Jia Tolentino
speaker
981 appearances
13 recordings
3 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard Apr 2025
Jia Tolentino’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Like Patrick Schwarzenegger is, you know, he is sweating. He's gulping things. He's slapping bugs off his body. He's profoundly uncomfortable in his own skin.
And Saxon is trying to blame his bad mood on the fact that Chelsea wouldn't fuck him. Right. And Chelsea's like so sincerely like, I could never because you don't have a soul.
But she, like, I loved this Chelsea moment. And she's, you know, to a certain extent, like, she's completely right. Like, hooking up with sex would 100% be an empty experience, you know?
No, I mean, Saxon is the one that needs to spend a year at the meditation retreat. Like, I mean, if we're talking about what should happen, you know. Yeah.
And in the conversation with the monk, there's like a strong insinuation that she has had a moral problem with her family's way of life for a long and perhaps unarticulated time. And she's maybe coming here to make sense of it. But yeah, so she's 21. But as if she's 12 or something, she asks the monk, like, can you just tell my parents that it's okay that I stay here?
So Timothy goes in and asks, what do you think happens after you die?
Yeah, I feel especially conscious of the fact that, like, you know— This monk is not saying anything about and here they will find it. Right.
Like the point is just about what people believe that they're going to get here. It also kind of goes back to the way that Piper ostensibly what she wants is meaning, but she put it as happiness. And, you know, there's the way in which this entire framework has been imported as a 90 minute wellness seminars at AI companies in Silicon Valley. You know what I mean? Yeah. Right, yeah.
It's like you're either—unless you're off of it, you're still on it.
And we have the sort of classic, this visual of a drop of water kicking up in the sea spray and then melding back into the great consciousness. Right. But it's really kind of beautiful the way that it's played here because what does this mean to Timothy at this exact point in time? Like this is making him both want to die more.
Right. Like it's making him want to die more. It's giving him some sort of access point, some sort of ladder has dropped out of the nothingness to like find some sense of forgiveness or something. Right. Like some sort of absolution. Like this this idea that you just go back, you just go back into the great universal and that's it. And all of life is just you come up and you go back down. Right.
And there's a profound relief to him in thinking of that, that what's happening to him right now is not like the Empire State Building crumbling in front of everyone's eyes, right? Like it's actually just one more drop of water going back into the ocean. But then it makes him want to die a little more. You know, it makes him want to live more and it also makes him want to die more.
And I find that – I mean I guess that's –
Yeah, but the way he puts it to his family, you know, like Parker Posey's like, how was it or whatever? And he's like, he's legit. You know, like whatever he says.
Like, as if, like, you know, he's just job interviewed an intern or something, you know? Another thing that happens with the Ratliffs towards the end is that, you know, Victoria's worried Piper is not going to have the creature comforts that she's used to.
And in fact, she should never get used to anything but those creature comforts. She needs to be afraid of poverty like me and everyone else I know. Because otherwise, how will she make good decisions? And Timothy's like, well, we want her to be resilient. You know, what if, you know, we want our children to be able to handle whatever comes their way.
And Victoria is basically like, if I'm not rich, I'd rather be dead. Like that is functionally what she says. She says, I don't know if I'd want to live, which is the fantasy that bookends the episode on the other side is a new version. Compassion, murder, suicide.
We didn't talk about Rick at all.
Yeah, and one of the main things I think we can expect to see in the next episode, you know, Walton Goggins has a really good prolonged shot at the end of the episode when he and Frank, who's pretending to be director, director Frank, they have made it to Srutala's house. The husband has walked down the stairs. We don't have a clear look at him, but we look at Rick, look at him.
And he has assured Frank that he's not going to murder him. He just needs to have the gun for a reason that doesn't have anything to do with murdering him. He just needs to sit with him for 10 minutes and make him understand. He just has to almost murder him.
Showing 381–400 of 981 · page 20 of 50
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