Nathan Radke

And then all the other women he was with left him.

And then he lost his job and he's had all this bad luck.

And this is for an item that he's trying to sell.

And so this raises, I think, two really important questions.

One, if you don't believe the seller that he has a haunted doll, then why would you spend hundreds of dollars on a fake haunted doll?

But two, if you do believe the seller that he has a haunted doll, why would you spend hundreds of dollars on a legit haunted doll?

Well, I mean, I think that's definitely part of it.

We are having a moment in pop culture and we have seen these historically.

It's sort of it's a bit of a cycle.

There are times in history where ghosts are just absolutely popping.

And this has been true for 200 years.

And we're definitely at a moment right now where ghosts are having sort of this pop culture moment.

But I think in general, our culture, maybe every culture has a very complicated relationship with ghosts and hauntings, which I think is almost certainly because humans have a complicated relationship with misfortune and death.

I mean, the truth is everyone who's out here in these streets, including everybody listening right now, including you, including me, we're all going to experience misfortune.

We're all going to experience death eventually.

And the haunted doll with its weird glassy eyes and ceramic face, at the same time, it serves as like a kind of container for those ideas and a scapegoat at the same time.

It's like a personification of misfortune.

You can tell yourself, you know, bad things don't just happen out of randomness or poor choices.

They happen because of the manipulations of an evil entity.

It could be like, oh, darn it all, the haunted doll made my partner break up with me.