The Center of the Universe
Episode Stats
Summary
Rebecca's cat allergies have improved, and she's here to tell you all about it. Plus, we talk about how cats are weird, and dogs are nice, and what it's like to have a cat and a dog in your life.
Transcript
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Hey, Rebecca, what's doing well? Yeah, someone noticed my allergies. It's not springtime yet.
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There's still snow out here, so it's not quite pollen season or anything, but I'm taking care
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of a cat. My cat allergies have gotten a lot better. I guess by better, I mean I'm not totally
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losing it due to the presence of a cat. I guess my immune system does it adjust in some way.
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The allergy is an over-immune system in many ways. Having allergies is a sign of health,
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is it not? Your immune system is going into overdrive, fighting off something that it
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doesn't need to fight off. But I used to have just really terrible cat allergies in the sense that I
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couldn't even function around a cat. I remember visiting someone's house one time in Texas,
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I believe, which was lucky in terms of the location due to what I'll describe. But
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he had a cat and I didn't know it and I just could not sleep. I felt like my throat was cramping up to
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the point that I might suffocate. And so I just went and slept outside. I just grabbed a blanket and slept
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on the grass to get away from the cat. But I've been taking Claritin and that's helped. That has
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certainly helped. But cats are weird. There is something just strange about a cat. Cats aren't
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fully domesticated in the way that dogs are. Because I think I think dogs genuinely love humans more than
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other dogs. And it's not like a dog won't get excited when it sees another dog and he'll want to go
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sniff its butt and pal around and maybe fake bite and things like that. But they seem to have a just
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genuine attachment to their owners that I think can only be called love. I don't think cats are quite
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like that. Cats. It is like you have a wild animal in your home. But this animal is so small that it has
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strategized as such, which is that I'll let this giant animal feed me and I won't pick a fight with
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the giant animal. But if I were bigger, I would eat that son of a bitch. I think that's how cats think.
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You're thinking of Williams syndrome. This actually exists in humans. People with Williams syndrome,
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they have a dog-like face. They smile more. They're just to their detriment. They're not
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functional, but they're just really nice and they act like puppies. What is the name of that syndrome
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again? Williams syndrome, if I recall correctly. Williams, yeah. Williams syndrome. Okay. Interesting.
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Let me just look that up. So they basically have a dog attitude is what you're saying is that? Yes.
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Yeah. As someone mentioned in the chat. So they're just millennials. They're just here to help and
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be quirky and service. Yeah. Yes, it is true. I yeah, it is. I think the dog thing is real,
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though. I don't know what you would call it. If not love genuine happiness to see you when you get
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home. And now you could just say, oh, it's some strategy to get fed or something, which,
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of course, it is on some level. But I don't know. I think it's a little bit more than that.
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Pax? So what would you make of the idea of a cat and a dog loving each other's company? What would
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that mean? Cats and dogs. What was the line from Ghostbusters? Cats and dogs living together. Total
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chaos. Total chaos. Yeah. I think it can definitely happen. Is it love, though? Have
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you seen this? Like they snuggle up together or share food or help each other out? I think
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cats and dogs are it depends on the individual. But I've seen affection from both. Yeah. But
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I don't know. I think dogs understand hierarchy. Like they will look at a person and think,
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yeah, that's a different species. But I love it nonetheless. I think a cat. They've done studies
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where a cat looks at a person and just sees like a large cat. Kind of like this and equal. How did
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they do that? I've seen that image of like what you look like to a cat and you basically look like a
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cat. But how would you do that? You can't put a video camera inside their brain. And you obviously
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could. But that's the video camera looking at the brain. You can't get inside its mind. Let's say
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I don't know how they do that. But it's interesting. I think it's also interesting to think about the
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polymorphisms between like large cats like lions, tigers, and then you compare them with small cats.
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And then you've got dogs where you've got like wild dogs that roam in Africa. And then you've got
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like the wolf, which look very kind of similar to a husky. Yeah. I've also heard that like a small
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cat. There's supposedly small cats in Africa that have like a huge chase to kill ratio. So they have
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a higher kill ratio than even like lions and cheetahs and things like this. They're very successful.
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Wow. Cats are supposedly like little weapons of mass destruction.
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They definitely are. This cat I'm referring to. I'm not sure she could totally survive on her own.
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I'm not positive, but I think she would come close in the sense that she's always finding little rodents
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and then torturing the rodents. So she'll bring in a mouse and like sadistically play with it for two
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hours before finally killing and eating it. My mother also said that one time this cat like
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there was like a little bird in the house and the cat like caught the bird in midair. I still can't
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even believe it myself. Like I don't know. You have to have a, it's not IQ in the way that we think of
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it of like, can you, are you a good legal problem solver? Can you solve math equations or whatever?
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It's a sort of like IQ of the nervous system. It's a kill IQ where you can do something that I don't
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think any human could do. I mean, catch a bird in mid flight and then have, and then eat it like
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within a few minutes. It's pretty remarkable when you think about it. That is a, uh, quite an evil
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being. I don't know what to say, but no, I've, I've always liked dogs. I've never quite understood
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cats and I've probably had a sort of bigotry against cats due to my allergies where, you know,
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it's, it's almost like plavlovian. You walk in and there's this cat and my, and I feel like I'm
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about to suffocate and my eyes are running and yeah. I'm curious. Have you ever been around a
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sphinx cat before? What is that exactly? I suppose that is the short haired cat, almost bald looking
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Dr. Dr. Evil. Oh, okay. I've, I don't think I've ever been around one now. What are they like?
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Oh, I don't know. I was just curious if, if people with cat allergies have been around short
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hair varieties and had the same issue. Yeah. Richard, you might be interested in wolf dogs.
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Are you familiar with that? Are they like hybrids? Yes. Uh, there's a whole market for them. If you
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have a big old backyard, it could be someone to look into. They're actually healthier than they're,
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they've got fewer diseases than dogs and wolves. Interesting. But like that you get that hybrid
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vigor sometimes actually between species. It's interesting. What? Yeah. When the species are
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inbred, you do get hybrid vigor, but they're not necessarily more fit in the sense that if you put
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the wolf dog in a wolf pack, well, they're not aggressive enough. They're not high T enough.
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If you put them in a, in a dog environment, they're just going to eat your couch and they might bite you
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and you're going to have to kill it. Anyway, just a little thought on dogs and cats. There is a joke
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I've heard, which is that when you feed a dog, the dog looks up with you, looks up at you and thinks
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you are God. And then when you feed a cat, she thinks to herself, I am God. And I mean, maybe a little
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bit over, maybe a little bit exaggerated, but I think that is sort of true about dogs and cats. I, there
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was this one time I remember where, I mean, luckily this is during the summer, but I, it was late and I
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let my dog Zeus out in just this little backyard that I have here at this place, not big enough for
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a wolf dog. And I, it was late and I just like lay, I laid down and I just fell asleep. And so I, I am not
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proud of this fact, but I left him out all night. And so I woke up and I usually, I, I'm usually awakened
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by Zeus who wants breakfast and is ready to go for the day and so on. Uh, and I was like, where's
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Zeus, where's Zeus. And then I look out and he's there by the door, like lying down by the door.
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And then when I let him in, he was like, Oh, great. Thanks for letting me in. He's like, I love you.
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That was really a great thing you did to let me inside. I was like, thought he would be mad or something.
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He had a right to be mad, but there's basically like zero resentment or so on. He's happy about
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being let in. He, he doesn't think that you did something wrong. I don't know. It's interesting,
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but we are just vamping on and on about dogs and cats. This is going to be a casual one today
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already is. I actually want to interview this person. I thought we could do it on today,
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Tuesday, but I think we might have to delay it until next Tuesday, but I will check back in with
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him. There's just a little bit of a misunderstanding. I think we can cover some war stuff, but to be
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honest, I think I would rather cover some kind of meta war stuff, to be honest, because that's
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something that, you know, we can do that's unique. I think in terms of getting updates on the war,
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I think there are a lot more kind of mainstream outlets doing that. And so I don't really think
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we need to do that, but I've tried to understand what Trump is up to. And if you listen to his exact
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words, I don't think you can reach any sort of definitive conclusion. Because if we go back
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a few months, we had this notion put forward by J.D. Vance and company, which is that Donald Trump's
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not going to get us into any foreign forever war. We don't want the IATO to have a nuclear weapon. And
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so Trump puts America first and he strikes and he strikes hard, but it was a sort of strategic strike.
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And it was a strike in the tradition of humanitarian intervention on the one hand and the war on
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terror on the other, where it's sort of a police action that the United States can do at will that
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is not considered an act of war, is not usually voted on by Congress as such. And we kind of get
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away with it. And there certainly was like a dovetailing of the logic of the global war on terror
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and the humanitarian interventionism put forward by someone like Samantha Power. Now, these types of
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people will, that is terror warriors and humanitarians, will disagree on occasion, but they disagree on
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occasion, sometimes in important ways. But I don't think there's a philosophical or first principle
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disagreement between these two. I remember actually when I was a graduate student at Duke and I was
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teaching, I was TAing, I should say, a course on, it was called Genocide. And no, it wasn't a how-to
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course or a do-it-yourself. It was not that. Do it, you know, DIY genocide course. It was not that.
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So it was basically a kind of Samantha Power course. We actually read Samantha Power's book.
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I'm forgetting the title of it now. I think it's out of print. But she wrote it in the late 90s,
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before 9-11. And it was more of a sort of guilt trip about the West or America in particular for
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not stopping genocide. So there's sort of a history of these catastrophes. And that included the Armenian
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genocide and even Stalinism and the Great Purge and the Great Famine and all sorts of wicked things
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that he did. And the Holocaust, obviously, and a history of the development of the concept of
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genocide, little Greek and Latin mix, an attempt to destroy a group of people or a race. And even how
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that could be applied more broadly, where even if not a single person dies, the destruction of an
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indigenous culture is a kind of genocide. And that's very interesting that they would put it that
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way. For a couple of reasons, it presupposes that there's a kind of homogeneous ethno culture that's
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real and maybe even eternal and so on. So that there is a kind of Irishness at the heart of the
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Irish. And I don't know, closing down the pubs and preventing any acoustical renderings of
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mornin' m'lady when the blue moon rises over Ireland. I'm just making up things at this point.
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That preventing the performance of those works would amount to a genocide. And so it's very
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interesting because you hear a lot of that rhetoric coming from the far right and even the center right
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of, you know, remember we are dealing with, what's his name? Forgetting his name at the moment.
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He has a Claremont Institute degree or connections. And he was talking about how white culture
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is under attack. He was sort of making a genocide argument. And he was making this argument that
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presupposes that there's some like whiteness there, but he couldn't, of course, describe it.
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Jeremy Carl. Yes, thanks for coming up with that. I've already forgotten him. But so it was basically