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
And yeah, and I do think people are talking about that more now.
And obviously it's clear which side I fall on, right? It's like, why wouldn't you look upstream? And you're right. It's like, even where people are like, The sort of heartlessness, right? What heartlessness are we appalled by? You know, and even in the case of the, you know, there's a strange parallel. Daniel Penny just got acquitted for strangling Jordan Neely on the subway, right?
And that ideologically lines up with my priors. Like, I am appalled that this man strangled Jordan. Like someone in the middle of a crisis and, you know, instantly became a folk hero among some conservatives. And I think this was something that like the protests in 2020, like they tried really hard to redirect us.
Like, yes, this sort of murder that occurred in public is, you know, it's egregious, committed by one man, one police officer, one vigilante ex-Marine, whatever it is. But the real problem, you know, like the real problem is upstream.
The real thing to be outraged about is the system, you know, which is not just like the New York City mental health care system, but it's part of it, that makes it possible for people to be so unsafe and feel so unsafe and thus then make other people feel unsafe, you know? Yeah.
I do understand the tendency to fixate at the end point, but it doesn't make sense if you think about it for any longer than that.
It kind of reminds me of the Sacco and Vanzetti case. Like, there were these two... young men that were part of this violent, overtly violent Italian anarchist sort of collective group in New York in the 20s. And they were wrongfully convicted for an armed robbery and all these things. But they became these sort of folk heroes and they became this sort of famous cause.
I just think it's interesting whenever there's a clear reason to talk about something like the health care system where we all know, like, this doesn't make sense. This doesn't happen in places other than America. It's like school shootings, right? It's like these things that we know are so... are so profoundly hideous and so profoundly American.
And we feel kind of powerless to do anything about it and like it'll never, ever change. And maybe it will never, ever change. But these moments where everyone suddenly is talking about the morality of private health insurance and the immorality of it, you know, it would be a lot better if someone hadn't had to be murdered to make this happen.
But, you know, and of course, like this is exactly what presumably, I mean, you know, who knows what the shooter wanted. And you hate to sort of think like, oh, like I'm happy about the thing happening that he wanted to happen aside from the murder. But I do think we ought to be talking about all these things more.
And this energy belongs in other places other than group texts where we're, you know, like literally I'm two of my friends being like, oh yeah, I'm having endosurgery and my insurance won't cover it. And like, oh, I can't freeze my eggs until 2025 because the pre-approval has to come in three days before my period. And I was one day too early. You know, like it's,
When we're like, oh, you know, these assholes, like, oh, my prescription just went up to 500. And, you know, the people I'm talking to are all people like, we'll be fine. It's not going to drive us into bankruptcy. And the way a lot of people cope with this is just to not get the medical care or start a GoFundMe. And I hope that the conversation about this is alive for longer.
I think there are many sort of populist economic issues that are presented as leftist when they're not. I read this book last year called Limitarianism, and it talks about this study from 2011 where researchers asked people to choose between three different models for wealth distribution in the country. And the first choice was perfect equality, that every quintile had 20% of the wealth.
The second choice was each quintile receiving successively, like the top 20% has 36% of the wealth. Next has 21%. Next has 18%. Next has 15%. Next has 11%. And the last option was the actual wealth distribution of America in 2005, which meant that the first quintile, the top 20%, had 84% of the wealth. The second quintile had 11% of the wealth. The third quintile had four.
And the last two had basically nothing. And 92% of respondents chose the second option. And we are so far from it. And so I'm always like, there is so much populist economic energy that is not being harnessed by any person that I can see. Again, it's presented as this sort of leftist plank, but the energy exists everywhere. Anyway, I think economically...
It makes no sense for there to be a class of people making tens of billion dollars a year off of the backs of people who are struggling. And in this case, very, very directly. And in a case where the company is itself causing the struggling. or failing to address it in the way that they could. There is money out there to give everybody health care. We have the wealth in this country.
We have the technology. We have the ability. There's no reason. There's no reason why people should be dying because they can't pay for insulin. There's no reason that that should happen in this country. And I think most people agree that the situation we're in is unjust.
I think now would be a really wonderful time if this country's political process functioned enough that we could have sort of like a nationwide referendum on single payer health care. I do think the numbers might be quite different right now than they were two weeks ago.
And I do think that the Democrats in general would be profoundly foolish to not push public universal health care as a primary plank in 2028. I don't think they will. But I think that's, I mean... What does this show us if not that that's a layup, you know?
Of course, the solution in the end can't be indifference, not indifference to the death of the CEO and not the celebration of it either. But who's going to drop their indifference first? At this point, it's not going to be the people who have a lifetime of evidence that health insurance CEOs do not care about their well-being.
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