C (2:26)

His wife was a therapist and he was piping his voice through the vent, commenting on the therap sessions that she was doing with a client. Like, in the middle of it, you just hear a disembodied goblin in the vents. And it was Stefan.

A (2:39)

Yeah. So we're going to tie this into science and transition a little bit because Liv and I spent some time looking at the world of forums for alienated and aggrieved parents. Now, one of these forums is a substack blog specifically for parents of trans kids and trans young adults that don't like their kids very much and it's pretty depressing. But there's kind of a through line here. We also looked at ones where there's no transness involved. The kids are not any type of gay and it's just relationships that have frayed and broken down. And I was really interested in reading these because I am a huge fan of the seminal like blog series by Issendai called the Missing Missing Reasons or Down the Rabbit Hole. It is a formative text by a blogger who spent years on alienated parents forums back when there were more forums on the Internet and now it's just one app for child pornography and nothing else. Isandai wrote about the phenomenon and like the psychological processes that go on there. Now I recommend reading the whole post again. It's called down the Rabbit Hole and it's fantastic. But the important thing to know here is that alienated parents, like genuinely alienated parents, do exist. There are absolutely cases where a kid gets addicted to drugs, has a severe behavioral problem, or just acts abusively towards their par parents when the child gets into adulthood and the kid is at fault. That absolutely happens. Those people don't go on alienated parents forums, or if they do, they don't stick around because what they realize is, is that alienated parents forums are not for alienated parents. They are for abusive parents to commiserate about how ungrateful their kids are.

C (4:19)

Yes.

A (4:19)

Now some things you're going to notice some trends here. You're going to notice that people on these forums, even if you're sympathetic to the parents involved, are maddeningly vague. They offer as little details as possible. They say almost nothing about what could have caused the alienation or what could have caused the break. They don't really specify like what has gone wrong. And there's a common thread through all of them that is also not discussed but you'll be able to pick up on as we read some of these. So Liv and I have chosen some of our favorite. We went on a couple of forms. The big ones are Gran's Net, which is vaguely related to the anti trans forum mumsnet, but Gran's Net seems a little bit more, shockingly, seems a little bit more normal.

D (4:59)

The idea of beef with each other where mumsnet is weirder than Gran's Net.

A (5:03)

Yeah, mumsnet is insane.

D (5:04)

Which shows something about where the moral rot in the United Kingdom is generationally.

A (5:10)

Yeah, it's like Gen X. It's all Gen X. It's like Gen X moms, the boomers are like, all right, how do I rescue my grandson?

C (5:19)

Pensioners just ranting.

A (5:22)

Yeah, pensioners, yeah. No, where the Gen X ones. It's like people like women who are 15 years away from retirement and are, like, acting crazy about it. They fully lost their minds. But anyways, so Liv and I have chosen a couple of these. We're going to start with Grands Net. We might read some from a gardening forum, which actually had some of the most insane. It was so bad that we had to stop reading it. We had to stop reading it. And it was like, again, a forum for like, backyard gardening. And it was some of the most disturbing things we've ever read.

D (5:50)

Yeah, it was just like a sub forum where it was like, you know, family problems or something. Yeah.

A (5:55)

And it's appalling. And then we will turn to Pitt, which is for. It's called Parents with Inconvenient Truths About Trans. It's a terrible title. And Pitt was formed by two, like, anti trans psychotherapists in, like, Oregon and Seattle. For some reason in the Pacific Northwest, there just seemed to be like 100,000 evil psychotherapists who are like, all right, I have a cure for transness. It's called a needle. And the other half of that, it's those people. And skinheads are the only people in the pnw.

D (6:25)

It seems like puppy girl. Polycules. That's the three.

A (6:28)

Yeah.

C (6:28)

So you can cause transness and cure it with a needle.

D (6:31)

Yeah.

C (6:32)

Perfect.

A (6:33)

Which one should we start with?

D (6:34)

I think maybe the rent story. That's like a kind of classic.

A (6:37)

This one's great. Now, I really want to specify before we go in, please do not go and, like, track these people down. We considered, like, using like, AI to anonymize the stories a bit. We decided against it since you really do need some of the exact phrasing that said we're leaving out usernames. And please, for the love of God, don't, like, tap the glass. Don't bother these people. This is their own thing. We are inadvertently putting them on the couch and psychoanalyzing it. Because I think that it's worth looking at these trends and understanding how these people think that said, don't look, don't look. We did that for you.

C (7:09)

We are very used to cursed online communities. I think our listeners are a no lolcow. Just as a baseline.

A (7:17)

So we're going to present this one. Liv can start reading it. We're going to present this one as something as almost like a mystery. I want you all to kind of figure like as it goes on, Jake and Julian try and like, guess about like, what's going on here? What's the real story here? It's very Rashomon esque.

D (7:31)

All right, it starts. Have two children age 20 boy and 22 girl who are university students in Ireland. The oldest finishes university at the end of April in Ireland, unless you are very poor. Parents have to pay for university. I moved to the UK 18 months ago to get a better job to be able to support my children through university.

C (7:48)

Irish defector detected.

D (7:50)

The children live in a house that I own in Dublin. I bought it when I was 23. They pay no rent as their students. I pay all the utility bills and maintain and insure the house. They have a very expensive lifestyle as students. Lots of foreign holidays, designer clothes, out drinking several nights a week, eat only at the best restaurants and cafes, have sushi delivered to the door when they feel like it, and take taxis whenever they wake up late and can't get to work and or university on time.

C (8:13)

This is so good. There's so much resentment here already. Oh, you can't just the description itself. It's like they're ungrateful brats.

D (8:20)

They work full time and go to university to be able to pay for their expensive lifestyles. They still get good grades, so they're pay.

A (8:26)

They're paying for all of this. They get sushi delivered, but they're paying for it. The only thing they're not paying for is their rent, apparently.

C (8:32)

Yeah, well, they give you good grades in exchange, so be grateful.

A (8:36)

This is where the story takes a turn.

B (8:39)

You've been listening to a sample of a premium episode of the QAA podcast. For access to the full episode, as well as all past premium episodes and all of our podcast miniseries, go to patreon.com qaa Travis, why is that such a good deal?

E (8:53)

Well, Jake, you get hundreds of additional episodes of the QAA podcast for just $5 per month. For that very low price, you get access to over 200 premium episodes plus all of our miniseries. That includes 10 episodes of Man Clan with Julia and the Nanny, 10 episodes of Perverts with Julian Liv, 10 episodes of the Spectral Voyager with Jake and Brad, plus 20 episodes of Trickle down with Me Travis View. It's a bounty of content and the best deal in podcasting.

C (9:23)

Travis, for once I agree with you. And I also agree that people could subscribe by going to patreon.comqaa well, that's

B (9:30)

not an opinion, it's a fact.

C (9:32)

You're so right, Jake.

B (9:33)

We love and appreciate all of our listeners.

C (9:36)

Yes, we do. And Travis is actually crying right now, I think out of gratitude.

E (9:39)

Maybe that's not true. The part about me crying. Not. Not me being grateful.

A (9:43)

I'm very grateful, Sam.