DOD161: TikTok and Self-Diagnosis

Transcript

This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors — the audio is the record.

0:00:28 Tom: Dear Old Dads, the podcast. That's pretty sure it's sarcoidosis. I'm Tom Curry. I'm joined as always by Thomas Smith and Eli Bosnick. Hello gentlemen. That joke works if you watched House. Did you guys, are you House?

0:00:38 Eli: Yeah. No. I get... Yeah, no, it's a House thing. Yeah, I got it. I got... I almost yelled "It's not lupus." Wow.

0:00:46 Tom: Not lupus.

0:00:52 Thomas: No, I hate House. I actually almost made the lupus joke, and I was like, wait, I don't want anyone to get the impression that I like House, like, I was like, I definitely, oh,

0:01:01 Tom: It's I liked house or

0:01:01 Eli: You come yeah, take us there. What's where it comes from, whence from whences tore

0:01:04 Thomas: Well, we used to have this show called Dear Old Dads, until creative differences led us to, course, House. Is the worst show in the world.

0:01:10 Eli: Us apart. Tom steal the podcast while he's talking.

0:01:12 Tom: I've changed all the past. I don't

0:01:14 Thomas: Eli,

0:01:14 Tom: Know any of our passwords though currently, but

0:01:14 Eli: Yeah.

0:01:15 Thomas: There's no chance you like the show, and if you do, I think you are pretending to like it for someone else.

0:01:17 Eli: I loved House. So first of all, it aired when I was a child, so I have no idea if I like it in the modern day. What don't you like about House?

0:01:28 Thomas: It's absolutely terrible. It's a terrible, terrible show. We

0:01:31 Eli: Use reasons,

0:01:33 Tom: That's just, that's the thing. That's another way of saying, I don'T like it.

0:01:33 Eli: Thomas! That's just you saying you don't like it again!

0:01:37 Thomas: You see, he's such a genius that we have to put up with how how horrible he is at all times because the I think I've done this bit too many times, that's why, like, I, but, like it's He's such a genius, you see, that we have to, we to put up with how much of an asshole he is, because you can only be a genius if you're also an asshole. It's the only way. And then every dude watching is like, yeah, that's me. That's gonna be me. I'm gonna be so smart that I don't have to be nice to anyone. I can be a piece of shit all the time, but I'm so smart. And And they need me so bad.

0:01:42 Eli: That's what I thought it was! Yeah, with me you haven't.

0:02:05 Eli: Not only that, but, like, his assholery was always the solution to the puzzle, right? It wasn't just that he was an asshole, right, because that's all doctors. He was an asshole, and he would get someone so mad, they'd be like, You're just like the black mold underneath my sink! And he'd be, like... That's it! Black mold under this sink! Every episode, for some reason, Him being impolite and insensitive to people would be the thing. And then, and I, again, I haven't watched this show for years, but I'm just going off recollection, every, like, 11 episodes he would, like, sigh while leaning against the door and we'd be like, he's probably a really great guy. And I'd be like, no, there's no

0:02:10 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Mm hmm. Yep. That's

0:02:45 Eli: Evidence he's

0:02:45 Thomas: That's I have the same exact bit twice season. Some do like, hey, you're all right. To some worker, he's abused for five years. And then they'll be like, wow, heart of gold. You know, that's the thing about this guy who's an asshole all the time.

0:02:47 Eli: Sad sometimes, right?

0:02:49 Tom: Okay.

0:02:56 Eli: But Again, this is pure recollection, so feel free to correct me. I feel like he had a team of young attractive people who he was sexist, racist, and anti-Australian to in various turns, and they never got it right. They never were correct. So it was just like a weird pitch room for what disease it might be, and he'd be like, and the black guy would be like, I think it might be span of an innocent. And he's like, oh, probably because of how black you are you think that. And And the lady would be like, could it be, and he'd be like, did your fucking flaps tell you that? And then the Australian guy would be like, what about it? Give it a go, buddy. And he'd be like, fucking eat a kangaroo, you piece of shit. And then he'd been like, I went and told that guy to fuck himself, and he sneezed out a piece of paper that says lupus. So it's lupis.

0:03:21 Thomas: Yep. Yep. Yep. Oh,

0:03:54 Tom: But here's why I do like that show. Let me defend that show it is medical pornography. It is a fantasy that connects not in any way to reality right?

0:03:58 Thomas: My. God, okay.

0:03:59 Eli: Please.

0:04:07 Thomas: Good. I'm glad you mean that literally like Actually, yeah, there's a team there's a fucking team of doctors, yeah.

0:04:07 Eli: A doctor has competence.

0:04:10 Tom: If you get, like, big sick and there's anything wrong with you and

0:04:16 Eli: Yeah.

0:04:16 Thomas: Sucks.

0:04:16 Tom: They give a shit about finding out what, what the problem is. I can tell you from personal experience, the current procedure as we've experienced it for four years is you go to the doctor, you say, I'm really sick, and they say, you sure are. And then they say well We're going to run this next test. And then they call you and they said, good news, and test shows it wasn't such and such. And then they leave that on your voicemail and there's no follow-up, and you're like, that did not help. That cares so House is a glorious fantasy. It's the ass to month of, of fucking medical diagnosis. Like, no one's doing that. Oh

0:04:30 Thomas: To suck can

0:04:44 Eli: Yeah, it's It's why the cop shows are They solve the crimes where

0:04:53 Thomas: We make the anti-cop show where every single crime is solved by someone just telling us who did it

0:04:58 Eli: They just go into Mariska Hargitay. And she's like, sounds like you let him on. And it's like I'm a child. And it'S like, yeah, you're a real slut child is what you are.

0:05:05 Tom: Shit.

0:05:06 Eli: Boom. But good to come. Boom. Turns out she did the rape. That's why she can't solve it. Realistic cop show. Dick Wolf.

0:05:15 Tom: Oh.

0:05:06 Thomas: Anyway, we did An episode out of House as, like, a gam copy clone on SIO. And it was so fucking with an actual doctor is so fucking funny. It's the best. It's so fun watching those things with real doctors.

0:05:16 Eli: Oh, that sounds amazing.

0:05:25 Tom: Did the doctor say, like, "No, we actually don't care that much, we would never spend 12 minutes in a room with a whiteboard trying to figure out"?

0:05:30 Thomas: Oh, a hundred percent. ItS well,

0:05:31 Tom: The problem, well,

0:05:32 Thomas: I also made the joke of like, what is this hospital? Like everyone has all the time in the world to sit in a boardroom and just talk about like one patient. It 'S so fucking absurd.

0:05:41 Tom: They got a guy on that show whose whole job it is, is to diagnose. He's a diagnosis guy.

0:05:45 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah, it'S like, you knOw, I think Excel can do that now. Now, like you just have a differential, like diagnose, like it's not hard. They had that technology in the nineties to be able to like, just look through symptoms and like cross, which

0:05:47 Tom: Right.

0:05:56 Eli: How about this? For a medical show: billing coder, right? Like a, he's a cranky old billing coders who figures out what the code is for a particular procedure, but damn it, he knows every fucking code in the book, right? And so they go down to his office and they're like, "Walt, we need to get a a diagnostic panel, a blood panel, but it's not on someone's period and it's not for cancer," and he's like, "God damn it, it's four six six eight two nine three and that's the fucking Etna code," and it's like, he's a son of a bitch, but he's the best in the biz. "Now give us thirty thousand dollars cash or we'll let you die in the waiting room."

0:06:16 Thomas: One's this?

0:06:31 Thomas: Yeah. It has the same music for some reason. Yeah. And And the the only thing worse. Then all these show pitches is the auto ads, the lupus of our podcast.

0:06:43 Eli: Dick Wolf, the auto ads the auto adds, yes, the auto heads those the lupus of our podcast. How it works, because a lot of people, they come to me, they say, "Eli, I love this part where you explain what the auto ads are, take longer." And I say to them, "All right, if you want me to." So here's what happens, okay? You go to patreon.com, don't just go to patreon.com, that'll bring you to the home page of

0:07:13 Thomas: Yeah, you don't want to be there.

0:07:14 Eli: Patreon hundreds of creators for you to support, maybe you'll see someone who's funnier than us. Don't do that. patreon.com forward slash dear old dads, that's where you go, that's just us. You sign up, you give us a dollar, you put in your credit card information, and then they charge that credit card, that money then goes to a bank, I think, and that bank and then then

0:07:37 Thomas: Don't help him, Tom. Don't Help Him.

0:07:39 Tom: Nope.

0:07:39 Thomas: He like described the whole process.

0:07:39 Tom: Nope. And let him struggle. Let him struggle

0:07:42 Eli: Sends me a Zelle, the end, that's all I know.

0:07:44 Thomas: That that does happen. Yeah.

0:07:46 Eli: But anyways, look, that doesn't matter to you.

0:07:46 Tom: That's how the money is.

0:07:49 Thomas: And then California complains about not having.

0:07:51 Eli: California shuts off Tom's credit card. That's also part of it.

0:07:53 Tom: God damn it!

0:07:55 Thomas: Yeah.

0:07:55 Eli: I don't know why it is, but it is. But here's what happens for you. Okay. Here's what's happens for YOU. First of all, you hear this, but you don' hear the commercials. And you get a little bonus parenting story at the last one. We have, hey, if you haven't been a patron for however many years as we've been doing this show, was 188 episodes, buckle in, because Tom has found the peak of monogamy and he reveals it at the end of last week's show. We talk about what we're doing with our bodies when we die. We talk about necrophilia. We go there. Uh, you can get all of it over at patreon.com forward slash Dear Old Dads. That's

0:08:22 Tom: Alright, so this is kind of a topic

0:08:36 Eli: Right, I'm never doing it again. You heard it. You fucking heard it. You took it away and now it's never coming back. Yeah.

0:08:43 Tom: Wanted to talk about this topic a little bit. I found an article that I don't think we're going to talk About too much, but it kind of spawned this and I think this is a good corollary too to the ARFID episode and some of the things that were around that, but there was an article from the University of Utah Health Center about teens and social media and the trouble with self-diagnosis.

And I was thinking about the ARFID process that we had had an episode about a couple of episodes ago. And one of the things that I was thinking about when I read this article was that I Was very confident that Donovan and Aislinn had ARFID. Until I took them to the doctor and the doctor evaluated them, they didn't have ARFid as a diagnosis. Like, they clearly were living with the condition, right? I'm not saying the condition appears at the same time simultaneously with diagnosis.

I was never willing to say, Aislinn has ARFD. Has ARBFID until we took him to the Doctor and the the doctor said, I have diagnosed these kids and they have ARFID, right? And I think that there's a trend that's going on right now where both people and teenagers are doing a lot of self diagnosis based on a bunch of stuff that they Google or see on TikTok or, you know, are otherwise exposed to. And I Think there's also like a really disturbing trend of parental diagnosis.

And think I, I this is a like real fucking problem. And I think it causes all kinds of, you like within like the people who are diagnosed that can cause family issues. It certainly does not interact and intersect the right way with our care system and our educational system, but it's so pervasive. And I was curious what you guys thought about this.

0:10:28 Eli: For sure, I, so yeah, I completely agree and, and I think it's important to talk about, like, the causes of this, right, which is that our medicals, as we were joking about at the beginning in the intro of the show, like, our medical system is so broken. It is so hard to get a diagnosis that it feels really easy to just sort of be like, I feel like all of these things are true to me and maybe some of the things I I looked up on TikTok help. So maybe some of those things, like the adjustments or treatments that I'm hearing about, like, help me and make me feel better.

So maybe I can just sort of live my life as though I have this thing and I don't have to go to a doctor and get the stuff done. You do. Right, because the doctor is the one who can do medicine, whether or not. Right. And look, your diagnosis can turn out to be correct. Right? And I like to use this show as an example, which is until we had a diagnosis for Max of autism, I used NeuroSpicy, and I still use Neurospicy.

One, because it's just more fun to say. It keeps the vibes chiller, and if people don't know what autism can look like, because they sort of have our generation's understanding of autism. Just It makes it a lot easier to have conversations about his needs and wants and desires, right? But like, I was very careful, even though I was real sure this kid had odds. I mean, like this kid at one years old was rocking and flapping.

And when he got excited and I was Like, there it is. Right. But I was Very careful. Right? Because you can also create that. And there were a lot of like, things that could have been done resources for autistic kids that I made sure it was a doctor's idea for him to have before I just slapped him on and said, No, I got this. Right. I think, you the one hand, it is incredibly understandable because it is so difficult to get a diagnosis.

It's so difficult to get an appointment. It is so expensive to do those things. But the hard truth, especially when it comes to your kids, especially especially when it comes to your kids is no matter how hard and expensive and terribly broken the system is, you don't get to be a doctor, right? There is no amount of difficult that the system Is that it's like, okay, you know what? You tried your, you tried playing by the rules. Now you're the medicine police. Right.

Think that we, we genuinely face that, right? If we face that truth head on, we recognize that that is the place that a lot of anti-vaccine shit comes from, right? All the anti-medicine shit that we agree is bad, right? Like pouring bleach up your ass and fucking black tar treatments for you cancer and people who aren't getting chemo and homeopathy, right? All that bullshit, right, that kills people and kills a lot lot of people comes from that same impulse of God damn it. The medical system is broken. The medical system, the medical system is expensive and this is not This is easier.

0:10:41 Tom: So broken.

0:13:24 Thomas: Yeah.

0:13:24 Eli: This, you know, this person makes me feel cared for. This person makes me feel like we have a solution, right? You, and you know Tom, you made a joke at the beginning. That's so true, right. They call you and they say, Hey, we tested for X. It's not X'd, fucking see ya. You know who will never, ever fail to diagnose you? A homeopath. A homeopath will 100% of the time have a product to sell you, have a condition you have and a product to sell. You 100% of the time. And that feels amazing. It feels good because they're going to solve it. They're going to fix it with their potions and ointments. Yeah. But you You still can't do it. You can't do it for the same reason that homeopathy and fucking anti -vaccine bullshit's bad.

0:13:41 Tom: Yeah, man.

0:14:05 Tom: And like, I think you have to recognize too, that there is either a value to expertise or there's not right. Cannot be that we value expertise until we didn't get the answer we wanted, or we didn'T get the answers fast enough. And look to your point, I don'T think that there IS a family around that is more sympathetic to that than I am.

0:14:27 Tom: We have been in a in a state perpetual of living hell for four years trying to figure out what is wrong with Hayley, and we have not had success in getting answers through the system.

0:14:26 Eli: Of course.

0:14:38 Thomas: Well, Well, you didn't find the right tick

0:14:40 Tom: Yeah. Right, we didn't find the way. That was the thing. We're not, we should spend more time on, on TikTok. That's probably when. But like, the other thing too is that even if Hayley and I watched all the TikToks and we read all the stuff on Google and we did our own research and legitimately tried to do our very, very best doing it. I know that I will always approach that knowledge base that comes from a liberal arts degree, from a local school here that I have an English literature degree from. I do not have the expertise. I just don't have it. And I do that expertise to know these things and evaluate them and to read them carefully and to make either that stuff is real and valuable and important or I have it, right? And I don't have it. But I think like even more important than all that, even if I was like, hey, like with the ARFID thing, was I really fucking certain? I really was. I was really fucking uncertain. It doesn't actually matter what I think

0:14:40 Thomas: Tock, though. You have

0:15:35 Eli: Right.

0:15:35 Tom: Because I literally cannot diagnose them. It doesn't go anywhere. It's a fantasy when I do it. It, it's doesn't, not like, I can call up to school and say, hey, my kid qualifies for certain supports and helps because you have our fit. Oh, well, do you have a diagnosis? Yeah, I fucking did it myself. School, uh, a fantasy when you do it yourself. It doesn't intersect with the medical community. It's like, I could be like, hey, I need a prescription for this certain medicine, uh, not a doctor, but they have this, this condition. Like, that's, that's a fucking, that's nonsense. That's nothing. I can't even take that to the next doctor and say, hey, you talk about the kids, you know, medical history. Oh, they have, they have our fit. Oh. I don't see that anywhere in their medical charts. Oh no. I read a bunch bunch of stuff online so

0:15:52 Thomas: Yeah

0:15:54 Eli: Right.

0:16:17 Thomas: I brought my own medical chart here it's in crayon yeah I think I, it sucks because the 90s, 2000s version of this was WebMD or whatever, that and that was rough because every single thing was like cancer. It was like, oh, either you stubbed your toe or cancer.

0:16:18 Tom: Yeah yep

0:16:19 Eli: Right. I brought it. An Excel spreadsheet.

0:16:35 Thomas: Pretty understanding of how it's gotten now is it's if we took WebMD, misread it, and added narcissism and then talked about it in a video? And it's, like, oh, that's much worse. That's much worse.

0:16:27 Eli: Of course. Mm -hmm.

0:16:44 Tom: Yes

0:16:46 Eli: Disguised it as much needed community support, right? Because, because when you see TikToks, right, it's like, hey, girl, are you like me and have ADHD and rickets? Well, you're gonna need this fucking journal that I'm drop shipping from Timu, right? And like, they're, they're fucking selling you something, but here's the thing, right? As someone who suffered with mental illness my whole life, like, I am so heartened by how aware people are of depression and how much less lonely people feel and how many people are much community and support is out there. They just fucking did not, I mean, to say that it didn't exist, exist when I was in the peak of my symptoms and unmedicated is a, I mean, they might as well have been like, oh, Eli has a lunatic during the full moon.

We put them in a sanitarium and splash it with cold water. Like that's the level of not accepted mental illness was when I Was That. And it is better now. Right. And those communities are useful. Hell, some of them are even useful for someone else, but not me. Right? Like maybe the bullet journal really does help someone who who has ADHD and rickets, but I don't have the diagnosis of ADHD and rickets. So I shouldn't

0:16:48 Thomas: Yeah.

0:16:58 Thomas: I guess I need

0:17:55 Eli: Be using that journal.

0:17:56 Thomas: To get rickets for it to work.

0:17:57 Eli: You do have to have rickets?

0:17:58 Thomas: Do I need it? How does

0:17:59 Eli: Yeah, it's a very, it's very soft crayon that you write in the journal in so that it doesn't bother your bones. Because if I remember correctly, and I do, rickets is in your bones.

0:17:59 Thomas: One acquire rickets? I actually don't even... I couldn't tell you.

0:18:14 Eli: That's the new rip into it. Everybody rickets in your bone.

0:18:15 Thomas: Couldn't tell you, what is

0:18:16 Tom: Rickets is in your bones, fucking

0:18:17 Thomas: A ricket?

0:18:18 Eli: Rickets is in yo bones.

0:18:18 Thomas: Do you wake up and find like, oh, I found a ricket? Or is rickets like, you know what I mean?

0:18:22 Eli: Yeah. Oh, God, they're worse than bed bugs. Don't even get me started. That-- gotta check your hotel room for rickets every time you check in. Doesn't matter how nice the place is. Go to the edge of the sheet. If you see your bones underneath the sheet at the corner of the mattress.

0:18:24 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah. Rick it to it. I don't know. But

0:18:26 Tom: Jiminy rickets, it's, I-- liked it, Thomas. Yes.

0:18:39 Thomas: Pet peeve that I see all the time is then we have this weird narcissist thing.

0:18:43 Eli: The show house Yeah.

0:18:44 Thomas: Yes. Where people people associate like a positive quality and then do a, like a humble brag, fake, whatever thing where they're like, Hey, I'm neurodiverse. So that means I'm gonna like positive quality. That's not actually even about being neurodivergent. The one that just gets me every time is, Hey normalize when you're in a conversation, thinking about something that you also have in common with that conversation and talking about it. Do you, have you seen that that one? I'm not getting the wording just right, but it's everywhere. They're like, hey, I do that because I'm neurodivergent. I'm like, no, every human does that. That's what, that's called conversation.

0:19:14 Tom: Yeah.

0:19:21 Eli: All humans do that. Yeah. Oh.

0:19:21 Tom: Well, See that same shit all over the place, because like, so many people are like, I don't know, if you are not, I don't know, trained to be a diagnostician that is supposed to do this, like, differential diagnosis stuff that we were goofing around, like the House stuff, it's Zodiac shit, man. What you're doing is, like, you're counting the hits, you're forgetting the misses, you're seeing things that, like, "Oh yeah, like, that's true, that's for me," and you're like, that's fucking true for everybody. That's not how this works.

0:19:39 Thomas: Oh yeah.

0:19:48 Thomas: You to, I know we don't do hard science, but what? I was was speaking to Jenessa, uh, the other day, who comes on, sio and and about this kind of thing and we we've

0:19:49 Tom: Yes.

0:19:54 Eli: I have a podcast called God Awful Movies. You should check it out, everybody.

0:19:56 Thomas: Also, it's Great, I love it. We we also, um, Tom, do you do any podcast? Yeah.

0:20:01 Tom: Know, podcasting.

0:20:02 Eli: No.

0:20:02 Thomas: Uh.

0:20:03 Tom: I would never.

0:20:03 Thomas: Yeah, you don't have time, it's impossible. Yeah.

0:20:05 Eli: My sidekick. Over. Wow.

0:20:06 Thomas: Um, but it's like, so for example, on Dub T Dub we still in the midst of taking

0:20:10 Eli: Just fucking rolling out all the properties. Four.

0:20:13 Thomas: Down The John Ronson, and John Ronson in In his book, fucking Test, he says, like, oh, I went through the DSM, whatever whatever one we're on, and I diagnosed myself with, like five things or whatever. And he was using that as like a knock on the DSM. And she was like, no, you didn't. That's not actually how that works. Like, reason and I bring it it up is something that stuck with me. She's like, it's very rare for someone to even have like more than two things that it comes to these, psychological, like, whatever you even call them, you know, whether it's like um, depression, whether it's um, borderline personality, what all those things.

It's very rare to, for someone to actually have more than like one thing. Like, and, and the, the reason I bring it up is, yes, you can find a bunch of things that say, here's a symptom, it's being distracted or whatever it might be, but like you said, to your point, yeah, okay, but there's much more that goes into it than that. It's not, oh, I have that, therefore I might have this thing. It's like, no, there's a, there's like process that is much more than just, hey, I identified a couple symptoms I have that are in common with a thing. Yeah.

0:20:22 Eli: Yeah. Yeah.

0:21:14 Eli: Steve Novella has a really, really great blog about the DSM and sort of the misinformation around the DSM, right? Because the misinformation around the DSM is that your doctor like pulls it down from the shelf and goes, do you ever a feel nervous? Sometimes B think sad thoughts. You're nodding.

0:21:28 Thomas: A, baby.

0:21:33 Eli: You have ADHD. You have ADHD. It's right here. You've got it. Right. And so one of the things that he points out in his article, which I love so much, is he's like, um, screaming is a of psychosis, it's also a symptom of being on fire, right? So like, a doctor is well aware of whether or not you're on fire, right?

0:21:35 Tom: Yeah.

0:21:47 Thomas: Oh, okay. Yeah. Oh.

0:21:52 Eli: Ways that you are not, but it also talking about the false positive and false misses, right? This brings me to my favorite gripe, and I'm always so happy to talk about my favorite gripe, my controversial statement, right, which is that the "I don't have a narrative people in my head" people are lying, right? They're not lying on purpose, right, to be clear.

0:22:08 Thomas: Man. Here.

0:22:10 Eli: Now, I, I have been too brief when describing this in the past, which has been ungenerous, and I should, I should clarify, right, what they have discovered about the "I don't have a narrative in my head" people is that they right.

0:22:12 Thomas: We go, an internal monologue. You're saying this.

0:22:22 Tom: Right.

0:22:23 Eli: An internal monologue is that THEY HAVE A DIFFERENT UNDERSTANDING OF THAT LANGUAGE THAN YOU AND I HAVE AN UNDERstanding OF OUR LANGUGE ABOUT WHAT internal monologue is, right? So like, when we say "I don't have an internal monolog" or "I do have an internal monagogue," they are picturing us while I am talking going, "And now I'm saying words, saying more words, here come the words." The words.

0:22:47 Thomas: Is Not this Is Not

0:22:48 Eli: Are Being said, right? So that's the the language difference that's happening there. So when they say I Don't have that, they're not experiencing it, but we're also not experiencing It. And the way that you can sometimes suss out the difference between that, that it's just a language difference, is that they tell people that people who don't have an internal monologue also have aphasia, right? The ability to like smell colors or see sounds.

0:22:48 Thomas: True. I'm

0:22:49 Tom: That's Synesthesia.

0:23:10 Eli: Synesthesia,

0:23:11 Thomas: Gonna say synesthesia, yeah. Then

0:23:11 Tom: Aphasia

0:23:11 Eli: Right. Yeah. Aphasia is the moon, the Richard Dawkins thing. Yeah, aphantasia is the opposite of that. Um, they say it's a, that it has a symptom it doesn't have, right, the synesthesia is, is the one, right and then they say, Hey, you know, 90 % of the people who don't have an internal monologue also have, and then they describe that thing and people go, oh my gosh, I totally have that. Right. It's something that they do for a variety of things. It's a big part of mental health diagnostic criteria that when you you are doing diagnosis, you throw in symptoms

0:23:12 Tom: Is the inability to form mental images. Well,

0:23:16 Thomas: Or something. Is the, yeah. Huh. Throw

0:23:45 Eli: That are, yeah, you Throw in literal trap symptoms to see if someone is just yes anding in that conversation yeah

0:23:45 Thomas: In some traps. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Uh, that we have to argue about this insane theory, Eli. No, I, I bet that's like sometimes, but also you, there are people who were born never having heard human language, Eli. Do you think they don't, like, there's, think there's a certain percentage of people who, for whatever reason, have a different, like, cognitive, like, internal cognitive process that doesn't involve language in the way that I think most people's does. And I think that that's perfectly plausible. Maybe it's just not as high as is reported, though.

0:24:17 Eli: So, again, what I'm saying is, like, the thing that they define as internal monologue, right, not internal monolog, right? They are projecting an idea, right?

0:24:26 Thomas: And I'm saying That's not all of them. I think That's just some in the same way of the very theme of the thing we're talking about is people thinking they have a thing, but they're not actually diagnosing themselves with it. Like, I think there's probably those people. There are also people who genuinely have a brain that works in a way that's different than most people. You don't think, you think it's all fake? Okay.

0:24:44 Eli: Think I the notion of the The removal of internal monologue is a misapprehension of what an internal monologue is, right? Because you don't need to have heard language or think in words to have an internal monologue. Internal monologue has to be a way of saying, you know, I'm going to do this, I'll internal monogue is about narrative and flow of thoughts rather than the literal words you're hearing inside your head.

0:25:06 Thomas: I don't know about that, but okay.

0:25:08 Eli: Yeah.

0:25:08 Thomas: No.

0:25:08 Eli: So this is what I'm saying, right, is it's like, I think people often get confused, right. Because they think, right,

0:25:15 Thomas: You're just saying thinking, like, yeah, everyone is thinking, there's no, like, that, but then you're defining it out of a thing that's even interesting, like

0:25:22 Eli: Right. No, it's not interesting. Yeah, no, it is true. It's, it's why Sam Harris is wrong about free will. Right. Or, and, and Daniel Dennett's right. Daniel Right. Dennet wrote the essay where he was like, Hey man, the thing that you're defining isn't real. There's no scenario in which it's real and nobody can honestly define it in a way that it exists. So you're not defeating a thing that matters. And Sam was like some people People think that they squeeze real hard and have free choice.

0:25:48 Thomas: Amazing.

0:25:48 Eli: And Dan was like, people are just wrong, right? So similarly, in this case, right, people are, in reading that I have done, people are misapprehending internal monologue to be a voice that happens inside your head that is literally going like, and now I will move to the kitchen. And now Iwill pick up a glass of water. Yum, yum, yum. Water is delicious for me. And obviously, like, some of us do that. And some of us have that as part of our experience, but that's not internal monologue, right? And what people are picturing when they say, I don't have an internal monolog is a consistent voice that goes inside the head that they don't have because everyone cognates differently.

0:25:51 Thomas: Takes Okay, my new theory is that Eli doesn't have an internal monologue and is trying to make sense that would be funny, because I do have a constant voice in my head at all times. It doesn't say the the stupid things you were saying.

0:26:35 Eli: God, wouldn't that be so funny?

0:26:37 Tom: Yeah. Literally.

0:26:41 Thomas: But yeah, no, I do have it all the time.

0:26:42 Tom: Can't imagine not having an actual, like, voice in my head.

0:26:46 Thomas: Yeah. And 90 % of people do. And some percentage of people don't because they think not in necessarily in language in that way. They think in a different way. It seems totally interesting, real and plausible. But Eli says no.

0:26:47 Tom: Right.

0:26:56 Eli: Want

0:26:59 Tom: Right, but so, let's I

0:26:59 Eli: To be clear. Whoa, wait, wait. No, Tom, I'm sorry. I know you want to move on to self -diagnosis. Because as Tom is now making the claim that most people are doing the like, and now it is time to walk with my legs. Right, left, right, left.

0:27:01 Tom: Always just thought we'd have a parenting podcast, but

0:27:10 Thomas: No, you're doing that as a ridiculous example. Saying most people have monologue the going in their head. It's saying different things, but it's saying things. Mine is saying things things all the time.

0:27:11 Tom: No. No. This

0:27:20 Eli: You sometimes say things, right? You're not always hearing words.

0:27:26 Tom: This is gonna get way off topic, but it's kind of awesome. I

0:27:26 Thomas: Well. Uh, yeah.

0:27:28 Eli: Is insane. Because then I don't have an internal. Hey, I would like to retract my, hey, my fellow non monologues, monologos, monolagos, my follow non monologos. I'm ready to join you as one of your numbers. I'm non -monologous.

0:27:30 Thomas: Yeah. You might not have an internal monologue.

0:27:41 Thomas: None. I thought I, my brain went to, Oh, Eli's doing that thing where he just can't figure out a word. So I stopped listening and then I came back and was like, Oh no, this is great. This is brilliant. It's good stuff. Sorry.

0:27:53 Eli: Non -monologous. My fellow non -model logos. I'm to join. You proudly here.

0:27:57 Thomas: Well, here's another way I know. So Um, like I also, Also, if I'm not hearing a voice, I hear music, well, pretty much all the time. I always have music in my head at all times. And thing I wonder is how do people who don't have that voice in their head, do they hear music? Because then I think I would be on Eli's side, like, if they actually hear something, but not words, then yeah, maybe they're just misinterpreting kind of what that is.

0:28:18 Eli: Tom, do you also have music in your head all the time?

0:28:20 Tom: No.

0:28:21 Eli: Cause I don't.

0:28:21 Tom: I almost never have music in my head, but I do have a voice. I Like, I'm not narrating my activity because my activity that I perform happens sort of in a subconscious space. But my thoughts are thought using words. I think in words for sure. And I thinkin words like all the time.

0:28:21 Eli: Okay.

0:28:24 Thomas: Eli, you're the most generator of... words in the world, how could you not be thinking in words Like how, what

0:28:45 Eli: I make a conscious attempt to think in words sometimes, but I'm not in a flow state of words all

0:28:51 Thomas: Yeah

0:28:52 Tom: I'm in a flow state of words literally constantly, literally constantly.

0:28:55 Eli: The time.

0:28:54 Thomas: I think I think we might have cracked it. I think you don't have an internal. Yeah, That's

0:28:57 Tom: No,

0:28:56 Eli: This is insane. That's what this episode's about. I genuinely if this was the case, I genuinely don't have an internal monologue, and I think everyone who does is living in the Shining is

0:29:02 Thomas: So funny. Yeah, is lying Yeah Uh, yeah, I kind of am sometimes, yeah.

0:29:11 Tom: Around narrating your activity back to yourself, like, I am walking to the kitchen, but I am constantly thinking about something, and

0:29:19 Thomas: Or I'm in a fake conversation in my, or like, an, an imagined thing I need to say, or a thing, a thing I need to do, or

0:29:26 Eli: The thinking you're doing is language that's

0:29:26 Thomas: Yes,

0:29:29 Tom: I'm dealing with is exclusively language.

0:29:31 Eli: Insane

0:29:30 Thomas: Absolutely. Well, I wouldn't say, there's also a lot of subconscious stuff that goes on. That's really fascinating. Like, yeah, yeah.

0:29:31 Eli: Yeah

0:29:35 Tom: I'm talking about my conscious awareness of my own thoughts are always exclusively language, yeah.

0:29:38 Thomas: Yes. Yes. Eli, what is it to you when you're like, you know, the classic thing of like a, the jerk store called you doing that? Like, Oh, I was in an argument. If only I would have said this thing, like, what's your experience? Yeah. Yeah. That's right. What's your experience of that? Like, oh, I was having a conversation, huh?

0:29:50 Tom: Of the staircase. I

0:29:55 Eli: That engage monologue in those moments, but I do it consciously, right? I'll be like, I should have said this, I would have said that, right? It's not all the time. It's just when I'm choosing to think in words. Most of the time I'm just sort of like seeing stuff or recognizing Mags or like

0:30:11 Thomas: Jesus. Yeah, I think you might actually have a different, I'm not even joking.

0:30:13 Eli: No.

0:30:15 Tom: It, I love that this started off one way and like you've now proven that you are the thing that you said. Wasn't. No.

0:30:17 Thomas: Yeah. I,

0:30:19 Eli: You're gaslighting me as a weird example. The

0:30:22 Thomas: Isn't a joke, Eli, actually. Well, the fact that you say you sometimes do it is interesting because I don't know. Feel I like, yeah, that's why, yeah.

0:30:28 Eli: I've had is that they can't do it, right? Is that they're like, and they

0:30:33 Thomas: That's why I'm hesitant to say, yeah that's what I'm hesitated to say you fully have that, but you might just do it a lot lot less. I mean, there might be a spectrum of how much people do that.

0:30:33 Eli: Can't hear words. Is it possible that I'm just fucking stupid and my monologue is so slow that I don't think it's my brain's just like crackers.

0:30:46 Thomas: It's not because you are, you are a genius

0:30:49 Eli: Let

0:30:49 Thomas: With words at times. Like you, you have so much language skill in, in, in not in a technical sense, not a spelling or grammar sense, but, but in a, but in joke sense, you Have, you, have so Much skill with that. It would be impossible for me to believe you're, you have any sort of deficiency?

0:31:05 Eli: Throw this out there. Is it possible that I never don't say my thoughts and that's why I don't have and I don't have an internal monologue Because it's my external monologue.

0:31:11 Thomas: You've outsourced your internal monologue. You have an external monologue. Yeah. That's actually kind of possible, like it might be

0:31:19 Eli: Okay. You guys have spent a lot of time with me. That fucking tracks. Have

0:31:24 Thomas: But I also know how much you hold back though, like, I know how many thoughts you're like, "I can never say that." Thought

0:31:29 Eli: But I'm, I'm almost always making hard eye contact with you in that moment to tell you. So it's almost like an external monologue. I've switched monologues to like, I want to talk about the foot. I want her to talk about it. Wanna. Foot.

0:31:30 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah. Oh. That is so fucking funny. Oh.

0:31:44 Eli: Foot.

0:31:44 Tom: That's a riot. So

0:31:45 Thomas: The thing I was getting at is I did have a listener comment that, like, I don't hear thing voice, and I'm a musician. I was like, no, that's not possible. It's like, there's no way, because so much of how I do music is hearing is things ahead of time. You just like, yeah, I can't. They do music in a very technical way, like, not, you know, and it's, they don't.

0:32:03 Eli: They're just fingering. They're just arming and fingering all

0:32:03 Thomas: Yeah, yeah. Exactly. It's more, it's, and I believe them that that's true. I don't know how you would do that. That feels really hard to me. Like, mine is the opposite. I'm, I'm just all about hearing imaginary music, and like, it's for me it's like, oh, how do I get any technique to match at all what I'm hearing in my head? I never could come close. But to, to be the other way is, I can't imagine how that would work. Same.

0:32:07 Eli: Right.

0:32:26 Tom: Eli, I wonder if you can identify with this. So, like, when I write, so like, let's say I'm gonna write, like, um, like, not something like long form, but let's see I'm going to write, like, like a poem or whatever. Will compose the majority of that sort casually in my head. I'm going about my day, and then when I get an opportunity, I'll set it down on paper and then refine it.

0:32:45 Thomas: Wait.

0:32:45 Eli: Never.

0:32:46 Tom: Yeah.

0:32:46 Thomas: What?

0:32:46 Eli: You've you've seen me right, Tom. I'm I'm having entirely different conversations while I write.

0:32:47 Thomas: No.

0:32:51 Tom: I will say this, like, as a peak, none of this has anything to do with the show, as a peek behind the curtain, though.

0:32:54 Thomas: It's the new show Now.

0:32:55 Tom: I have seen many times Eli both performing his Citation Needed script, laughing appropriately, making his own comments while I'm also watching him type, like, a revision to a skit or a new joke live in the document that we're working on. It's fucking insane because you have a dolphin brain. Like, one brain is doing the show and the other brain is doing the writing.

0:32:55 Thomas: Yeah.

0:32:56 Eli: Yeah.

0:33:20 Eli: I do, like, a how's -your -life chat. If I forgot to write the, like, opening sketch for Citation Needed, like, we can just have the conversation, the sketch just writes. I know it just gets written. I don't, that's just it's that I, the closest is, like, remember how Mozart's Salia is, like, he was taking dictation from God.

0:33:36 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah.

0:33:37 Eli: Right? Mean that in the sense that I'm that good. I mean, in the sense that, like, I'm just writing the words down. I'm not But I'm

0:33:38 Thomas: Yeah, so You're God That's What John Lennon said too. There's, well, here's another thing I'm remembering that people listening to the show might know, um, favorite scientist who probably also was problematic, but he's been, you know, um, fucking rich Yeah, yeah, uh, the guy, the physicist, oh, I always, wait, oh man, I always blank on his name. Fuck. No.

0:33:53 Eli: Dawkins. Feynman.

0:34:01 Thomas: Feynman. Thank you. Why can't I remember that? Richard Feyn, thank you. It it's Richard. And then there's four other Richard scientists that I kept going to. So

0:34:04 Tom: Richard Fine man I

0:34:02 Eli: Yeah. Yeah, Richard Feynmann. Yeah. Not a great guy. Sad news. Google it.

0:34:10 Thomas: So he He talks about his

0:34:12 Eli: Richard

0:34:12 Thomas: Books are lovely and he talks about just the everyday like science that he would do. Like you just all all day. His mind was on science and scientific questions. And one time he was doing something where he was. What was it? He was counting. He was trying to count seconds in his head and he started he wanted to do some experiment. This is a long time, so it might be a little off, but it was something like he was trying to see who was good at that. Like, oh, if I have you just count seconds in your head, how close will you get to real? You know, like if I like, have you gone to 10? Could you keep, and then he was like, oh, I'll have people do other tasks and see how they can, it was just doing this around the office is why he was so entertaining to me as a scientist. And the one thing he found out was that some people can talk while they're doing that. And some can't. So counting to 10 is in my head, one, two, three, four.

0:34:56 Tom: Of course, dude.

0:34:57 Thomas: And he said like, so if there was any task where, okay, you need to count to 10 in your your head and also talk. Some people just can't do it. And I think that would probably be me. I don't think I can do it." And then, yeah, there was one scientist Where he's like, "Oh no, he could still do it fine." He and was like, "How can you do that?" And he's like, "Well, he imagines like a counter. Like that's he's always counting. He imagines like a stopwatch. Can doing that for a bit, but it doesn't do itself. You know, if I talk, I still will lose it." But some people, I think they genuinely, the way their mind works is different architecture. It's like Mac and Windows or something. There's like a different architecture in there that does accomplish the same things, the same sorts of things Yeah.

0:35:07 Tom: I'm right there with you a hundred percent. Yeah. A

0:35:34 Thomas: How do you count, Eli, when you count? Do you go one in your head, one, two, three?

0:35:33 Tom: Thousand percent that has to be true that But

0:35:38 Eli: I think I go one, two, three in my head. Yeah. I don't have like a separate window for counting. I'm picturing it like a laptop screen now.

0:35:38 Thomas: Okay. That's interesting. Do you Ever alt-F4 accidentally and then are

0:35:49 Eli: I will say, I do have multiple windows up on my screen, which Anna finds literally nauseating. Like, I have four. So most people have like one window and a bunch of tabs. I have like four or five windows all on my screen at once in real life to

0:36:01 Thomas: You talking in real life or your brain oh okay.

0:36:06 Tom: Let's, let's bring it back real quick to the parenting thing that we thought we'd have to do. No,

0:36:09 Eli: My genius of

0:36:11 Thomas: Well, it's related to self-diagnosis because this is a thing people have seen online and then, and they do, I think, apply it wrong. Like

0:36:17 Tom: No, I know, I know, I'm just goofing around. But I wanted to make a point, too, that one thing that I've seen in life, one thing that I'm seeing that is really pernicious about this is when parents who do not, and again, we're not talking about doctors that are parents, but parents who lack the expertise to make these diagnoses, when they do them anyway, and then they share that diagnosis with their kid, it becomes definitional to the kid's sense of who they are, right? And usually these diagnoses, not always, but very often these diagnosies relate more to mental health issues than they do to like, you know, I think you've got, hepatic you liver disease, you know, like they're not really doing a lot of that. Right. It's oftentimes relating to, you things like, Self you -diagnosis of ADHD or autism or, you personality disorders such as like narcissism or oppositional defiance disorder, things along those lines.

0:36:40 Eli: Course. Bipolar.

0:36:57 Thomas: Yeah, yeah. Yeah, and then

0:37:11 Eli: Disorder, or

0:37:12 Tom: Bipolar, borderline.

0:37:12 Eli: Fucking Borderline.

0:37:13 Tom: Personality.

0:37:14 Eli: Personality.

0:37:14 Tom: Dude.

0:37:14 Eli: Disorder. And, and the sexist connotations of that, like. That's a whole fucking episode of like women who have been diagnosed with BPD because their fucking shitty dad fights with them.

0:37:17 Tom: Yeah. For real. But like, when parents diagnose their kids so

0:37:27 Thomas: The overcorrection where people say it doesn't exist. It's like, well, no, it does exist though.

0:37:29 Eli: Well, obviously, that's right. Yeah.

0:37:32 Tom: Like, you know, there's there's really a pernicious element to, like, when parents diagnose their kids and they tell them, then the kids grow up thinking these are true things, because when we diagnose people with something like this, this is, like, oftentimes thought of, especially by young people, as an immutable truth about who they are. You

0:37:51 Eli: Yeah. A thing they can't do.

0:37:53 Tom: Are a person with anxiety, not you are anxious sometimes. And we do that to kids in ways that lack the sort of rigor and expertise that real diagnosis should require, and I want to put the should in there because it often unfortunately doesn't, but when it should require that, we're a sort of schema or or like a character sheet for our kids that defines how they think of themselves and move through the world. It's fucking horrible.

0:37:56 Eli: Yeah. Mm hmm. Yeah.

0:37:56 Thomas: Yeah,

0:38:21 Tom: It is horrible.

0:38:22 Eli: And want to speak to something my parents did right about this. So I think I've talked about this on the air before, but my dad had ADD. And my parents didn't tell me until I was well into high school. Right. Right. I believed that my dad took allergy medication my whole life. Right. He would just pop a white pill out of a bottle and be like, I have really bad allergies. And I'd be like fuck yeah. I don't know why I was like a fucking like in college before I was like, wait a second, Afrin doesn't look like that. But I did learn that dad had ADD. And the reason they didn't tell me is because they knew the second I knew my dad, who I idolized, had ADT, I would self-diagnose with ADD and then start getting treated as though I had ADD.

0:39:02 Thomas: Huh.

0:39:02 Eli: Right, there was no way I was going to hear my hero had ADD and little Eli wasn't going to be like, "I have double ADD. I have DAD. I'm my dad. I am him."

0:39:11 Thomas: But Imagine, how did that apply to depression though? Because I'm torn on this. I think that, like, imagine if you, for some reason, your mom had refused to say she had depression and then you'd have to be confused about what the fuck was happening. That feels rough too. Don't you think? Oh

0:39:11 Eli: Right.

0:39:26 Eli: I think it was specifically that they saw that I did not have ADD and did not want to talk to me about what was going on that wasn't going on for me, right? So like, very early my parents recognized that I was dealing with depression. We had lots of conversation in the family about my mom's depression. And so like, when it was recognized, they recognized that, like, this is how you're gonna, you're going to deal with sadness in a slightly different way. You're to deal mit bad days and thought distortions in a slightly different way. So they were, they were very open about that kind of stuff. I think the worry was, if were watching it very carefully, they were always looking for it, but I think the worry was if they announced it to the room, I was going to attach to

0:39:33 Thomas: Okay. Hmm. Hmm. Interesting.

0:40:10 Eli: It, and I I genuinely think I would have to And it's something I have been very careful about with Max, right, is like, you are incredibly careful about the way in which we talk to him about his brain and his ability to understand things. You know, one of the things that I talked to him him about is like, you are so smart in these ways. You are so amazing at these things. You are such, you're so good at X, Y, Z. I never talk about autism, right? I never say, Hey, Max, because you're autistic X, Y, Z, or because you are a neuro spicy X, X, Y. But I will say, Hey, because your brain is so amazing focusing, right? Sometimes it can be hard to use our listening ears. So like, that's something we're working on right now. It's because he doesn't want to use his fucking listening ears,

0:40:10 Tom: Absolutely.

0:40:12 Thomas: Yeah. Use

0:40:58 Eli: If you know what I'm saying. And yeah, exactly. What I say in my head with my internal monologue, which I have is you fucking asshole use your fucking listening ears. Right. But like, it would be very easy for me now that I have a diagnosis as a parent to be like, well, you're autistic and that's why it's hard for you to listen. And that's why change is hard for You. Right? But to me, to Me, that's A limitation, right? As As opposed to talking about a way in which his brain is strong, a strength of his, A right? Way that he can understand his own cognition in a positive way and adjust around it.

0:41:00 Thomas: Your fucking listening ears. Yeah. Is nothing Apparently, yeah.

0:41:06 Tom: I think too that there is a really difficult, and I just want to recognize the difficulty of it out loud, there is really difficult balance to strike where at some point in your kid's life and development, they do need to know all the medical truths about who they are. They need to know this. And that is super valuable because it will provide them a lens that they can use to understand their own experience and to connect with other people potentially that have similar experiences.

But we have to balance that in this really kind of parentally impossible way with with doing it at just the right time and just the right amounts to avoid that kind of, you that people will put themselves in or that definitional boundaries that people will put themselves in sometimes by nature or use that as an operative to say like, well, I don't do that because I have this thing or I can't do that or I can't push myself because I have this thing and it's like, well, we got to do this, this impossible parental thing of just kind of striking that perfect balance, which I recognize is not probably even possible to do, but it's also essential that we try and we try to get it as close to right as we can. But like

0:42:13 Thomas: Yeah, yeah.

0:42:52 Tom: None of that is possible if the diagnosis is being made up on the fly by fucking just, like somebody with a fucking accounting degree, you know? Like it doesn't work.

0:42:52 Thomas: How

0:43:01 Eli: Right.

0:43:04 Thomas: Dare you.

0:43:04 Tom: Oh, Oh, I forgot you had an accounting degree. I literally just made that up. I didn't mean anything about it.

0:43:06 Thomas: Business with a focus in accounting, so

0:43:10 Tom: I didn' t mean that.

0:43:10 Eli: Counting. Wow.

0:43:12 Tom: I didn'' t mean anything by that. English literature degree.

0:43:11 Thomas: Thank

0:43:14 Eli: Thomas, if you want to steal the podcast, let me know.

0:43:16 Thomas: You. No.

0:43:23 Eli: Right, gentlemen, before we go, I heard the most boomer-tastic dad joke and I'm so excited to share it with you. My wife says I apologized to her, but I tell her I'm sorry I married her all the time. Is That a man

0:43:36 Tom: Oh, my God. Oh, that

0:43:37 Thomas: My, oh Hey God That's so bad

0:43:40 Tom: Is the worst.

0:43:41 Eli: A man told me that joke with his mouth And I was like, and yet here you are, not dead. Oh, all right.

0:43:41 Thomas: Oh My God.

0:43:42 Tom: Oh.

0:43:54 Thomas: That's awful. Or

0:43:59 Clip: Want to meet sexy DILFs in your area? Email the dads at DearOldDads.com or, better yet, send us a message on Patreon. You can follow us on all social media by checking the links in the show notes. And if you need more podcasts in your life, you can find Tom on Cognitive Dissonance, Thomas on Serious Inquiries Only, and Eli on Godawful Movies and all the Puzzle in the Thunderstorm shows. Dear Old Dads is edited and produced by my favorite DILF, Tom Smith, who also wrote and recorded the intro music, which is used with his permission. This podcast is a production of Daddy Issues LLC. Copyright 2022. All rights reserved.

0:44:39 Eli: But good to come. Boom. Turns out

0:44:43 Thomas: Do you do any podcast? Yeah.

0:44:44 Tom: Know podcasting I would never

0:44:45 Thomas: Uh

0:44:45 Eli: No teach open assholes the way uh find my phone treats phones

0:44:53 Thomas: This is a plus material. I'm going to put some of this in the post credit. My main new thing, I'll put stuff from the bonus story in the post credit, and people are just going to fucking deal with it.

0:44:53 Tom: Oh, my Lord. All

0:45:02 Eli: A kangaroo you piece of shit. And