00:13:18.240I mean, one of the things I wrote about not long ago was what I call Aella's law, which is to say the internet power law is now being rolled out in real life.
00:13:30.780And the power law of how things work on the internet has been observable since the early days of social media.
00:13:38.320The 1990 law, which is to say in any given social internet space, 1% of the users will generate most of the content.
00:13:50.680The next 9% will generate quite a lot and 90% will mostly just hang out a bit.
00:13:55.860But that also goes for earnings on the internet.
00:13:58.640So if you look at any given internet platform, say eBay or Amazon or YouTube, indeed, 1% of the contributors will reap most of the gains.
00:14:09.8809% will do pretty well, and 90% will just get the long tail.
00:14:17.860Ayala, for anybody who isn't aware, is an extremely high-earning performer on the pornography website OnlyFans.
00:14:24.780She's in the top 0.6%, I believe, of earners.
00:14:28.640And in a good month can make several hundred thousand dollars.
00:14:32.460So so she's she's right up at the top of the curve.
00:14:34.640But the majority of the majority of performers on OnlyFans or indeed the majority of sellers on eBay will will make, you know, a few quid here and there.
00:14:43.380And that that law I see in the digital age, I think, is being rolled out in real life as well.
00:14:47.760So I mean, one of the things you talk about COVID and lockdown, one of the things that's definitely been happening is the further accumulation of wealth right at the top.
00:14:56.920and the immiseration of everybody else, pretty much.
00:15:00.780COVID has rolled out Euler's Law comprehensively
00:15:04.200throughout all kinds of areas of society which were still resisting it
00:15:07.160because it effectively banned real-life alternatives
00:15:10.180to the kind of virtualisation and centralisation that I'm talking about.
00:15:15.200And what about, Francis, did you have another question about this?
00:15:19.400Yes. So the question that I want to ask,
00:15:22.260and again, it's touching on the real-world impacts,
00:15:25.860What effect does that have on the real world?
00:15:28.540Now, we've talked about the middle class,
00:15:30.560but doesn't that just exacerbate the atomisation,
00:21:27.000Probably neither. I mean, England's market towns have been around for a long time. Where I live has existed for the last thousand years. I don't think it's likely to disappear overnight.
00:21:41.040um but but although i don't really believe in progress in any sort of absolute sense i don't
00:21:46.840think it's a thing um i do you know cultures do evolve and you know places places and
00:21:52.820communities change their meaning and their inflection over time and there's sort of there's
00:21:57.800nothing you can really do about that so i'm kind of i'm sort of fairly resigned doomer in that sense
00:22:02.500you know i don't i don't see my i don't i don't see bedfordshire and its community is just kind
00:22:07.320of blowing away like a sandcastle in the wind. But I do think, as you say, things are changing
00:22:13.480very rapidly. And a lot of the things that we thought were just dead certs forever are really
00:22:20.560not. When you say you don't believe in progress, what do you mean by that? Because, I mean,
00:22:26.660objectively speaking, if we compare ourselves to humanity 100 years ago, 200 years ago, 500 years
00:22:33.620ago a thousand years ago i think you'd be very you'd be very easy to argue humanity has made a
00:22:38.780lot of progress well i mean i would actually disagree i mean because i think at the moment
00:22:44.160if you say well you know we've we've progressed over the last thousand years you've got to define
00:22:49.300what you mean by progress longer longer life expectancy right but at that point you've already
00:22:54.480begged the question i've already you're begging the question as in you've you know in in the in
00:23:00.120the way you phrased the question you've already you've already predetermined your answer uh okay
00:23:06.140so but would you would you argue that it's unfair to say that people living longer healthier lives
00:23:11.600uh i mean i see what you're saying in a way my point is that there are always trade-offs
00:23:16.660yeah yeah i see what you're saying so for example you might argue that the fact that we live longer
00:23:20.560is a is a product of a society that also means we live in atomized groups and therefore we're
00:23:26.100not connected with family we have fewer children and and blah blah blah and we end up dying in
00:23:30.680care homes as opposed to being looked after by immediate family just so yeah just so you know
00:23:34.840what i'm saying is not that you know so that nothing ever gets better or that we're getting
00:23:38.860worse my point is simply you know the reason i don't believe in progress in some sort of an
00:23:43.000absolute sense is that i think all the all the things that we measure as progress are just
00:23:46.840measured as such by bracketing all of the ways that they constitute trade-offs so you know the
00:23:51.900moment you've framed such and such as as pro as as your your your metric for progress you've already
00:23:57.640you've already um answered your own question okay what about penicillin well i mean but penicillin
00:24:03.780is great um but but yeah what about superbugs touche touche i mean you know my my point is
00:24:12.440simply that you know it's it's not obvious to me that humanity you know taken in its total
00:24:19.100is in some way morally improved from over 1,000 or 2,000 years ago.
00:25:46.620I think I think there's a lot of truth to that. I mean, if you look at the last decade to suggest that things are getting better, I'm not sure I'd buy that argument.
00:25:57.400Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it depends where you're standing. You know, I mean, if you're if you're an upper middle class white person who inherited wealth sometime in the late 1990s and got on the London housing ladder before the before the colossal boom, then you'd be forgiven for thinking that things things have been continuously getting better.
00:26:16.740But, you know, for somebody not very far down the road from that person, it really might not feel like that at all. Or for, you know, not that many years younger than that person, it might not feel like that at all.
00:26:24.800you know if you're no it's it's it's an excellent point i mean let's touch on a subject that has
00:26:31.240never upset or offended anybody who gets anybody angry feminism you write a lot you write a lot
00:26:37.140about feminism i particularly enjoy your articles would you describe yourself as a feminist mary
00:26:41.480and if you do what does that mean to you well my twitter bio says reactionary feminist okay what
00:26:46.520does that mean let's start with that it's it it started as some banter it was literally just a
00:26:51.980running joke between me and one of my friends. I had a long-standing argument with a friend about
00:26:57.260the term post-liberal, which people attach to me. I don't attach it to myself, but people attach the
00:27:02.680term post-liberal to me. And I had a long-standing argument with a friend who's of the opinion that
00:27:09.300I was not a post-liberal, I was a reactionary. And I said, no, I am not a reactionary. Reactionaries
00:27:14.780are bad people. And his take was essentially that post-liberals are just reactionaries who don't
00:27:21.540inhale um and you know it was a it was a very long-running very sort of it was a a long-standing
00:27:27.240banter back and forth about about post-liberals and reactionaries and in the course of which i
00:27:31.860changed my twitter bio just to see how long it would take him to notice but i sort of i came to
00:27:36.120think that actually it's it it's a fun placeholder i like reactionary because people are going to
00:27:40.900call me that anyway they're bound to because i i acknowledge for example that humans can't change
00:27:45.980sex, which is already a serious enough heresy to have you dumped among the bad people. And also
00:27:53.960because I don't believe in progress. And one of the questions that has preoccupied me for a long
00:28:00.020time is, how is it even possible to argue for women's interests if you don't believe in progress?
00:28:08.820Because feminism, as we understand it, is pretty inseparable from the whole sort of liberal progress
00:28:13.540narrative this idea that you know we are where we're going from a bad place where everything
00:28:17.700everything was terrible and benighted to a good place where everybody is enlightened and it's all
00:28:21.980good and we have rights and so on and why is that not true i mean you can vote now you you know your
00:28:27.960husband can't beat you with a stick it's which is all great you know i'm i'm very much in favor of
00:28:32.780what are the trade-offs that you are concerned about well in that situation i mean what is worth
00:28:41.600being beaten with a stick for i guess is what i'm getting at i mean that's a bold question
00:28:47.340i'm just following the logical line here um and giving mary the opportunity to elucidate give me
00:28:56.260give me a nice long length of rope that i can hang myself with let me be let me be perfectly clear i
00:29:01.380am fully fully fully in favor of um very grateful to my foremothers for securing for me um the right
00:29:08.960to exist as a person, you know, in contemporary post-industrial, contemporary sort of liberal era
00:29:14.860terms. There's a very, very, very long answer to your question, which we probably don't have time
00:29:19.800for today, to do with the, I mean, it's essentially my thesis that what we understand as feminism
00:29:25.800is one iteration in the context of industrial modernity of a much of just an eternal debate,
00:29:31.340which is to say how men and women can reconcile their not always perfectly aligned interests,
00:29:36.240which are fundamentally rooted in our different reproductive roles you know what men what men
00:29:42.140want and need out of out of the opposite sex and out of society is not doesn't completely overlap
00:29:47.520with what women need and you know a lot of you know and it's an eternal source of kind of cultural
00:29:53.000negotiation let's say um how how we go about squaring these two sets of interests and in
00:29:59.120different material contexts and different you know socio-cultural contexts that plays out very
00:30:03.300differently. And it is my view that in the context of industrial modernity, well, when
00:30:11.520society is industrialised, that left women quite disadvantaged in some ways which are
00:30:17.560specific to the material conditions of industrial modernity, particularly to do with how work
00:30:22.840was reorganised. You know, there's suddenly this very stark split between work and home,
00:30:27.200which left women very on the back foot. And, you know, so to an extent still subject
00:30:33.300to an older set of patriarchal social codes,
00:30:36.080but without any of the social and cultural power
00:30:40.020that they had previously wielded, you know, in a medieval setup.
00:30:43.940In other words, you're expected to go to work
00:38:04.680yeah is it really that bad for them yeah i i think being being gender non-conforming is
00:38:12.100extremely difficult you know and if if anything it's more difficult now than it was um 20 years
00:38:19.000ago i mean i think about i mean my husband's a little bit older than me he's sort of proper gen
00:38:23.720x whereas i'm kind of borderline borderline gen x millennial and you know his his musical and sort
00:38:30.500of aesthetic era is the new romantics. I mean, if you think about some of the sort of celebrity
00:38:37.360figures from that era, the late 80s and up to the early 1990s, they were all gender bending
00:38:42.800merrily left, right and centre. And you think about Marilyn and, well, I mean, you name it,
00:38:47.820any of the new romantics. Right, exactly. I mean, the whole of pop culture there was filled with
00:38:52.920people who were just really playing very creatively with the boundaries of gender
00:38:56.900presentation and that all just seems to have gone i mean i was but if you watch top of the pops from
00:39:02.140from that era and you know from from the 70s through to through to i suppose perhaps the late
00:39:08.7801980s i mean you think you watch that and you see the women perform you think my god they're wearing
00:39:13.680a lot of clothes yeah but it's but it's really striking and it's not just but it's not just a
00:39:19.720decency thing you know patty smith would get up on stage wearing a pair of sort of brown corduroy
00:39:23.680flares and nobody tried to put her in little fucking britney spears sort of warrior battle
00:39:28.640bikini like they like they do battle bikini i mean you know exactly the sort of outfit i'm
00:39:33.440talking about rhinestone spangled battle bikini seems to be kind of the order of the day if you
00:39:37.800want to be a female performer the only way you can be at all you know anything kind of curvier
00:39:43.140than anorexic is if you're if you started life as a stripper um you know those are those are the
00:39:48.120options available you know the the set the pornification of women in in the culture now
00:39:55.220and the you know the sort of extremeness and the i mean you think about the contestants on love
00:40:00.640island you know they all the girls are kind of you know with their boobs hitched up to here and
00:40:05.120their botox and their fillers and the highlights and what have you and all the guys are uh it's
00:40:10.240sort of pumped up pumped up kind of uh ken dolls covered in with their arms covered in biro you
00:40:16.080You know, it's this sort of incredibly kind of cartoonish, you know, hyper-masculine and hyper-feminine stereotypical aesthetic, which, yeah, it doesn't leave very much scope for gender creative expression.
00:40:32.640So I can really understand how people who just don't comfortably fit those sorts of extreme stereotypes could find themselves thinking, well, actually, maybe I should just join the other team and just literally become the other team, because that's just going to be less of a miserable paradox to try and occupy.
00:40:50.920i get that and i can see why people would think no actually the uh the trade-offs in terms of you
00:40:57.240know osteoporosis and you know 25 years off my life or whatever it whatever it is you know
00:41:03.660it's that seems that seems like a reasonable trade i can see how people get there that that
00:41:10.460is so sad when you consider what the narrative that has been fed to us that you know we're more
00:41:14.520free liberal than ever before we're more accepting than ever before but actually you know the
00:41:20.360narrative that the media is showing us the images and also let's be fair social media as well
00:41:24.900it's very much the opposite of that isn't it yeah i mean one of the i i did a i wrote something about
00:41:31.520um how i i wanted to i wanted to explore you know the what what's understood about you know
00:41:39.980how much you know what what basis is there for thinking about you know they're actually you
00:41:45.700psychological normative differences between the sexes. I looked into it and I found a really
00:41:51.660interesting study which showed that the people are more likely to think of themselves as very
00:42:02.540masculine or very feminine in societies where materially people are more egalitarian.
00:42:09.360So people cling more strongly to masculine and feminine sex roles the more egalitarian life is
00:42:14.620in reality. Women are less likely to go off and study science and engineering and maths
00:42:21.140where the culture is. Women are more likely to study egalitarian subjects or to take an interest
00:42:29.400in science where the culture itself is more sexist and more sex role differentiated, which seems
00:42:34.640really odd until you think about it. You think, well, people intuitively sense that there is
00:42:41.740you know there is something different between men and women we're not quite sure what it is
00:42:46.120but you know if if everyone's saying oh you know men and women can both do everything and you know
00:42:50.700men men can be stay-at-home parents and women can be you know you know ball-busting CEOs and yada
00:42:55.860yada yada and there are in fact no material differences between us at all then but but
00:43:00.200people still feel instinctively that there is something there is something different and so
00:43:03.840instead they kind of construct this sort of exaggerated masculinity or femininity as a way
00:43:08.940of making up for the sort of the sense that we're all just kind of disintegrating into a sort of
00:43:13.740gray goo i mean i mean that's that's my that's my reading of what's going on there whether it's
00:43:17.720whether it's true or not i don't know but but but my sense is that people people want there to be a
00:43:23.180difference of some kind between men and women people people kind of people feel it matters
00:43:27.840and you think it's that they want or do you think that they're tired of being told there isn't even
00:43:32.620though all their objective life experience is telling them that there is and they're just tired
00:43:37.640of living a lie like with so many other issues it could just be it could be that it could be that
00:43:42.660i mean i don't know um i mean so certainly what what has what has felt very true to me
00:43:50.720is that it's very you can pretend that there are no differences between men and women until
00:43:56.820you have children and the fact that more people are putting off children until ever later and
00:44:01.600later or just not having children at all um is is increasing the constituency of people
00:44:06.780who pretend that there are no differences between the sexes.
00:44:10.360But the rubber really hits the road when you have children
00:44:13.240because at the end of the day, you know, it's only me.
00:44:19.500It was only me who was able to nurse a baby.
00:44:22.600You know, it was me who grew her in my literal entrails.
00:44:26.460And actually, you know, physiologically that came with a whole load of changes.
00:44:29.360I'm reading this amazing book at the moment that's just about,
00:44:32.180it's coming out shortly, called Mum Genes,
00:44:34.300which is all about the physiological changes that come with changing from being a woman to
00:44:39.460being a mother because it literally it literally rewires your brain i mean i'm still kind of
00:44:43.900hopefully mostly sort of functional cognitively i think i do okay um but but it completely rewires
00:44:51.480your brain you know and and actually you know even every child that you carry as a woman as a mother
00:44:58.560leaves traces of their dna inside your body permanently and there's absolutely wild i didn't
00:45:03.800know this um you know my sense that this sense i had of being kind of symbiotically connected to
00:45:08.580my baby actually has a material basis in the sense that you know every child you carry you
00:45:13.900leaves traces of dna that just sloshes around inside you and will will actually will actually
00:45:19.080repair injuries that you have so if you if you cut yourself you know the the i think that they
00:45:24.820call it microchimerism which is to say you know sort of genetic you you you become sort of chimerically
00:45:31.600interconnected with your child literally at a cellular level and you know the and the the cell
00:45:37.420the trace cells the trace dna which is left behind by your child will will repair injuries to your
00:45:42.480body you know my i have a c-section scar that was probably repaired by my daughter's dna even though
00:45:46.940she was she was physically gone from my body by then it's just nuts when you think about it
00:45:51.080and within this sort of atomized paradigm we have of you know what humans are and how humans
00:45:57.580relate to one another it makes no sense it just doesn't compute this idea that we're interconnected
00:46:03.540and can be interconnected you know even at a cellular level and that's particularly true for
00:46:07.900women in a way which is just it can't be true for men you know that that's sort of in in violation
00:46:13.980of a number of pretty kind of fundamental beliefs that we have about well for one thing about the
00:46:21.580the sameness between men and women and and also about the the fact that we're all separate and
00:46:27.240atomized and sort of propelling ourselves around like like like billiard balls around a table
00:46:33.280and in fact the reality is is much messier and stickier and more sort of interconnected than
00:46:38.280that and that's that's more pronounced for women than it is for men it's a really great point and
00:46:43.140it's fascinating and one of the things that you touched on that I particularly wanted to talk to
00:46:46.900about, because it was something that concerned me when I was a teacher, is what you talked about,
00:46:51.960which was the pornification of women. What impact do you think pornography is having on our society
00:46:58.060and particularly on its impact on women? Well, I mean, I'm not really at the coalface of this
00:47:03.540because I've been married for nearly 10 years. So I'm not really at the sharp end of dating
00:47:09.500and relationships so much um but from younger friends um of both sexes actually my my sense is
00:47:18.660that it's it's having a very radical impact um women i think there have been numerous studies
00:47:24.580done of this that indicate that women in particular are experiencing much higher levels of
00:47:30.360sexual violence violence during sex i think there was a study done last year that showed that over
00:47:35.520that something like three quarters of men have slapped or choked or spat on a woman,
00:47:41.940their partner during sex, men under 40, three quarters of them.
00:47:45.660Now, it may well be that some of those women were really into it,
00:47:48.360but all of them? I doubt it. I very much doubt it.
00:47:52.360And this is coming directly from pornography.
00:47:55.140And the difficulty there is that I think of pornography,
00:47:58.020it has direction as well as force, right?
00:48:03.480um but by by which i mean you know you what you watch something that you you watch two people just
00:48:10.060having a shag right and that's that's really exciting and maybe you and but then you watch
00:48:13.720it a couple of times and it's just not so exciting anymore so you go looking for something a bit more
00:48:17.220intense and that and that that takes you that takes any regular prolific consumer of pornography
00:48:24.540inexorably towards the really dark the really violent the really exploitative and then all the
00:48:29.640way out there beyond the pale into I don't know children on animals and what have you you know
00:48:34.320pornography has has it has force and it also has direction and and it also replaces intimacy
00:48:41.960and I think this is this is a problem that a lot of as as I understand it a lot of young men are
00:48:48.100struggling with some of them increasingly consciously I think there are there are
00:48:51.760hundreds of thousands of members now of the nofap boards you know where you know you usually usually
00:48:58.060adolescent, but, you know, men from all walks of life are really struggling with pornography
00:49:03.800addiction, you know, compulsive masturbation. Um, and I think, you know, people laugh and go,
00:49:10.040ah, losers, you know, you can't keep it in your pants. But I, I don't think, I don't think it's,
00:49:13.860I really don't think it's something to laugh at. I think what they're doing is genuinely heroic
00:49:17.580because the, the porn industry, the online porn industry is, is the most, the most kind of
00:49:23.500nakedly, nakedly venal and just completely out there in the open version of the whole of the
00:49:31.660internet dopamine machine, you know, full stop, you know, this whole, you know, that wants to
00:49:37.880commodify people's desires and turn them into profit centres. I mean, most of the internet is
00:49:43.880about that, right? You know, whether it's, you know, whether it's wanting to, you know,
00:49:48.340hack the hack the desire for you know social applause by encouraging us to get really addicted
00:49:54.940to social media platforms and the likes and the retweets and what have you and i fully confess i
00:49:59.360have a i have a fairly fairly serious and chronic twitter addiction so you know i'm speaking from
00:50:03.940experience there we've got no idea what you're talking about absolutely absolutely not of course
00:50:09.120i mean you know i mean we're all we're all um we'll we'll all perhaps be in recovery together
00:50:14.180one day um right i mean this is this is the water we all swim in right but the but the pornography
00:50:19.140industry takes that absolutely to its its most squalid and venal conclusion you know because
00:50:24.200it's every every every hit you get there um it's not just a little dopamine hit like you get from a
00:50:31.900from a from a like or a retweet um it's an orgasm so you know the the rewiring is more is is is more
00:50:38.980direct and it's more it's more comprehensive and i think for a lot of people it's it's very very
00:50:44.700very addictive and and the whole the whole pornography industry is just set up directly to
00:50:49.420hack um to to hack people's people's you know absolutely basic sort of lizard brain um mechanisms
00:50:58.880for reproduction um and the fact that there are there's this growing subculture of young men out
00:51:06.620there who are saying no actually I'm going to I'm going to disentangle the the vampire squid from
00:51:11.940my brain I think that's genuinely heroic and there's something really really quite sort of
00:51:16.960you know radical and yeah it's genuinely heroic and I don't I don't spend a huge amount of time
00:51:24.500on the no fat boards but I've I've I've scooted through them once or twice you know not not sort
00:51:29.840of voyeuristically but just out of curiosity to see what the discourse there is like and it's you
00:51:33.780know a lot of people are really suffering you know and they talk about falling off the wagon
00:51:37.020and they support each other trying to get back on it and yeah I mean there are there are corners of
00:51:40.100that discourse which are a bit weird you know the whole kind of semen retention thing is kind of a
00:51:45.240bit mad but and there are there are bits of it get quite misogynistic perhaps as well um but but
00:51:51.220these are people who are trying to unplug themselves from the dopamine machine and that's
00:51:55.460that's almost impossible to do you know as as witnessed by my own twitter addiction when I
00:51:59.460think about trying to quit twitter i just think how am i going to do that you know it's it's it's
00:52:04.900every bit as addictive as the smoking as which i which i finally quit 10 years ago and in some
00:52:11.200ways i think it's a direct replacement for it and but you know these this this is the this is where
00:52:17.040this is where we are as a culture it's it's interesting we're rapidly running out of time
00:52:21.960because i think we're we're trying to scratch the surface of so much that we could talk about but
00:52:26.740before we get to the end, we brought up feminism, never really got into it. But this is an interesting
00:52:34.020perhaps point on which to wrap that conversation up for now until we get you back and talk for
00:52:38.540seven hours instead of one, which is what do you make then of strands of feminism who seem to be
00:52:45.920totally okay with this? Totally okay with sex work, totally okay with pornography, totally okay
00:52:51.280with the erosion of women's spaces in some cases how does that work i don't think it does well i
00:52:57.860don't either but i'm guessing what i'm trying to say is how has that happened how has it happened
00:53:01.740well i'm this is i suppose central central to my reactionary feminist thesis is that we've come to
00:53:08.680the end of the gains that we can be can be made for women by centering freedom and you know those
00:53:16.440strands of feminism which are now you know all about applauding prostitution and um transgenderism
00:53:23.800and yada yada yada you know the whole sort of meat lego matrix this idea that we can just sort
00:53:28.820of monetize and commodify our bodies and that constitutes empowerment i think that that's a
00:53:33.740that's a set of people who are still committed to the idea that it's possible to square feminism
00:53:37.740with uh liberation in the digital age and i i just disagree with that i think i think they're
00:53:42.620looking at it wrong and we need we need to we need a root and branch re-examination of the
00:53:48.620material conditions we're in now not rather than just fighting yesterday's battles i mean if you
00:53:53.800if you look at the digital age you know within and if you're stuck in the if you're stuck in
00:53:58.140the industrial paradigm and you still think more liberation is self-evidently better then i can
00:54:02.820see how you could end up in that you know arguing for sex work or arguing for um you know uploading
00:54:08.500our consciousness is to the cloud or, you know, abolishing, liberating women, even from the
00:54:13.380constraints of biological sex via, I don't know, extra uterine gestation or just being men or
00:54:18.880whatever. I can see how if you're still chasing the high of liberation, you could still imagine
00:54:24.940those things might be feminist, but I'm not chasing the high of liberation. I think we're
00:54:28.600all of us, men and women alike, liberated enough. And what we need is more and better obligations.
00:54:33.820boom and alpine credits bring you payroll payout win a hundred dollars an hour weekdays at nine
00:54:39.440one and five sign up now at boom 97 free.com approved by alpine credits own your own home
00:54:45.060and eat alone alpine credits can help visit alpinecredits.ca like what well i think we need
00:54:52.180that that depends on who you are and who you're committed to and who your obligations are to
00:54:56.240i mean in my case it's straightforwardly my obligations to my family particularly to my
00:55:01.180daughter but also to my extended family and to to the people who i'm actually connected to and
00:55:06.220whom i love in real life and you know beyond that to to my working my working relationships and my
00:55:12.400friends i mean they're i mean grounded commitments in actual relationships um you know parasocial
00:55:17.800relationships are great and fun and interesting and exciting but they but but they're insustantial
00:55:23.520when it comes down to it you know internet friends come and go some of them turn into real life
00:55:27.120friends. You know, I've been online long enough to have, to have in real life friends who started
00:55:32.420out just as, you know, a DM chat. Um, but that's, but, but, but it's, I think it's important to
00:55:37.320develop an ability to discern the difference and to be, to be able to think very pragmatically
00:55:42.480about what actually matters. Um, so, you know, there, there isn't a universal answer to what
00:55:47.260more and more and better obligations means, but it's, it's, it's grounded in real relationships