even us,
00:33:01.700 we did an episode where we were talking about, I grew up where, where gay men were genuinely
00:33:04.620 impressed, oppressed, beaten up. If they were found out, like it was very rare that someone
00:33:09.800 would come out. One of our listeners, who was a gen alpha person was like, it's so weird to hear you
00:33:13.880 say that because when I was growing up, being gay was a status symbol. Oh yeah. It was in school and
00:33:21.060 it gave you special protection from teachers. It gave you special access to things.
00:33:25.020 And that just means you're like vicious and fun. Yeah. And that the older population doesn't 1.00
00:33:32.140 realize how much the pendulum has swung. And so they think that they are affirming an oppressed
00:33:39.080 group without realizing they are pedestalizing the group that is at the top of the status hierarchy,
00:33:47.260 which is really fascinating. Right. And then of course, with Gen Z who are having way less sex, 0.71
00:33:52.420 queer just means like straight with weird hair, like straight with the right politics or whatever 0.98
00:33:56.800 it is. Like it's the, the whole decoupling your sexual identity from what kind of sex you have,
00:34:04.620 I think is really interesting because you no longer have to have gay sex to be gay. 0.99
00:34:09.240 Yeah. We always point out that we are technically trans by LGBT ideology because we are a gender. 0.65
00:34:14.580 I don't care what gender I am. If I woke up a woman tomorrow, it would not genuinely affect my life 1.00
00:34:18.820 that much. He'd work it. You're just a, you're just a brain in the head.
00:34:22.600 Right, right. I'm just a brain in the head. And that makes me a gender from the perspective of 1.00
00:34:26.820 trans ideology. Well, being a gender is a form of gender queer. Gender queer is a form of trans. 0.91
00:34:32.760 So we are not incorrect in saying that we are fully trans within a trans moral architecture. And
00:34:39.780 they'd say, well, no, you're not. And it's, well, then why no, am I not? And it's because your
00:34:43.200 politics aren't trans because we have turned these into political identities.
00:34:48.540 It's interesting too, because this almost goes back to the spoony thing, because it's like,
00:34:52.100 these are invisible illnesses. I don't need to look sick to be sick. I don't need to tell you my
00:34:55.800 diagnosis to be sick. I can self-diagnose and be sick. I don't even need to go to a professional.
00:35:00.620 Similarly with gender ideology, you don't have to present as a woman to be a woman. So it's all 0.92
00:35:05.680 internal, but there's still this need to like signal to everyone else, but you don't need to do that
00:35:10.840 because that has nothing to do with it. And it's, it's, I don't know. I think there's some sort of
00:35:14.920 connection there where it's, yes, you, a trans man, a trans person and me like a deathly sick 0.69
00:35:20.540 person, even though observably, none of those things are true. You're treated the same with
00:35:25.340 society. In both cases, society doubts your, and the supposed authorities within various professions
00:35:31.540 doubt your lived experiences. And so you can come together under this umbrella of never doubt
00:35:39.220 what I say is true about my experiences of reality. Who coined, we have to find out who coined lived
00:35:45.320 experience. It is like the trick of the century. Well, this has been such an engaging conversation. I
00:35:52.520 almost feel like you could be a third host of the show. You are, I get along with you so well. And for our
00:35:58.560 fans who say that there are not unmarried, like super, super eligible women. Now she, I think she's dating 0.87
00:36:07.000 and stuff like that now, but she doesn't have a ring on it yet. And this means you should be sending
00:36:11.920 applications because she is attractive, based, and super intelligent. Okay. Last one, ladies and 1.00
00:36:19.800 gentlemen. And so I don't care how that happens. My kids need people to marry. I always say this. 0.97
00:36:26.640 So this call has been absolutely fantastic. Please check out her stuff. Create a Google alert with
00:36:35.060 her name. If you want, do you have a Google alert with her name, Simone? No, because I just subscribe
00:36:39.780 to the free press. Yeah. Subscribe to the free press. That's the best thing to do. Go to the
00:36:43.140 fp.com slash subscribe. All the content's really good, but Susie's is the best and you, man, I want to
00:36:50.500 see more at every time I see the free press. I'm like, is it Susie? And not enough. Come on,
00:36:55.740 man. All right. Awesome. Thank you guys so much.