SNAP, Crackle, Billionaire

Arghavan & Alyssa diagnose America's latest nutrition emergency as SNAP benefits face potential cuts. They dissect the economic consequences of food insecurity with surgical precision while examining the bizarre phenomenon of billionaires hoarding wealth like it's toilet paper in a pandemic.

The doctors perform a thorough examination of:

• The alarming case of disappearing SNAP contingency funds (prognosis: sus)
• How cutting food assistance creates a cascade of symptoms across the economy
• Billie Eilish prescribes wealth redistribution to Mark Zuckerberg

Side effects of this episode may include: righteous indignation, increased awareness of food insecurity, and an irresistible urge to check if your local billionaire is sharing their metaphorical sandbox.

This episode may induce hunger for both nourishment and economic justice.

Please, donate to your local food banks and/or volunteer your time. 

Not sure where how? Check out your city/county resources, or search these national databases:

• Feeding America
• Hunger Free America
• No Kid Hungry

For relief from the heavy diagnosis, get a dose of joy featuring Isabel Klee and her pet dog Whimsy, who frankly demonstrate better social skills than some humans with bank accounts larger than GDP.

• Isabel Klee and Whimsy, the Rescue Dog
• A woman hits the Conservative dating apps
• You think scientists are hiding things from you? Have you met these losers? 

Resources:

Mississippi Monkey Hunt

• Questions remain after monkeys leaving Tulane lab escape

SNAP

• Joyce Vance: “When did making kids go hungry become a Christian value?”
• Elizabeth Austin's essay: $149.57 Is Going to Have to Feed My Family Indefinitely
• 'I don't think we fully understand who SNAP recipients are': Single mother speaks out

Billionaires, Wealth Inequality & Financial Struggles

• Billie Eilish Calls Out Billionaires In Room With Mark Zuckerberg: ‘Give Your Money Away’
• The Secret IRS Files: Trove of Never-Before-Seen Records Reveal How the Wealthiest Avoid

Thanks for listening to The Present Illness with Drs. Arghavan Salles and Alyssa Burgart!

Follow us on TikTok and Instagram @ThePresentIllness

Credits

• Production by Arghavan Salles and Alyssa Burgart
• Editing by Alyssa Burgart
• Theme Music by Joseph Uphoff
• Social Media by Arghavan Salles

Chapters

• 5:48 SNAP Reliance - The Reality of Hunger and Malnutrition
• 14:08 Economic Consequences of SNAP Cuts
• 24:44 Taxation and the Wealthy
• 30:27 Barriers to Accessing Education and Healthcare
• 36:45 The Struggles of Working Families
• 43:34 The Misconception of Wealth and Intelligence
• 48:45 Judgment Around Food Choices and Poverty
• 55:46 What's bringing you joy this week?

Transcript

Arghavan Salles (00:01)
Hey there, fellow culture nerds. Welcome to another episode of The Present Illness, a podcast where the two of us, Alyssa and Arghavan try to make sense of a world that's a little febrile and definitely underdiagnosed. I'm Arghavan Salles a surgeon scientist in your friendly neighborhood, doom scroller in residence.

Alyssa Burgart (00:18)
And I'm Alyssa Burgart an anesthesiologist and bioethicist. I'm tracking health news and health law like they're pulse oximeteries full of beeps and boops. I love a beep and a boop. The present illness is where we dig into public health, politics, culture, and ethics with a bandage in one hand and a meme in the other.

Arghavan Salles (00:30)
Who doesn't?

Big thanks to everyone who's listening, who's come along on this journey with us, especially to those who've written any reviews for us. We love that so much. It really helps for people to be able to find our podcast, which is ultimately the goal. We love talking to each other, but it's really to try to inform listeners like you. And a warm welcome, as always, to those who have stumbled in from the Mississippi Monkey Hunt.

Alyssa Burgart (01:04)
Yeah, I mean, for those of you who have not followed this news, and I'm telling you, it's wild that there has been a, I would say a manhunt, but it is a monkey hunt for escaped rhesus monkeys. There was unfortunately a bunch of research monkeys that were being transported across, ⁓ they were in Mississippi, they were being transported from Louisiana. There is one still at large that is apparently ⁓ potentially infected with pathogens.

So much secrecy around this, but we do know there's one monkey that is still missing. So if you are in Mississippi, know, watch out, stay safe. But we're glad you're here, and let's get into it.

Arghavan Salles (01:46)
Yeah. What are we talking about today?

Alyssa Burgart (01:48)
We're gonna, I mean, we are recording this on Halloween. We have to talk about SNAP benefits. We have to. They were set to expire tomorrow. ⁓ Hot off the press today, Friday, there's been ⁓ two judges that have moved to require the government to make SNAP benefits, to continue SNAP benefits. They have never been paused before since starting this program. And this is a huge issue. We... ⁓

Arghavan Salles (01:55)
Yeah.

Alyssa Burgart (02:17)
People really need snap, people need to eat.

Arghavan Salles (02:21)
Yeah, yeah, eating is not optional. We know this as physicians. We can take our word for it. People really do need to eat and people do need to eat multiple meals a day, every day. You know, I don't know why we have to say this, but it seems that we do based on the discourse that we're seeing and 42 ish million people rely on SNAP.

Alyssa Burgart (02:42)
Yeah, and you know, I have been really struck because, you know, you and I are both online. ⁓ Wow, I have seen some I mean, I've seen some amazing advocacy on on Twitter and on Instagram. Sorry, Twitter on TikTok and on Instagram. ⁓ But I've also seen some pretty horrid, horrid videos of people aggressively eating on camera while disparaging people who cannot afford food.

which is, it's super wild to me because these seem to also be people who proclaim to be morally superior. And I just, I'm not seeing it. I'm not seeing the actual moral superiority.

Arghavan Salles (03:21)
I know.

kind of missing that part. ⁓ Joyce Vance, Joyce White Vance, who some people may know, had posted something along the lines of, ⁓ when did hunger become like a pillar of Christianity? ⁓ Because there are a lot of self-proclaimed Christians who are really wishing for people to go hungry. I mean, there's, I think one of the videos you were probably referring to is this woman who was eating toast, like very crunchy toast.

on camera and talking about what did they do with their October benefits? And why don't they have those around to use in November? And what I love about that video is the response to it, which was a lot of people being like, what happened to the gas you put in your car last month? How come you're not still using it this month? Like pointing out how absurd her argument was because obviously food is not only perishable, but it is consumed. It is a consumable. It's not like a TV where you bought one.

however many years ago and you don't need to buy a new one and maybe you should just saved your TV. Like it's a very bizarre argument she was making that you should just have saved up what is honestly not that much money for most SNAP recipients. ⁓ It works out somebody did the math and it works out to a few dollars per meal. And obviously grocery prices are wild these days. So I'm sure those staff benefits weren't going as far as they used to anyway.

Alyssa Burgart (04:51)
Yeah, absolutely. And it's so, I mean, I was raised Catholic. We were taught we are supposed to feed the hungry. did. It's like big part of what we talked about, ⁓ in church. I've, I continue to just be flabbergasted by the cruelty, ⁓ in, in thinking about, so many families who will not have food. And there's also, there's so many families who depend on SNAP benefits.

who already have been struggling to feed themselves. And oftentimes then what families do is a lot of times it's the mom and the dad, they're not gonna eat. They're not gonna eat so that they can feed their children. And that's with SNAP access. And so if this is allowed to lapse, that's just gonna get a whole lot worse. And we know that there's so many terrible health consequences to malnutrition. And so when

Arghavan Salles (05:30)
Vroom.

That's right.

Alyssa Burgart (05:49)
You're just literally at a massive caloric deficit for kids. This is a big problem.

Arghavan Salles (05:56)
Yeah, absolutely. And I think there's a few common kind of arguments that I see being made online and they're around things like taking personal responsibility and yes. And, and you know why these people should just kind of like the pull yourself up by your, ⁓ your britches or whatever, bootstraps. And, and those comments, I think really come.

Alyssa Burgart (06:07)
shut up. ⁓ God.

Bootstraps. Yeah.

Arghavan Salles (06:24)
Like they reveal a lack of real world experience, I think, to understand and something that we see as physicians a lot is the different experiences and positions that people find themselves in through no fault of their own. And I think a lot of people also don't understand how easily any of us could need social assistance programs like SNAP because as you and I were talking about earlier, we are, almost all of us,

much closer to needing SNAP than we are to becoming a billionaire. And the policies that have created such a large population of people who need to be on SNAP are the policies that protect the wealthy. So we have one in eight, so 42 million works out to about one in eight people in this country needing assistance to get food. That to me reveals a very fundamental policy error in our government and in our society.

Alyssa Burgart (06:56)
Absolutely.

Arghavan Salles (07:19)
that we have created a system wherein that many people need government assistance just to be able to eat. And 40 % of SNAP recipients are children. Between children and the elderly and the disabled, I think that's almost two thirds of SNAP recipients. Of the remaining, the majority of the people who are on SNAP who can work do. So what's the, I mean, I think people don't,

aren't putting all those pieces of information together.

Alyssa Burgart (07:52)
Yeah, and ⁓ my friend Elizabeth Austin just had ⁓ a fabulous personal essay in the New York Times about her experience of being on and off SNAP benefits from the time that her, ⁓ the father of her children suddenly up and left, didn't want to be a dad anymore and disappeared from their lives. And she had two kids under three and needed to then put herself through school to all of these things, was on SNAP, eventually was able to get a job that

gave her the where she had benefits and she had the ability to feed her family. But guess what? During the pandemic, her job got restructured and she lost those benefits again. ⁓ And so she talks about how, you know, snap has been a key to being able to feed her family during these times of transition. And, you know, she's the first to point out that she's like pretty typical. She's not an abnormal person for being a single parent who is

Arghavan Salles (08:29)
Thank

Mm-hmm.

Alyssa Burgart (08:48)
simultaneously working and struggling to feed their family. think that's just, this is the American way right now.

Arghavan Salles (08:54)
Right, because we have refused to have any sort of universal basic income and we have refused to require corporations to pay a living wage. That's why so many people who are on SNAP are also working. And in fact, Walmart and McDonald's are the two companies in this country that have the highest number of employees on SNAP. And what happens is they underpay their employees, those employees go on SNAP, then

the government pays these companies for the generosity of hiring people who are on SNAP through this work opportunity tax credit. So they're in some ways incentivized to exploit their workers. Well, not even for other reasons, there are other reasons they're incentivized to exploit their workers' capitalism, but just specifically with regard to SNAP, they're incentivized to exploit their workers. And that's a policy failure.

Alyssa Burgart (09:50)
Absolutely, and it shows how these corporations are actually the ones who are freeloading off of this system because they don't want to pay their workers appropriate wages. And there's also all of this abuse around who gets to be a full-time worker who qualifies for benefits and who doesn't. And I remember when I worked at, ⁓ I worked at In-N-Out when I was in college and I worked as many hours as I could around my college schedule. And so I would work nights. I had two jobs while I was in college.

Arghavan Salles (10:06)
Mm-hmm.

Alyssa Burgart (10:19)
And when I remember when I got close to 38 hours a week, they were like, yeah, you can't, we can't schedule you for another shift. And I was like, no, no, it's cool. I'm, I'm free. I just needed like, you know, I'm trying to pay my bills. And that was absolutely not, not allowed. And that was a real, as a, as a young person trying to make ends meet while going to school, it really put in perspective for me how it was that these structural factors were really keeping people down.

Arghavan Salles (10:27)
Thank you for now.

Mm-hmm.

Alyssa Burgart (10:48)
And I remember that my roommate and I, used to buy ⁓ like a crate of oranges and we would get ⁓ like cup of noodle basically, because it was really inexpensive. then I would eat at work because it was a fast food restaurant. And that's how we survived. ⁓ But there's a lot of students, ⁓ medical students for example, who rely on SNAP benefits because

You you think about the astronomical amount of money that you have to take out to become a physician if you're, you you have so many loans. And those loans also don't cover your living expenses. So people are also taking out additional money in order to do that. And now because of limitations on how many federal loans folks can take out, students are gonna have even less money on hand to be able to pay their rent, eat anything. And these are some of the additional consequences

Arghavan Salles (11:28)
Thank

Yeah.

Alyssa Burgart (11:46)
And it feels like so much of this is grounded in one, ⁓ an underlying hatred and disrespect for people who are low income and an assumption that there is this flattened picture of who it is that needs assistance in this country as opposed to the reality, which is that it is a massive number of people because of these systemic inequities and because of these complicated factors that continue to benefit big companies.

Arghavan Salles (12:13)
Yeah, and I think part of it too is like this whole very long-standing idea of American individualism, right? Rugged individualism that

Alyssa Burgart (12:23)
People who are listening don't know, but I rolled my eyes so hard right now. I just want you to know that I cannot hear rugged individualism without my eyes practically rolling out of my head. It's actually a medical condition. I have to be very careful.

Arghavan Salles (12:34)
For a moment

I didn't even see anything other than the whites of your eyes. ⁓ The irises were gone. They were rolled so far back in your head. But yes, so this idea of rugged individuals are right that like we all have access to opportunity and success if we just try hard enough, is patently false to be clear. Yet there are a lot of people who have been convinced that that is how society functions. And that's part of that moral superiority.

that you were mentioning earlier, because if I believe that the system is fair, and if I believe, or not, if I believe that the system is fair and I find myself in a good position, then that must mean I'm better than somebody who finds themselves in a bad position. None of that is true, yet that's what a lot of people have been taught to believe, and that's why it's so easy, I think psychologically, to be like, well, it's not my problem that that person didn't do what they needed to do, I did it.

I did what I needed to do so. I can pay my bills and I don't need SNAP. The fact that they couldn't do it means it was a problem with them. They're not smart enough, they didn't work hard enough, they're not morally upright enough, whatever it is, right? And that is a fundamental flaw in the thinking, I would say, of a lot of people in this country, which perpetuates these policies that continue to create tremendous wealth inequality.

That makes it hard when we talk a lot about like the federal government, it makes it hard for people to be healthy if they don't have a place to live, if they don't have access to food.

Alyssa Burgart (14:08)
I mean, we haven't even talked about food deserts. I mean, that's a whole other thing where people don't even have access to food. anyway, and the other thing that I think is so interesting about, I mean, interesting, horrific, you know what I mean. ⁓ Money from SNAP actually goes really far. So like for every dollar that we spend, it actually generates one and a half to almost $2 of economic activity.

Arghavan Salles (14:29)
Mm-hmm.

Alyssa Burgart (14:36)
And part of why I started looking up some of this stuff is I was like, wait a minute, if we suddenly don't have 40 % of the population spending any money on groceries or drastically reducing their spending, like what are the consequences of that? Like what happens? And I immediately started to think about like, well, first of all, grocery stores are gonna start charging way more money.

for everything and you've already mentioned grocery prices have already gone up and we know they're not going to go down once this crisis is over. They will stay high. And so even if SNAP comes back, those dollars are not going to go as far in the grocery store. ⁓ And then the other group that I immediately thought of as well is all the people who transport food. So people who do truck driving when

Arghavan Salles (15:26)
Mm-hmm.

Alyssa Burgart (15:29)
When we drive up and down the five freeway, for example, we see lots and lots of ⁓ agricultural vehicles that are transporting food to be processed. All of that is potentially gonna slow down. ⁓ We're going into harvest season right now in huge parts of America. ⁓ People in our family who are farmers, I have no doubt this is gonna impact how much money they are able to get for their crops in this market. I think there's gonna be.

so many consequences for the US economy that are gonna be real painful on top of the fact of the most important factor, which is that people are going to starve.

Arghavan Salles (16:08)
Yes, and I mean, let's be honest, people, again, can't live without food. So people will find a way to get food. And so what's likely to happen is an increase in things that we have decided societally are crimes. And that means there will be more people being put away for trying to meet their own and their family members needs, biological, fundamental biological

needs, which I think you and I probably both agree that that's completely perverse and is not a functioning society. That's not what a functioning society looks like.

Alyssa Burgart (16:41)
It's going to be interesting to see like our grocery stores going to start doing what, you know, CVS and Walgreens have done with things like pregnancy tests where they lock them up. You know, they lock up almost everything because they, because the, don't want things to be stolen. And it's like, well, when things are that unaffordable, people have to figure out how to make it work.

Arghavan Salles (16:50)
Mm.

Yeah, and I've seen a number of people post things like, you know what, if somebody really needs deodorant that badly that they're going to steal it, like, let them, you know? I understand that's very anti-capitalist, but I do feel that, like, the things that are being locked up at these stores, it's like, nobody's stealing that for fun. Like, it's not making them, like, have a party. It's not helping them have a party or do something like that someone would consider as irresponsible use. It's like,

Alyssa Burgart (17:11)
I know, right?

Arghavan Salles (17:29)
fundamental things that people need for hygiene and you need by the way to have good hygiene to get a job. So if there's this whole argument of like, why aren't these people working? I mean, we could also talk about unemployment. We have like pretty high rates of unemployment at this moment. We've had a lot of people in particular women and in particular black women leaving the labor force in the last 10 months or so. And all these companies are doing massive layoffs. I

somewhere again.

Alyssa Burgart (17:57)
Nothing like a

layoff right before the holidays, you know?

Arghavan Salles (18:00)
Right, Amazon 14,000 layoffs, UPS 48,000 layoffs, Intel 20,000 layoffs. Meanwhile, the CEOs of all these companies are making tens of millions of dollars, but rather than them taking a cut on their salary, they're laying off all these employees, which also connects with, this is a topic for another day, but the AI bubble, because a lot of what these companies are doing is they're saying, well, we're not going to need these employees because...

Alyssa Burgart (18:03)
Mm-hmm.

Arghavan Salles (18:27)
we're going to be using AI more, nevermind that AI is non-functional, but practically non-functional, I should say. And a lot of people suspect that part of these layoffs are to create a, or to free up capital so they can invest in more data centers so they can have more AI rather than, we don't need these employees because their actual labor is going to be done by AI. It's more that they're in this, we're kind of in this AI arms race, if you will, with each company trying to outpace

the other so that they can be the leader in AI. fact, somebody had said, I didn't fact check this, so take it with a grain of salt, but that ⁓ meta stock had gone down because they weren't performing as well when it came to AI. ⁓ These companies are all, there's a great graphic. I put it in one of my Instagram carousels, I think earlier this week. There's this great diagram of the arrows going from Nvidia to Google to Amazon, to Meta, and they're all.

just sending money to each other and that is the majority of our economy right now, is these tech companies sending each other billions of dollars to support or prop up an industry that many of us think is doomed to fail ultimately. But anyway, that was just an aside. So back to the main story of the day.

Alyssa Burgart (19:46)
Well,

before we go back to that, only because you brought up, because I was absolutely also thinking about the AI bubble as we were talking about this and the way that like, well, first of all, like, is this world for humans? mean, because I'm confused about the way we're prioritizing who benefits. ⁓ But also when you talk about meta, it just reminded me of ⁓ Billie Eilish when she was receiving an award, I think it's through Wall Street Journal and ⁓

I hear Mark Zuckerberg didn't love her comment about how billionaires maybe should do some things with that money to benefit society.

Arghavan Salles (20:19)
Yeah, I loved her

comment. she, this was at the Wall Street Journal Magazine Innovator Awards and she won an award. I actually don't know what the award was that she won, but this was part of her acceptance speech where she said, and this comes right after she had announced that she's donating 11.5 million to charities supporting climate justice and food equity and other things.

that are important to her. And right after that announcement, she has this opportunity at this awards reception or whatever. And she says, there are a lot of people, something like, I'm paraphrasing, something like, there are a lot of people in this room who have more money than I do. And for the billionaires, why are you a billionaire? You should be giving away that money, shorties, essentially is what she says.

And yeah, apparently, reportedly, Zuckerberg was there and did not clap and maybe had some kind of feelings about her comment. I mean, he is one of the wealthiest people on the planet. ⁓ So as you said earlier, that's quite fragile. It's fragile state to be in if you're going to be have your feelings hurt by a singer who is 23 years old. By the way, the other thing I was thinking about with her comments is you might think people need to save money.

Okay, first of all, nobody needs a billion dollars. cannot spend a billion dollars in your life. But even if you thought like people should save money because they might have needs.

Alyssa Burgart (21:45)
But I'm open to them

trying. I'm open to them trying to spend the money on good things. I'm open to it. Try.

Arghavan Salles (21:50)
Right,

like Mackenzie Scott. We'll come back to her in a second. But what I was thinking about was she's 23. If anyone has an incentive to hold on to money, it's someone very young, right? Because she's got a lot of life to live. She is only 23. Incredibly talented, yes. And so if anyone has incentive to hold on to cash, it's someone at that age. But we've got on the other end of the spectrum, people like our president, who are essentially one foot in the grave.

Alyssa Burgart (22:01)
Is she really only 23?

BALLER

Arghavan Salles (22:19)
and still trying to not only hoard but amass more wealth that you cannot take to the grave with you. I don't know if they understand that. Like I find it very perplexing because what are you doing at that point in time? And more on the Billie Eilish spectrum is Mackenzie Scott, who I mentioned. So this is, you know, Jeff Bezos' ex-wife and she has been on a mission to give away money. That's what she has proclaimed publicly and continues to do.

in a kind of very interesting fashion. There's no application, there's no grant, there's no website. She just hears about things and does what she wants. So in the last few weeks at least, I've seen her make grants to, or give funds to, it might be five, I don't wanna say exactly, but multiple HBCUs. Each of them, for each school, it's been somewhere in the 40 to $60 billion range.

a million, sorry, million dollars, 40 to 60 million dollars per HBCU. And she's been doing this for multiple HBCUs over the last few weeks. And that is exactly what people should be doing with their wealth. Mark, if you're listening, give your money away. What are you doing? You can't take it with you. Make this world a better place. How is it that people can have the massive amount of wealth that he has that he's building bunkers in like Hawaii or whatever he's doing?

Alyssa Burgart (23:15)
And for...

Arghavan Salles (23:41)
And we have people in this country living on the street with the administration or federal administration making plans to put them in detention camps for the crime of being homeless. We have people who are about to go hungry. We have people who have so much medical debt that it is making them bankrupt. In the meanwhile, we have these small, relatively small number of people with a billion dollars or more that again, literally cannot be spent in their lifetimes. And they are in some years paying literally $0 in federal income taxes.

zero dollars because they are playing the game the way that I can't really fault them for this. They are playing the game the way the game was written. The rules were written to allow them to claim almost no income, to put all of their money into assets so that they have no income to claim, and then to take out loans for their expenditures that they can take out on because they have so many assets and because how they're living their life, the money they use at the grocery store or for their yacht or whatever to, you know, stock their yacht, all that money.

is coming from a loan and you don't get taxed on a loan. So one year, Jeff, let me just like blew my mind. Jeff Bezos got a $4,000 child tax credit. One of the richest men in the world got $4,000 off on his taxes because he claimed so.

Alyssa Burgart (24:52)
Come on.

With a straight face?

Arghavan Salles (25:01)
Yeah, mean, like, they're, again, I can't really fault them for taking advantage of tax laws as they are written. I can fault our government for allowing this to happen and for creating these loopholes and refusing to do anything to stop them or close the loopholes. But in the meantime, you know, there was this great article I really recommend folks read from 2021 in ProPublica that was an investigation of the 25 wealthiest people in this country and their taxes. It is unclear from the article how they got.

this detailed tax information for these people, but they did. And what you see is that like of Warren Buffett, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and I think it was Soros maybe, I have the graphic, I'll pull it up. The highest tax rate that any of these people paid from 2014 to 2018 based on the increase in their wealth was like 3%.

Alyssa Burgart (25:55)
So horrid, my god.

Arghavan Salles (25:57)
And imagine how much money that would bring in to the US government if they actually were forced to pay what would really be their fair share of taxes and where that money could go, how many people that money could help, which is why I get confused when people say things like, well, a billionaire doesn't have anything to do with me. It's like, no, man, like, Yes, yes.

Alyssa Burgart (26:18)
Billionaire has everything to do with you and your pocketbook.

Arghavan Salles (26:23)
and sorry, I want to correct myself. It wasn't Soros on that graphic. was thinking it was Michael Bloomberg. I apologies to Mr. Soros, but he is mentioned elsewhere in the article. Yeah, he, no, he's definitely in that article and there were multiple years where he paid zero taxes apparently. ⁓

Alyssa Burgart (26:31)
I mean he's rich too. I'm sure he's on here somewhere.

Well, folks, we

will put the link to the ProPublica story in the show notes. It's called the secret IRS files.

Arghavan Salles (26:42)
Yes, and

the last thing I wanna just say on that specific article is one of the things that I thought was really helpful to see is they look at increase in wealth and the amount of tax people pay. And they looked at kind of regular households like your household, my household, and they found that in general, the more wealth we had in our household, the more taxes we pay, kind of a linear increase for both of those. And then they contrast that with one example was Jeff Bezos where his wealth,

over time was increasing nearly exponentially, but the amount of taxes he paid stayed pretty stable. And that should ring alarm bells for people. Like, what are we doing? And we live in a society as much as people want to say individual responsibility, blah. We do live in a society. It is the function of a society to care for the people in that society. It's not me, myself, and I.

Alyssa Burgart (27:39)
It's also though, yes and there's such an underappreciation for the degree to which the cards are stacked against some people much more so than others.

Arghavan Salles (27:51)
Yes.

Alyssa Burgart (27:52)
This

is not an equal opportunity situation.

Arghavan Salles (27:56)
I mean, obviously, I mean, that's part of, you if you want to think about other things that people have brought up over the years, like reparations, that's part of the whole, maybe not the whole, that's one of the main ideas behind reparations is people, black people in this country built this country and got really nothing for it. And in fact got tortured and separated from their families and, you know, all the horrors that we know about slavery and that period of time in this country.

There's never been an effort to, a formal financial effort to repair the harms that were done by the government and by the majority population in this country. And then people will sit there and say, you've got to, as you said earlier, pull yourself up by your bootstraps. But when you don't have boots, how are you supposed to do that? When people have made sure, in fact, that there is no way you could ever get boots. How are you supposed to do that?

And so I agree with you that that goes back to the meritocracy myth that like all it takes us to succeed in America, right? The land of opportunity is if you just work hard, if you're smart and you work hard, everything will be fine. Isn't that right, Alyssa?

Alyssa Burgart (29:11)
tell you, know, because we are obsessed with a hero's journey. We love a hero's journey, especially in America, where we love a hero. love an anecdote where like the little guy worked it out. ⁓ and yet, we really love to suppress or ignore the many, many cases where that is not possible, where people

Arghavan Salles (29:30)
Thank

Alyssa Burgart (29:36)
I mean, how much luck does it take to be able to make it in America? Like, absolutely, if you work hard, there's folks who can make certain inroads, but it really depends on what you have access to. And it is that is just not the same for everybody.

Arghavan Salles (29:48)
Well, and we know that the people who have the best chance of making money, becoming wealthy, are those who started wealthy. I mean, Elon Musk is a great example of that. Donald Trump is a great example of that. It's very hard. You kind of have to have money to get money, to be honest, in this country, to have like extreme wealth. Can you have a modicum of success by like going to school and getting a graduate degree?

Alyssa Burgart (29:55)
people who already have money.

Arghavan Salles (30:15)
For some people, yes. For some people, even that, there's too many obstacles on that path. And those obstacles really, in large part, have been put in place intentionally. They're not accidental. Like, go ahead.

Alyssa Burgart (30:25)
Absolutely. Well,

well, and when we look at, mean, just bringing it back, for example, to like folks who are in medical school right now, we know that the number of medical students who are able to matriculate who are low income, like it is really impacted. I mean, it is so expensive to become like becoming a physician is a way to bring yourself out of poverty if you can manage to make it through all of these hoops. And some medical schools are becoming tuition free, but a lot of them aren't.

Arghavan Salles (30:42)
Nope.

Alyssa Burgart (30:54)
And what we're going to know is that we are increasingly only going to have, or the majority of the people that we have who are able to make it into places like medical school are folks who already have enough financial capital, resources through their families, resources through other means that they can actually get through all of these hoops to even make it to the application process.

Arghavan Salles (31:15)
Absolutely, and I would be curious to look at the income of the students who are getting into the schools that have the free tuition because. Exactly exactly.

Alyssa Burgart (31:24)
It's not the poor kids, I'm gonna tell you that much, from what we know, right? It's just making it it's this arms race

to be already rich and get a free education.

Arghavan Salles (31:34)
Exactly. And I will just say that when I was applying to medical school, so I was like you, I worked through college, I had three jobs basically the entire time that I was in college, even though I had a full tuition scholarship, you would think that's good. But turns out, and it was helpful, thank you to my university, but they didn't cover textbooks, they didn't cover laboratory fees. And as an engineering major, I mean, every term I had multiple lab courses, those fees were hundreds of dollars. They didn't cover housing.

And so I still had, despite working three jobs and a full tuition scholarship, I still had a little bit of debt when I came out of college, although, you know, definitely people had more. And so I came away, I think, in an OK position for the resources that I had going in. And then I went to medical school. when I was applying to medical school, as you can imagine, I'm working these three jobs in college. I didn't have the money that it takes to go through that process.

And my mom made, I think, just enough money that I didn't qualify for the low income support, but my mom also didn't support me financially at all. When I went to college, she said, good luck to you. And so I didn't have any of the formal supports that exist, which I'm sure are not sufficient anyway. But what ended up happening was I was lucky at the time that I was in a long-term relationship with someone whose father flew a lot for business.

And so he generously, like extremely generously bought all of my plane tickets to fly to interviews with his miles because he just had so many miles because he flew all over. Yeah, if it had not been for that, I honestly don't know if I would have been able to get in because I wouldn't have been able to apply to that many places. I suppose I still would have applied to the place that I ended up going to because it was with driving distance. And so I was able to drive because I was in L.A. at the time and I went to medical school in the Bay Area. So.

Alyssa Burgart (33:04)
wow.

Wow.

Arghavan Salles (33:27)
Maybe I would have made it still, I don't know, but I certainly wouldn't have felt good about the process and wouldn't have been able to apply to a lot of places if I hadn't had that. And I was just lucky that I was just just lucky to have been in a relationship with someone whose father happened to have these miles and was willing to use them to help me. And like you said, that's luck. Like not everybody has access to the resources it takes to do this. And as you mentioned earlier, with the...

cap that they're putting on educational debt that people can take on. For many, many people, that will take medical school and graduate school off the table, because how can they possibly pay for it with only, I forget what the limit is, but it's a very limited amount of money. And most people are graduating with like $250,000, $300,000 of debt from medical school these days.

Alyssa Burgart (33:58)
Mm-hmm.

That's what I had when I finished. Yeah, it's like a little over $300,000 worth of debt. Yeah, it's wild. remember I went into, I was very lucky that I qualified for a, because I had a job, I made more than minimum wage, I qualified for a credit card. And I went deeply into credit card debt to buy all these plane tickets to pay the application fees, I had to buy a suit that fit, you know, like

shoes that were appropriate. I lived in the Bay Area at the time and then you'd have to go to like, I don't know, someplace where it snows in February and you were like, I guess I need to buy a jacket now. I don't know what I'm doing. Yeah. And so these are all real struggles for folks who are trying to be able to do that. And we know with...

Arghavan Salles (34:53)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. ⁓

Yeah.

Alyssa Burgart (35:09)
Again, the number of students who rely on SNAP benefits for exactly those sort of binds that folks are in. They can't possibly, if you're in school, you can't possibly work as many jobs as you might need to and then also be successful. I mean, it was really hard to like take a full load and work multiple jobs and ⁓ it was a very tenuous way to come up. And I remember I specifically got a job at In-N-Out because they paid more than minimum wage.

Arghavan Salles (35:26)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Alyssa Burgart (35:39)
Like I went around looking, I was like, where can I get a job where it is more than minimum wage? simply because I knew that I was going to need every dollar I could get. ⁓ and families today are just profoundly struggling with that. We have so many families where, you know, if you're a single parent and you have a child and you have little kids, like, guess what? You have to be able to afford to send them to preschool or daycare. ⁓ we do not have universal access to those things in this country.

And if you are able to send your child to some program, it is very rarely the length of a full-time person's job. And so maybe you can only work a handful of hours a day while your children have childcare. And it's just such a bind for families to be in. And especially as well when you have a single parent household, like it is totally unreasonable.

Arghavan Salles (36:22)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Alyssa Burgart (36:34)
And this narrative that like, if you just worked harder, it would be fine. Can't you cobble together the bare minimum? And it's like, actually, no. It's really difficult. difficult is not even the right word for that. And I think a lot about our families that ⁓ their kids are in the hospital. And we take care of a lot of folks, right? Where it's like, they're farm workers. They have minimum wage jobs. They have managed to cobble together the bus schedule to be able to get themselves and their child to the hospital.

Arghavan Salles (36:45)
Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Alyssa Burgart (37:04)
and somebody's gotta stay in the hospital with the kid and make sure the kid's getting their decisions made and getting their support that they need. And you can see the kind of strain that it has on families. the child is gonna get food in the hospital. The parents aren't necessarily getting food, right? So you have parents who are trying to make things work out. Hospitals depend on charitable giving in order to support food for families that are in the hospital.

Arghavan Salles (37:21)
I don't.

Mm-hmm.

Alyssa Burgart (37:34)
You know, so there's just, there's so many consequences to this that are just outrageous with the idea. And especially when you put it in the context of the astronomical split between who is in that top, top, top, top, tippity top percent and how far away everybody else is.

Arghavan Salles (37:58)
yeah, worlds away. Like I could never, unless I, don't know, maybe if somebody out there wants to discover me.

Alyssa Burgart (38:04)
Also, I don't want to.

Arghavan Salles (38:08)
I would love to be discovered and then have the money to fix some of these things. I would love that. Somebody, had posted a video about this wealth inequality and the way that billionaires, some of the ways that billionaires amass their wealth. And somebody said, look, if you care so much, why don't you sell your house and your car and give it all away? I was like, what are we talking about? Apples and oranges, what are we talking about? A billionaire.

could easily afford to do something to help hungry people. And I don't think asking someone to become homeless in order to support people is the same ask, you know? Like, I don't think those things are quite the same. ⁓ But I also want to add just...

Alyssa Burgart (38:54)
Why

are people so eager to defend the ultra rich? I really don't get it. I really don't.

Arghavan Salles (39:04)
I I think it has to be, like we were talking about earlier, I think it has to be that they in some ways identify with that person, that person who has that wealth. It's like an aspirational, I mean, don't know, obviously I have not asked these people ⁓ on the internet why they feel this way. It's hard to have that kind of conversation in the comment section, but I do think that it's in some ways ⁓ an identification with the wealth.

Like that could be me someday. And the policies that are allowing those people to amass wealth might allow me to amass wealth, even though the chance that that happens is like basically zero. I mean, unless there's something about, you know, John Smith 3254 that I don't know. And I think, I mean, I think that has to be it because otherwise I don't understand it. They don't obviously have a personal relationship with these billionaires. Yeah, I don't know. I mean, I'll just add.

along those lines that I had this post about the White House demolition a couple weeks ago that's like kind of low grade viral. And once things go viral, the people who have the complete opposite opinion as you tend to see it. And so I have all these people being like, duh, why do you care about, it's just a stupid building. like even people defending the president in general, like, he's made the economy so much better and crime is down.

you know, all these like fictional things that he's supposedly done. And I find myself wondering that same thing, like, why are they so insistent on defending this person who is causing so much harm and not just to liberals or Democrats or immigrants, but like widespread destruction of our society and how things function. And it reminds me of, there was an article a few months back.

And it was a woman who had spent some time on conservative dating apps. And she herself, I believe, is liberal. And she spent some time on conservative dating apps to try to learn about, you know, was there a way to cross this divide? And one of the men that she describes going on a date with was talking about people who were harming him and insulting him. And she was like, why would they be doing that to you? And he goes, not me, to Donald Trump. Like there was a conflation of

who he is and the insults that people make to Trump feeling personal to him. So I think there's maybe some element of that here somehow ⁓ when it comes to the billionaires, but I don't pretend to fully understand it either, to be honest.

Alyssa Burgart (41:42)
Well,

I mean, I think there's also, mean, I obviously this doesn't go for everybody and I'm just talking off the cuff here, but like I'm remembering when Facebook first started and like, you know, Mark Zuckerberg was like friends with everybody, which is kind of hilarious. and same with my space. can't remember. What was the guy's name for my space? I can't remember. Tom.

Arghavan Salles (41:56)
Mmm.

don't know his name, but somebody just brought him up because they were like, he made hundreds of millions of dollars and then

he just like went on vacation. He's like on permavacation. You know, he didn't feel the need to keep, yeah, he didn't feel the need to keep amassing wealth. He was just like, yeah, okay, that's good. I'm good for life, ⁓ which he probably is.

Alyssa Burgart (42:11)
Yeah. Yeah, Tom, Tom from MySpace.

So, but I think there's also these like parasocial relationships with some of these folks. ⁓ We're to your point, right? And obviously liberals are absolutely guilty of this. Like the number of people who like refuse to believe the kind of harm that like Bill Clinton has done, you know, specifically when we talk about things like the comments about welfare queens, the comments about policy choices that were very harmful. But people are very, and all of us, I think are guilty of this to a degree where we're like, well,

Arghavan Salles (42:43)
Yeah.

Alyssa Burgart (42:53)
We'll give a pass to somebody that we identify with or that we like. you know, certainly this is not limited to Trump. I just kind of don't understand why folks have this parasocial relationship with like Jeff Bezos. Like, why? I don't get it. I don't know.

Arghavan Salles (43:06)
Right. No, I mean, I really do think it's like

the somewhere inside they think that could be them someday and they don't want to be harmed by whatever might harm Bezos or Musk or whatever. mean, there's also that related problem. I want to get back to snap today. I have so many thoughts. There's also the related problem of conflating wealth with intelligence that we definitely we definitely have that problem in this country where people assume that if you have money, you must be brilliant.

And despite all evidence to the contrary, by the way, just to be clear, there's a lot of evidence that some of these people were talking about, you know, I think you and I could both be in some sort of test of intelligence ⁓ or competition of intelligence. ⁓ But I do think that's part of it, too. There's like this assumption that like, ⁓ Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk or Donald Trump must be so brilliant.

That's how they got their money. Nevermind that Trump had how many six, I think, casinos that he bankrupted. That's not ⁓ intelligence. I think he's very skilled in some very specific things that have led him to be quite successful by some definitions. But I do not think that he's a particularly, my mom and I argued about this actually. I don't think he's particularly intelligent. I'll just say it. I do not think Donald Trump is particularly intelligent.

Alyssa Burgart (44:23)
I think he's good

at avoiding paying bills. He's good at avoiding paying bills.

Arghavan Salles (44:26)
He's good at avoiding paying bills.

He's very good at grifting, like in general of like, I'm gonna have this cryptocurrency that's, he's made a lot of money off his cryptocurrency. That's a scam. I mean, it's all cryptocurrencies as far as I'm concerned is basically a scam, but he's just made a ton of money off of that. So again, that's a specific skill and I'm not denying. He definitely has that skill, ⁓ but that to me does not equate to intelligence. I mean, the guy took this,

cognitive test, ⁓ it seems like as far as we can tell dementia ⁓ assessment and said that it was a really hard test. You know, so anyway, putting him aside, I want to say a couple of things about SNAP. So one is that food banks, if people are looking for something to do, volunteering at food banks, giving money to food banks is really, really helpful at this time. The food banks do not have enough to support all the people who are going to need them if

Alyssa Burgart (45:01)
Very difficult.

Arghavan Salles (45:23)
the government decides to not comply with the judge's orders in this case and to let, as you said, snap laps. The food banks exist, they want to help, but they do not have enough resources. So you can find your local food banks just by doing a little search and money often is more helpful to them than specific food because they know best what food they need and that will be most helpful to the people they're serving. The other thing I want to say, go ahead.

Alyssa Burgart (45:49)
And food

banks are able to buy in bulk and so they can actually get a much better deal on larger amounts of food. so giving money is much better overall if you have the ability to do that. If you only have the ability to clean out your pantry, I don't think anyone's going to turn you down.

Arghavan Salles (45:54)
Yes. Yes.

Absolutely, yeah, whatever people can do will be welcome. And I think I wanna talk for a moment about a different aspect of the judgment that I've been seeing around poverty and food choices. So there've been a number of people who've posted things like, what do you mean this person's buying cookies with their SNAP benefits? What do you mean this person's buying like a steak? Or even they're not even saying what...

necessarily what a person is buying, but they're looking at the label at the grocery store that says that you can use EBT for this thing. And they're saying you shouldn't be able to use EBT for this purchase. And I think it's, I mean, bizarre, first of all, to think that you should dictate what anyone else should eat or how they should distribute their very limited resources. But one of these pictures that was on Twitter actually was a bin of cookies.

And this person was like so angry that someone could use their snap benefits for cookies. And people were like, what kind of monster thinks that like children shouldn't be able to have cookies? Or that anyone, like why does being poor equate to needing to never have anything even like good tasting? know, like it's really weird. And I wish people would stop doing that.

Alyssa Burgart (47:21)
Listen.

Listen, there's some we can we can unpack so much more about this in another episode. But like the whole thing reeks of healthism, which is this idea that like it is your health is your personal responsibility. It maps beautifully onto American idealism, that if you are unhealthy, it is your personal moral failing. And therefore, if you are ill, it is your personal moral failing. There's also tons of things that map very, very closely on to

Arghavan Salles (47:39)
Mm-hmm.

Alyssa Burgart (47:53)
⁓ certain like, types of Christian beliefs and Catholic beliefs around what the meaning of suffering is, that you should suffer if you are to be a good person, and that it is your responsibility to suffer. I have so much more that we can talk about ⁓ another time. The main thing that I just would love to say to these people is mind your own goddamn business. Mind your own goddamn business. Shut up.

Arghavan Salles (48:00)
Mm.

Absolutely.

Alyssa Burgart (48:21)
Like it is none of your business what people are spending it on.

Arghavan Salles (48:21)
And are they ready? But also are they ready for someone to come and do an audit of their food choices? Of what they're spending their money on and whether it's all fully responsible, whatever that would mean? Yeah, exactly. I don't think so. Okay, the other thing I wanna say before we leave this topic is we've talked before and we'll talk again about what it means to be pro-life.

Alyssa Burgart (48:29)
spot.

Arghavan Salles (48:45)
And someone had this tweet that was like the, no, you can't have abortion to also know you can't feed your kids pipeline. It's often the same people who are against abortion. So who want people to be forced to bring children into this world against their will, who also refuse to support any programs or policies that would help them feed those children. And it is so disturbing to me and I don't

I truly don't know how they, some of these folks reconcile that for themselves. Aside from back to individualism that like, it's not their fault that the kid can't eat. It's that the parent who brought the kid into the world didn't plan properly, you know, whatever nonsense. But to me, if you think a life has value, then once a person is here, we should be trying to support that life to make sure they have food and housing and dignity, not.

shaming them for doing the best they can with the resources that are available to them.

Alyssa Burgart (49:47)
It is the perfect this whole all this dialogue around snap is such a perfect example of the way that children in this country are used as props for political fodder. ⁓ You know, kids don't vote. Kids don't have jobs. And so their primary goal, primary purpose in a lot of these political arguments is to be used as props. And if people genuinely cared about children and genuinely cared about the investment in our future, I mean, not having food insecurity is

is an adverse childhood event. It will damage children for a long time to not have access to food, to not be certain if they're going to be able to eat, to watch their parents be super stressed out about whether or not their parents are gonna be able to eat. Like kids are gonna notice this, kids are really smart. Kids are gonna see how much their family is suffering. And it is, I am,

Arghavan Salles (50:20)
Yes.

Alyssa Burgart (50:46)
I understand some of the arguments that are being made amongst the Democratic Party about why it is that they are using this, they're not wanting to pass the budget in this ⁓ way. And I understand that they're trying to tie that to many other issues that are also going to profoundly harm Americans related to healthcare access, related to control over the Environmental Protection Agency. And the reality is the

both of these groups, they have to reach some sort of a consensus. it's interesting too, and we didn't talk about this earlier, but the way that, there used to be a document on the USDA website just back in September, I think September 25th, that was basically saying like, have emergency funds, we would not allow SNAP benefits to expire. And yet what do know, it just disappeared, which is how we got to the...

lawsuit that we talked about earlier in this conversation about the judge being like, yeah, that doesn't really make sense. And the idea that this is not an emergency is unreasonable.

Arghavan Salles (51:42)
Yeah.

Yeah, well they have and-

No, they have some money, I should say. They don't have enough money to fund SNAP at the full amount for another month, but they do have almost $6 billion that was set aside for this purpose. And that's why even in past government shutdowns, SNAP has never lapsed. I want to share one thing that the Pope said earlier this week. I'm not Catholic, just to be clear, and I'm not endorsing any particular...

person, but I think this is relevant to this conversation. He said, one cannot love God without extending one's love to the poor. Love for our neighbor is tangible proof of the authenticity of our love for God. The Lord himself teaches us, truly, I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these, my brethren, you did it to me. And I'm saying that mainly because again, the people who are so opposed to feeding people in this country are often Christian and will often have

Bible verses or Jesus in their profiles on these social media sites. And so if they're not going to listen to us, maybe they'll listen to the Pope.

Alyssa Burgart (53:00)
Yeah, and I also just also want to say like, there are, you know, people who are online tend to be loud, like it's not a representative sample of the whole world. But like, you know, I, the people that we see the most who are just loud and proud out there on the socials, my goodness, so much Jesus slinging in a such a very bizarre way, I just don't get it. ⁓ But again, like these

these don't have to be partisan issues. Like we could all just choose as a society to decide that we wanted to do that. I mean, the other thing that's so wild is the number of people who voted for Trump, who are in deeply red parts of this country, who are going to suffer immensely from lack of access to food and already have immense amounts of food insecurity. And this situation is going to compound it. And so you're also seeing, I'm seeing in

the news and in the punditry really this effort for each group to blame the other group in an effort to convince them that actually you should vote for me next time and All I want to see is people have people get fed people have access to health care like this should not be so hard we are fighting over the wrong things and

Arghavan Salles (54:10)
Mm hmm.

Alyssa Burgart (54:23)
We could change this with some tax things, think, pretty... We also don't need to spend so much money on a national police force through ICE. I mean, we could change the way we're spending our money. We could do it. We could. We could do it.

Arghavan Salles (54:32)
We absolutely could do it and we

should do it. And I agree. it's actually, if you take a step back from, ⁓ we're all very mired in our local politics here, but if we take a step back, the position that people should have food, I don't think is radical. The position that people should have housing, I don't think is radical. It does seem, I think, from where I sit, like a thing that we should all agree on, that people should have access to healthcare, seems like a thing that we should all be able to agree on yet.

One party in this country has for many years decided they don't agree with any of that. Okay, I do want to add one more quote since you brought up this last point. This is from Lyndon Johnson. He says, if you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on and he'll empty his pockets for you. And I know a lot of people have been sharing that quote, but I think there's a good reason for it and it's.

Boggling to me in the same way that I think it's boggling to you that people would rather suffer knowing that other people who they dislike will also suffer Than to imagine a world in which none of us have to suffer Anyway, shall we talk about joy?

Alyssa Burgart (55:48)
I mean, we have to now. mean, we have to, we have to. Take us out. what's, ⁓ what is bringing me joy? Okay. You've already seen it cause I forwarded it to you cause I was laughing so, so hard, but I am really looking forward to sharing with our listeners a video that I saw. It's from a MD PhD student who was laughing where she was like, man, all these people saying like, scientists are hiding.

Arghavan Salles (55:53)
What's bringing you joy?

Mm-hmm.

Alyssa Burgart (56:18)
the information from you, are hiding. And then she's like, have you met these nerds? Like, scientists are just desperate. can't know, Leah, have you met these lizards? They cannot wait to tell you all about their research. They have been desperately waiting for someone to give a shit about their research. ⁓ So I'm paraphrasing, obviously, but I will drop that in the show notes because I'll tell you, it gave me a good laugh knowing the number of scientists that I know who are like,

Arghavan Salles (56:19)
No, she called us losers.

Alyssa Burgart (56:47)
my gosh, let me tell you about protein folding. And I'm like, wow, I did not know that one could know so much about something so small. Give me the elevator pitch, man. Give it to me.

Arghavan Salles (56:49)
Yeah.

Ha

No,

she was spot on. No, I appreciated that video. ⁓ What I was thinking about is, do you know this creator named Isabel Klee, I think is her last name? She.

Alyssa Burgart (57:10)
I

don't, you put that in here, I don't know anything about this person.

Arghavan Salles (57:13)
Yeah,

she's, I mean, she has other things, I'm sure, but what I know her from is from her fostering of dogs. And I think that's what a lot of people know her from. And she fosters these dogs and shares kind of their journeys. And like one dog that became really famous, well, I know people knew her before then, but she came into my orbit because of a dog named Tiki. Anyway, now the dog that she is fostering is named Whimsy. And Whimsy was

severely underweight when Isabelle got her, I think, just last week. And Whimsy's like the cutest, the cutest dog and so like cuddly and just wants to like be in Isabelle's lap and ⁓ seems like a really sweet dog, has some behavioral issues with other dogs, but just is a really sweet dog. I love, Isabelle does such a great job of creating videos of the, just the daily life of living with these dogs and how they

really can change so much just from having a nice house. Did you look it up? Did you see whimsy?

Alyssa Burgart (58:20)
⁓ yeah, I just looked up whimsy, an emaciated pit bull mix found as a stray covered in, I'm not even gonna, ⁓

Arghavan Salles (58:26)
It's so cute, it's so cute.

I

Alyssa Burgart (58:32)
Okay, so I'm in. I'm in. Tell me about the doggy.

Arghavan Salles (58:35)
So nothing that I mean that's all we know so far a doggie is very very cute and very needy and um it had like an incident last or over the weekend I think um out in the world with another dog so they're working on some training um but you know with the dogs that she fosters like you just get to see the dogs grow from having a safe place to be and from having food and from having caring people around them and they just go on this

they're all unique right but they just go on this amazing journey and then she sends them off to their permanent home and and it was just such a beautiful thing that she does i don't know if joy is the right word because it also makes me cry but like it's it's a beautiful thing to see and ⁓ she she has touched a lot of people's lives with the work that she does.

Alyssa Burgart (59:27)
love that. love a, know, listen, anybody who's into rescuing animals, like they got points in my book.

Arghavan Salles (59:34)
Absolutely. It's hard. she, you every time, at least the ones that I've seen, people try to convince her to keep the dog. Like, because she's so great with these dogs. And you see how much they love her. And people are always like, you should keep this one. And she's always like, that's not the point. Have to have to, you know, pass this one along so that I can help another dog. And but I think one of them, if I remember correctly, one of the dogs she fostered, her parents adopted.

Alyssa Burgart (59:44)
Go.

Arghavan Salles (1:00:03)
So she still gets to see that one, which is nice. ⁓ then Tiki, Tiki's adoptive parents, Tiki had a strong, strong following. So Tiki's adoptive parents who had not been on social media have like made accounts for Tiki and have continued to keep us updated on Tiki's progress. And so, you know, these dogs live on in Isabel's life and in our lives in different ways. ⁓ anyway, it's really nice.

Alyssa Burgart (1:00:34)
is lovely and you know you can cry tears of joy you can be you can cry tears from being touched from the goodness of another human being I'll allow it.

Arghavan Salles (1:00:43)
Thank you. I appreciate it.

All right. Well, that's it for this week's episode. ⁓ If you didn't like what you heard, this has been Smartless. If you liked it, don't forget to subscribe to the presence of this and leave us a review and tell your friends or the doctors in your life or whoever else you think might enjoy our conversation.

Alyssa Burgart (1:00:46)
All right.

You can follow us on all the places we are on TikTok and Instagram at The Present Illness, and you can stay on top of all of our TPI related news.

Arghavan Salles (1:01:13)
We'll be back next week with more headlines, hot takes, and doom scrolling, hopefully with some laughs.

Alyssa Burgart (1:01:19)
Until then, agitate, hydrate, take a nap, and we will see you next time on The Present Illness. Now, as a disclaimer, do not take advice from random people on the internet. So this show is for informational purposes only. It is meant to be fun. It is certainly not medical advice. Please take your medical questions to a qualified professional. You deserve

Arghavan Salles (1:01:29)
Thank