Here are things that bite: Not Jen Kirkman, anxiety, Reality, mental health employment, college football, weird birds
Not all at the same time. Unless you consider this newsletter to be the same time.
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You can’t go wrong with Jen Kirkman
If you manage to book Jen Kirkman on your show, AS WE DID ON THE MOST RECENT EPISODE OF DEPRESH MODE, you’re going to have a great time. She’s prepared, she’s funny as hell, she’s human, she’s relatable, she’s everything you want in a guest.
In part, that’s because she’s anecdote-driven. She has stories ready to go for all sorts of responses and, because she has spent a career telling stories of her life in standup and books, she knows how to deliver those stories. So that’s part of it, she’s got those stories. And the stories pertain to the question being asked. It’s not like a late night host kind of thing where the host says scripted set ups like “So I hear you’ve been in a lot of airplanes lately” so the comic can use their airline material.
As I say in the episode, Jen is one of my favorite people to talk to on the subject of anxiety. She’s given it a lot of thought and put in a lot of work to manage her anxiety. It’s not a matter of getting rid of it, it’s about managing it. Knowing it’s there but not giving it any more power than it deserves.
Jen has a new podcast called Anxiety Bites where she talks to a variety of experts and thinkers on the subject of anxiety and, more broadly, how to live life. I was on the show too!
You can tell that Jen and I are from the same generation because we both named our podcasts after cultural institutions of our youth.
I want anyone’s hair from either of those photos.
Crisis Text Line crisis?
Big story in Politico about how Crisis Text Line has been making some money by anonymizing the text messages received from people in crisis and then selling the data.
Crisis Text Line says any data it shares with that company, Loris.ai, has been wholly “anonymized,” stripped of any details that could be used to identify people who contacted the helpline in distress. Both entities say their goal is to improve the world — in Loris’ case, by making “customer support more human, empathetic, and scalable.”
In turn, Loris has pledged to share some of its revenue with Crisis Text Line. The nonprofit also holds an ownership stake in the company, and the two entities shared the same CEO for at least a year and a half. The two call their relationship a model for how commercial enterprises can help charitable endeavors thrive.
It’s freaking people out because hey, those are personal messages from my, you know, CRISIS.
Here are my thoughts:
I mention CTL in the credits of my show every week because it has helped people and some of those people asked me to put it in the credits.
The Politico story refers to CTL as a “suicide hotline” but it’s meant for a variety of crises.
What they’re doing is not unprecedented. We talked about Talkspace doing the same thing last spring.
Gmail does the same thing, basically.
CTL is a free service but it needs to pay its bills. Is this a better way than ads?
I don’t know if I’ll keep CTL in our credits. I’m talking about it with Gabe, Kevin, and folks at Maximum Fun. But I think it’s a complicated situation.
The mental health crisis is an employment crisis too
Our rates have been stagnant for years. In 2005, getting paid $40,000 a year when you first got out of college would’ve been great. Now, 17 years later, we’re still starting people at $40,000, maybe $45,000, depending on the role. The cost of college is a real burden to the people who work here. I’ve had people who’ve worked for me who have $90,000 in college debt and they’re making $40,000 a year, maybe topping out at $65,000 a year after years of work. That pay rate is based on a number that DHS and the state legislature set for our reimbursement, and there hasn’t really been any real move lately to increase those rates.
A lot of their people are quitting to go do telehealth and get paid better.
Penn State football player claims coaches were horrible about his mental health
Bryce Mostella, a redshirt freshman for the Penn State football team went to Twitter to speak out about the coaching staff there, including head coach James Franklin. Mostella said the issue was based on the coaching staff insisting that he gain weight to play at a higher level. He had been trying to put on weight but struggled.
“These struggles had a negative impact on my mental health. Contributing to my diagnosed anxiety and depression,” Mostella wrote. “I made James Franklin and [defensive line coach] John Scott aware of this, however after that I only mentioned it when they asked. Reason being to avoid sounding like I was making excuses.”
It is at this point Mostella makes an alarming claim, suggesting Franklin wondered if Mostella even cared about football.
“In the coming months, CJF made it clear to me he wasn’t satisfied with my progress,” Mostella wrote. “The narrative went from me being ‘a hard worker who’s going to figure it out’ to someone who ‘doesn’t care about football or the team.'”
Mostella then claimed Franklin suggested Mostella would be risking being removed from the roster and losing his scholarship if he didn’t reach his weight goal by December.
When Mostella returned to campus for the spring semester, he found that he was not registered for any classes and there was a financial hold on his account.
You can read the whole thread here. The replies have a lot fewer a-holes calling his masculinity into question than I expected. Couldn’t find any, at a cursory glance. Refreshing.
Maybe some of those recent items are leaving you feeling dispirited
So here’s a long thread of fake birds generated by an AI robot.
It’s surprising how many of these birds, though fake and robot-generated, look like they’re posing for yearbook photos.