The state of the feminist and female centric subreddits in 2026 is incredibly sad. Aside from some of the mom subs, it’s getting pretty hard to find a sub just for women.
Reddit is waaay past its prime. Getting rid of any ideological diversity has just turned it into a bro-ier Tumblr. It’s gotten to the point where there are accounts on other social media sites dedicated to mocking Redditors, just like there was with Tumblr before it fell off a cliff into obscurity.
I hope K&J do an episode on the marijuana discourse/backlash. It would be interesting to hear their opinions about all of it.
Agree. I think it is really helpful in smaller narrow groups. e.g, one city/town, one piece of software (one software subreddit has been super helpful to me), one type of home repair, etc. Anything in which the majority of the posts and comments are people helping other people.
In college in 2011-2015, i was on it every day and loved it. And it really just was going downhill and downhill. The only reason I go on there now is for specific things. Usually purposely adding "reddit" after my search for reviews or commentary on something I am looking up. I have not scrolled the main page in probably at least 6 years.
One thing that a lot of people don't realize is that IMC was anti-Gamergate before he turned to the right. I remember seeing him at the beginning of that arc thinking "Huh, maybe he's becoming more reasonable" and then he became Milo's throatgoat.
The sphynx stuff reminded me of how I'd suggest an episode about the exotic bully community if they hadn't caught so much flak from the XL Bully episode. Exotic bullies are severely inbred and deformed pitbulls that usually live 3-8 years and the scene around them is wild- a full-on brawl broke out at one of their dog shows a few years back. I've seen them a few times and some of them could barely walk. Moist Critikal did a video about them a while ago:
There could easily be a weekly podcast about all the crazy stuff that goes on in the world of animal breeding. The stuff going on with exotic bullies and frenchies is especially crazy.
The blowup over docked vs undocked tails in rottweilers from 2019 feels like it could have been a good Barpod episode:
"When the first Rottweiler with a tail showed back in 2006 back in Florida, there was almost a riot. People were crazy – cursing, yelling, screaming, all kinds of threats. It was ridiculous. There were Facebook wars, this that and the other. Friendships ended over it.""
The TLDR: a genetic bottleneck left every single Dalmatian with a genetic disorder. Unlike some other genetic disorders, this isn’t actually part of the breed standard, it’s just something that happened.
A breeder used 1 non-Dalmatian to bring the normal version of the gene back into the gene pool. It took decades for the breed club to allow them to be registered and it was controversial even then.
Poundcake was some classic grade A trolling. Maybe it's my chan-centered childhood coming out but I find it really surprising that you guys had to try and find a motivation for the poster. Back in my day you didn't need monetization or karma, you did it for the love of the game! (and screenies)
Reddit is already full of the type of person who would be great to troll, but the concentration would be so much higher in a subreddit like /r/sphinx.
That's what I thought. It'll just be a teenager or college student doing it for the fun of it. It makes as much sense as prank calls. Bored people do stupid shit for no particular reason. People are stupid for bonding with AI cats and getting sucked into online narratives. I enjoy listening to all if this on a podcast. It's the way we live now.
Wait, are you telling me that it might be a bad idea to form intense emotional connections to people or animals that you've never meet or even seen? Wack.
It was actually horrible to listen to Jesse saying he was about to go skiing at Tahoe and that the pod was recorded on Wednesday. As I’m sure many of you have heard by now, 9 (?) skiers were killed in an avalanche in Tahoe on Thursday. This was an experienced group of backcountry skiers (so we know it wasn’t Jesse) - but it was an awful, awful tragedy. The group had been going skiing together for years, and included two sisters. I feel sick about it.
Jesse was probably subscribed to the twoxchromosomes subreddit on his jsingal account because in 2015 or so, it was one of the 50 subreddits new accounts were subscribed to by default, as well as what one would see if they weren't logged in. Reddit did away with "default subreddits" a few years later and now it's algorithmically determined by your cookies and region and whatever other info reddit can scrape from you.
The twox reddit died a very quick death when it became default. I too made my account around then and it took a year for me to realize that a lot of highly upvoted posts were just fictionalized rape porn. The post would be something like "I don't know what happened" and then the text would be a very long and detailed story of sexual assault. I guess the only comfort is that they were probably all fake. It's claimed that it was a stratetto scare away guys, but as Jesse points out, it's just all creeps through and through. Add in all the trans stuff and I sort of just feel bad for any awkward young woman who was hoping to find a forum of women for advice. Making that sub a default was a major backfire on reddit's part.
I met a hairless cat last summer - intriguingly repulsive in appearance. I have to say, re: the genital resemblance discussed on the episode, that I stroked the cat and the way its smooth skin moved around its ribcage was WAY too reminiscent of a foreskin... Truly a uniquely disturbing experience.
Jesse saying AI is the biggest technological shift in our lifetime, and me thinking "but what about cell phones?" And then realizing just how old I am. Several anthropological eras old.
Katie's theory about cat pee repelling mice isn't entirely off base. There's a chemical compound in their urine, saliva, sebum, and stool that mice instinctively avoid. However, mice can gradually become desensitized to it if there is not a consistent accompanying threat. So putting cat urine in your house isn't going to be effective, it's just going to make your home smell like cat piss. Additionally, having a cat who can't or won't hunt is going to be similarly useless. Just like people, cats have personalities, and not every cat has a mouser personality (i.e., high prey drive). The ideal mouser is one that pursues the mice at least frequently enough that the mice associate the cat's scent with danger. Fun fact, some dogs can also be trained as mousers, like Dachshunds and Rat Terriers (hence the name).
Also, cats do have what could be described as empathy for their owners. They are excellent at reading body language, because that is how adult felids communicate with each other in the wild. Meowing is a kitten behavior that does not persist into adulthood for wild and feral cats, but domestic cats meow throughout their entire lives because it allows them to better communicate with humans. Cats are aware of when a person is angry, happy, in distress, etc. because they can read our body language. Domestic cats find the familiarity of human voices comforting, which is why it seems like they're "listening" or can "understand" when we talk to them. So when the crying woman in the episode said that her cat was alarmed, that makes sense; the cat sees that she is in pain and wonders if there is a threat nearby.
I have one good mouser and one super-special-idiot. I fear for when the good mouser passes on, he is all that stands between us and mouse-hell. The super-special-idiot is absolutely no deterrent to mice at all.
Haha I'm sorry to hear that. The other thing about pets is that they tend to imitate each others' behaviors. In some cases, a cat who ignores mice may influence the other cats to do so. My aunt uses an electric mousetrap and she swears by it; the only rub is that you have to remember to clean it out.
My cousin had a cat that would run and lie on her chest if she cried or pretended to cry. This is definitely a thing.
I once trained a cat to do classic dog tricks. That's when I learned about their interest in body language. They need for you to gesture the same way each time for a given command. That seemed almost more important than the command.
This episode confused the hell out of my dog because I use the word "sphinx" as the command word to lay down. In the future, please only do episodes about breeds of cats with normal names like the nebelung, suphalak, or peterbald.
(if anyone is wondering why I use the word "sphinx" instead of "down", it's because I already use the words "upsie" and "downsie" when picking her up and setting her down. She looks a bit like the Great Sphinx of Giza when she's in the down position.)
Re: LLMs writing newspaper articles. What I want to know is, does the editor intend to disclose to readers at the top (or bottom, whatever) of articles when they're written by AI (or "partially written by AI", or "written by AI followed by human fact checking", or whatever qualifiers are warranted)?
Because the thing about genAI is that everyone wants to be the person using it but a whole lot of people don't want to be the ones receiving it. Sports Illustrated's CEO got fired when it came out that some articles were being written by AI, and the whole "oh but we have a human check it over before publication" bit didn't matter.
If I find out someone is sending me AI generated emails, I'm not reading that person's email anymore. If I find out Spotify is sticking AI generated music into artist playlists, I'm not listening to those anymore. I don't want to consume this shit, and I know I'm not alone. If I listen to some music and "it's so real you can't even tell it's AI", that doesn't make it suddenly ethical, that means I've been deceived and fuck whoever did that.
A *lot* of what genAI is used for is deceptive. Disclosing when something is AI generated fixes this problem, but people making things with AI don't wanna do this because they know that it will harm their credibility. Thus they know that what they're doing is deceptive.
There are plenty of ways to use genAI that don't implicate ethics in this way, of course. Katie using an LLM to organize the personals is fine. That's the classing selling point for this kind of technology: making rote tasks more efficient. I'm all for it. But writing articles is not a rote task. Any editor who disagrees should show they really mean it by giving full disclosure to readers whenever they publish something that AI had a substantive role in writing.
I CANT BELIEVE ITS A POUND CAKE EPISODE I WAS IN THIS FROM THE START
The state of the feminist and female centric subreddits in 2026 is incredibly sad. Aside from some of the mom subs, it’s getting pretty hard to find a sub just for women.
I was permabanned for asking if it was black mold that made me think women didn't have penises.
Women’s lib just got targeted by r/againsthatesubs and it was banned. RIP.
Katie does kind of look like Amelia Earhart and is very brave.....
I thought it was funny that she mentioned Helen Keller since Katie once confessed to being a Helen Keller truther.
In many ways her career has a Bermuda Triangle aspect to it.
Wow, record early and miss some major news; this time the news is from Jesse’s actual destination 😓 (avalanche at Tahoe kills 8)
Yes, it was really dreadful listening to that part of the conversation.
That was absolutely disturbing to hear.
The concept, too, of Reddit “people” not actually being real people is very fascinating.
To us olds, individual quirks ARE what make others interesting.
The flattening of individuals into broad categories is frustrating.
Okay, I’m an almost-?50 mostly-white dude. That really doesn’t dictate most of my thoughts.
I am not fond of avocados. Why? Clearly, it’s innate bigotry.
Reddit is waaay past its prime. Getting rid of any ideological diversity has just turned it into a bro-ier Tumblr. It’s gotten to the point where there are accounts on other social media sites dedicated to mocking Redditors, just like there was with Tumblr before it fell off a cliff into obscurity.
I hope K&J do an episode on the marijuana discourse/backlash. It would be interesting to hear their opinions about all of it.
It's still great for like, DIY, tech stuff, advice on things like housing etc.
Agree. I think it is really helpful in smaller narrow groups. e.g, one city/town, one piece of software (one software subreddit has been super helpful to me), one type of home repair, etc. Anything in which the majority of the posts and comments are people helping other people.
In college in 2011-2015, i was on it every day and loved it. And it really just was going downhill and downhill. The only reason I go on there now is for specific things. Usually purposely adding "reddit" after my search for reviews or commentary on something I am looking up. I have not scrolled the main page in probably at least 6 years.
One thing that a lot of people don't realize is that IMC was anti-Gamergate before he turned to the right. I remember seeing him at the beginning of that arc thinking "Huh, maybe he's becoming more reasonable" and then he became Milo's throatgoat.
The sphynx stuff reminded me of how I'd suggest an episode about the exotic bully community if they hadn't caught so much flak from the XL Bully episode. Exotic bullies are severely inbred and deformed pitbulls that usually live 3-8 years and the scene around them is wild- a full-on brawl broke out at one of their dog shows a few years back. I've seen them a few times and some of them could barely walk. Moist Critikal did a video about them a while ago:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5QJQNY0VKTg
EDIT: There have been OnlyFans models who used AI filters to make it look like they have Down Syndrome for some bizarre reason.
Pitbull haters and pitbull lovers can bond over hating exotic bully breeders, honestly.
There could easily be a weekly podcast about all the crazy stuff that goes on in the world of animal breeding. The stuff going on with exotic bullies and frenchies is especially crazy.
The blowup over docked vs undocked tails in rottweilers from 2019 feels like it could have been a good Barpod episode:
https://www.capecodtimes.com/story/lifestyle/2019/02/15/more-breeders-want-to-end/53227050007/ Bypass the paywall here: https://archive.ph/wVonV
"When the first Rottweiler with a tail showed back in 2006 back in Florida, there was almost a riot. People were crazy – cursing, yelling, screaming, all kinds of threats. It was ridiculous. There were Facebook wars, this that and the other. Friendships ended over it.""
The whole dog (and I think to a lesser extent, cat) breeding world is insane. The LUA Dalmatian controversy is one of the most telling to me:
https://www.luadalmatians-world.com/enus/dalmatian-articles/crossbreeding
The TLDR: a genetic bottleneck left every single Dalmatian with a genetic disorder. Unlike some other genetic disorders, this isn’t actually part of the breed standard, it’s just something that happened.
A breeder used 1 non-Dalmatian to bring the normal version of the gene back into the gene pool. It took decades for the breed club to allow them to be registered and it was controversial even then.
#teammutts4evah
Poundcake was some classic grade A trolling. Maybe it's my chan-centered childhood coming out but I find it really surprising that you guys had to try and find a motivation for the poster. Back in my day you didn't need monetization or karma, you did it for the love of the game! (and screenies)
Reddit is already full of the type of person who would be great to troll, but the concentration would be so much higher in a subreddit like /r/sphinx.
That's what I thought. It'll just be a teenager or college student doing it for the fun of it. It makes as much sense as prank calls. Bored people do stupid shit for no particular reason. People are stupid for bonding with AI cats and getting sucked into online narratives. I enjoy listening to all if this on a podcast. It's the way we live now.
Wait, are you telling me that it might be a bad idea to form intense emotional connections to people or animals that you've never meet or even seen? Wack.
Didn’t Jesse almost die the last time he went on a west coast skiing adventure?
It was actually horrible to listen to Jesse saying he was about to go skiing at Tahoe and that the pod was recorded on Wednesday. As I’m sure many of you have heard by now, 9 (?) skiers were killed in an avalanche in Tahoe on Thursday. This was an experienced group of backcountry skiers (so we know it wasn’t Jesse) - but it was an awful, awful tragedy. The group had been going skiing together for years, and included two sisters. I feel sick about it.
And many of them had young kids 😭 I’m so broken up over it, just a terrible tragedy.
He got lost and cried a bit till some real men came along.
Jesse was probably subscribed to the twoxchromosomes subreddit on his jsingal account because in 2015 or so, it was one of the 50 subreddits new accounts were subscribed to by default, as well as what one would see if they weren't logged in. Reddit did away with "default subreddits" a few years later and now it's algorithmically determined by your cookies and region and whatever other info reddit can scrape from you.
The twox reddit died a very quick death when it became default. I too made my account around then and it took a year for me to realize that a lot of highly upvoted posts were just fictionalized rape porn. The post would be something like "I don't know what happened" and then the text would be a very long and detailed story of sexual assault. I guess the only comfort is that they were probably all fake. It's claimed that it was a stratetto scare away guys, but as Jesse points out, it's just all creeps through and through. Add in all the trans stuff and I sort of just feel bad for any awkward young woman who was hoping to find a forum of women for advice. Making that sub a default was a major backfire on reddit's part.
I met a hairless cat last summer - intriguingly repulsive in appearance. I have to say, re: the genital resemblance discussed on the episode, that I stroked the cat and the way its smooth skin moved around its ribcage was WAY too reminiscent of a foreskin... Truly a uniquely disturbing experience.
Jesse saying AI is the biggest technological shift in our lifetime, and me thinking "but what about cell phones?" And then realizing just how old I am. Several anthropological eras old.
Or the internet! Or--brace yourself--computers! I HAVE SEEN THINGS
Nice ter meet you, two-letters-starting-with-T. Mind we don't get into any trouble 'round these parts.
Katie's theory about cat pee repelling mice isn't entirely off base. There's a chemical compound in their urine, saliva, sebum, and stool that mice instinctively avoid. However, mice can gradually become desensitized to it if there is not a consistent accompanying threat. So putting cat urine in your house isn't going to be effective, it's just going to make your home smell like cat piss. Additionally, having a cat who can't or won't hunt is going to be similarly useless. Just like people, cats have personalities, and not every cat has a mouser personality (i.e., high prey drive). The ideal mouser is one that pursues the mice at least frequently enough that the mice associate the cat's scent with danger. Fun fact, some dogs can also be trained as mousers, like Dachshunds and Rat Terriers (hence the name).
Also, cats do have what could be described as empathy for their owners. They are excellent at reading body language, because that is how adult felids communicate with each other in the wild. Meowing is a kitten behavior that does not persist into adulthood for wild and feral cats, but domestic cats meow throughout their entire lives because it allows them to better communicate with humans. Cats are aware of when a person is angry, happy, in distress, etc. because they can read our body language. Domestic cats find the familiarity of human voices comforting, which is why it seems like they're "listening" or can "understand" when we talk to them. So when the crying woman in the episode said that her cat was alarmed, that makes sense; the cat sees that she is in pain and wonders if there is a threat nearby.
I have one good mouser and one super-special-idiot. I fear for when the good mouser passes on, he is all that stands between us and mouse-hell. The super-special-idiot is absolutely no deterrent to mice at all.
My ex has a pretty bad mouse problem even with having cats, I think because generations of mice have been born in that house to be desensitized.
Haha I'm sorry to hear that. The other thing about pets is that they tend to imitate each others' behaviors. In some cases, a cat who ignores mice may influence the other cats to do so. My aunt uses an electric mousetrap and she swears by it; the only rub is that you have to remember to clean it out.
My cousin had a cat that would run and lie on her chest if she cried or pretended to cry. This is definitely a thing.
I once trained a cat to do classic dog tricks. That's when I learned about their interest in body language. They need for you to gesture the same way each time for a given command. That seemed almost more important than the command.
This episode confused the hell out of my dog because I use the word "sphinx" as the command word to lay down. In the future, please only do episodes about breeds of cats with normal names like the nebelung, suphalak, or peterbald.
(if anyone is wondering why I use the word "sphinx" instead of "down", it's because I already use the words "upsie" and "downsie" when picking her up and setting her down. She looks a bit like the Great Sphinx of Giza when she's in the down position.)
I already have more of an emotional connection to your dog than I do half of my relatives.
Re: LLMs writing newspaper articles. What I want to know is, does the editor intend to disclose to readers at the top (or bottom, whatever) of articles when they're written by AI (or "partially written by AI", or "written by AI followed by human fact checking", or whatever qualifiers are warranted)?
Because the thing about genAI is that everyone wants to be the person using it but a whole lot of people don't want to be the ones receiving it. Sports Illustrated's CEO got fired when it came out that some articles were being written by AI, and the whole "oh but we have a human check it over before publication" bit didn't matter.
If I find out someone is sending me AI generated emails, I'm not reading that person's email anymore. If I find out Spotify is sticking AI generated music into artist playlists, I'm not listening to those anymore. I don't want to consume this shit, and I know I'm not alone. If I listen to some music and "it's so real you can't even tell it's AI", that doesn't make it suddenly ethical, that means I've been deceived and fuck whoever did that.
A *lot* of what genAI is used for is deceptive. Disclosing when something is AI generated fixes this problem, but people making things with AI don't wanna do this because they know that it will harm their credibility. Thus they know that what they're doing is deceptive.
There are plenty of ways to use genAI that don't implicate ethics in this way, of course. Katie using an LLM to organize the personals is fine. That's the classing selling point for this kind of technology: making rote tasks more efficient. I'm all for it. But writing articles is not a rote task. Any editor who disagrees should show they really mean it by giving full disclosure to readers whenever they publish something that AI had a substantive role in writing.