Time to Block Grok

Activation Warning: This episode discusses SA, CSAM, state violence. 

In the first feverish episode of The Present Illness in 2026, the Doctors discuss the tumultuous events of winter break, including significant changes in vaccination policies, a big win for abortion rights, ICE actions in Minnesota, and the dangers of Elon Musk’s Grok.

Abrupt CDC Child Vaccine Rollback

AAP, APHA lawsuit against HHS moves forward

Grok’s gross contribution to the winter break. Elon happy to push Grok, and the content is worse than what’s on X. “Take It Down Act”. 404 Media coverage. NCII - report (stopncii.org)

Get X removed from the app store - directions.

• Go to the App Store
• Search for X
• Scroll to “report a problem”
• Select “Pornography or sexual content”
• Then select “Predatory behavior toward children”
• Then write a brief description, eg, “This app allows the creation and distribution of non-consensual sexually violent images and child sexual abuse material via Grok. Please remove this from the App Store.”

Wyoming Supreme Court blocks ban on abortion and abortion medication! 

ICE shot and killed Renee Good in Minnesota. JD Vance video praising law enforcement. NYTimes’s video analysis.

January 6 insurrection-versary. NPR video of January 6 and January 6 archive. The White House’s revisionist history J6 site. Jack Smith testimony. “Presidential Memoranda” NSPM-7 on domestic terrorism.

💊Take Two and Call Me in the Morning💊

• Georgi Arthur makes a castle with her lips
• Film: One Battle After Another. Here is a thoughtful criticism.
• Visible and

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

• 4:58 CDC Vaccination Policies
• 8:10 AAP Lawsuits
• 10:14 GROK and AI fueled harm
• 18:38 How to Block X and Grok in the App Store
• 20:11 January 6th Insurrection-versary
• 34:50 Simone Gold - COVID shill physician at J6
• 38:25 The Shooting of Renee Nicole Good
• 45:20 ICE Inhumane Treatment of People
• 54:25 Denial of Medical Assistance
• 59:48 Take Two and Call Me in the Morning

Transcript

Alyssa Burgart (00:00)
one of the things that's so challenging is that when we have new information now,

that is video-based, that is image-based, that is text-based, we all have to be asking ourselves, is this real" in a way that we never have

Arghavan (00:14)
Hey there, fellow nerds. Welcome to another episode of The Present Illness and welcome to 2026. The Present Illness is the podcast where two physicians try to make sense of a world that is a little febrile and definitely underdiagnosed. I'm Arghavan Salles, a surgeon scientist and your friendly neighborhood doom scroller in residence.

Alyssa Burgart (00:32)
And I'm Alyssa Burgart an anesthesiologist and bioethicist who tracks news and health law like they're EKGs, full of spikes and surprises. The present illness is where we dig into public health, politics, culture and ethics with a scalpel in one hand and a meme in the other.

Arghavan (00:46)
Big thanks to everyone who's returned after our couple weeks hiatus for the holidays. Thanks to everyone who follows and who subscribed and a warm welcome to anyone who just stumbled in from Minnesota where apparently you can't even drive home after dropping your child off at school.

Alyssa Burgart (01:03)
rough intro. Woof. Poor Minnesota.

Arghavan (01:04)
⁓ Well,

it's been a intro to 2026. I don't know about you, but for me, I felt it's been quite jarring.

Alyssa Burgart (01:16)
It's been pretty intense. But let's take a moment. You know, we try to not be all doom and gloom here on the present illness. you know, Arghavan, I know that you know that I was like checking every single day for like my little hit of dopamine and we hit a big milestone on the podcast. We hit 2,500 downloads.

Arghavan (01:38)
Woohoo! I know it sounds like maybe a small number to some people, but I think that's amazing. Go us.

Alyssa Burgart (01:43)
I mean,

for our brand new little podcast, I'm pretty stoked. ⁓ And then the other thing is ⁓ a number of you who really enjoy listening to the podcast have asked us to offer video. And so we have launched a YouTube channel. You will find us at The Present Illness on YouTube. The podcast, RSS, is up. So if you want to listen to your podcast with a video, you're welcome to do that. And I am slowly bringing up all of our videos from our previous episodes. So feel free to catch us that

Arghavan (01:46)
Yeah.

Woohoo!

That's awesome. Thank you for doing that. Teamwork makes the dream work, as they say.

Alyssa Burgart (02:16)
Teamwork.

Yeah. ⁓

So what I thought we could do today, since this is our first episode of 2026 and our, ⁓ you know, return from our two weeks that we took off from the pod, I just thought I would just go through, ⁓ you know, a handful of the things that have happened while folks were away.

Arghavan (02:38)
Wait, have things happened? Has it been eventful?

Alyssa Burgart (02:41)
I would like nothing more than for it to be real boring, but it was very eventful. ⁓ Well, know, yeah, there were no quiet holidays. One, it's interesting too, because there were several things that the government did specifically while folks, you know, people were out of session in the government to do some things under the radar. ⁓

Arghavan (02:47)
Yeah, I know. So much for like, quiet holidays.

No, they

didn't. They didn't do anything nefarious. They wouldn't do that.

Alyssa Burgart (03:07)
⁓

well, yeah. I mean, as you know, we talked about Venezuela last time and the mitochondrial condition that I've been worried about and we were like, it's terrible that they're like bombing fishermen, but it's fine because because our government was like, do you know what would be worse? Let's bomb Caracas and no big deal. And while we're at it, let's steal the president of Venezuela and his wife.

Arghavan (03:24)
Yeah

No big deal. No big deal.

Yeah, because that's a totally normal thing to do. Yeah, people do that all the time, kidnap the heads of ⁓ foreign states.

Alyssa Burgart (03:36)
Totally normal, totally normal.

Yeah, so that was one of the big things that happened while we all were away. ⁓ The abrupt rollback of a bunch of CDC recommendations around childhood vaccination, all outside of even the ACIP, even our like fake ACIP that we have, they didn't even get to talk about this stuff. ⁓

Arghavan (04:03)
Right, the ACIP

for folks who don't know is the group that's supposed to make recommendations to any changes regarding immunization. It's the advisory council, advisory council on immunization practices, ⁓ or it be committee instead of council, I don't remember. But anyway, they're the ones who are supposed to be in the past. They would have been experts in immunization, vaccines, virology, et cetera, ⁓ immunology, who would review evidence, data,

science to make evidence-based recommendations. ⁓ folks may recall, basically the entire committee was fired and new people were appointed. And then that committee is the same group that made the changes to the recommendations regarding hepatitis B that we've talked about before. But they weren't involved at all. Your point that you're making is that they weren't even involved in the decision to change the entire childhood immunization schedule.

Alyssa Burgart (04:58)
Yeah, and so there's a bunch of vaccines that are ⁓ no longer part of the federal vaccine schedule and they've been moved to a shared clinical decision-making model, which again, is very frustrating because these have always been things where people could talk to their doctor. You always have been able to try to get more information from your clinicians that take care of you. ⁓ There's nothing about these changes.

that actually change, for example, school mandates, which we know is something that RFK Junior is gonna go after as well. ⁓ So it's interesting because this whole like Medical Freedom Act, actually doesn't change anything that's gonna happen at the state level. ⁓ But we are gonna see a lot less kids getting vaccinated against diseases that are absolutely preventable, which means we're gonna see a lot more complications, surprising no one.

Arghavan (05:54)
Yeah, I mean, the thing

is it's going to create a lot of confusion for parents and families to be like, what does this mean? Because you would think in our previous model where things were functioning, you would think that if the Department of Health and Human Services made a change in recommendations, that it was for an evidence-based reason and that therefore we should follow these new guidelines. But that is not.

the case and so that's a real major change in paradigm for how our country has functioned and how public health has functioned here going back for decades. So it's very confusing as a new parent perhaps to see, okay, well the HHS says we don't need to do the rotavirus vaccine for example. Rotavirus used to land 55 to 70,000 children in the hospital every year and kill several dozen.

And now it doesn't do that because we have a vaccine that's very effective, but that is one of the vaccines that is no longer recommended by HHS. And influenza, know, last year we had 300 children die of the flu. 89 % of them were unvaccinated and the influenza vaccine is no longer recommended. Meningitis. Anyway, we could go on, but the point I was just trying to make is that these changes are not evidence-based and they're going to create a lot of confusion.

Alyssa Burgart (07:12)
Yay.

Arghavan (07:17)
which is why parents will choose increasingly to not do those specific vaccinations for their children, which will result in death and disability that is completely preventable and unnecessary.

Alyssa Burgart (07:28)
Yep, and we're gonna see it, you know, for decades to come. The Western Vaccine Alliance, which is California, Oregon, Washington, and Hawaii, has already said, we're doing our own guidance, we're rejecting the federal guidance. Colorado has done something similar. I'm hoping we see more states do this, but given the...

health politics of it all, I know that this is not gonna be something where every single state is gonna act against the federal government. So.

Arghavan (07:59)
Yeah, and

not every single state is going to have people who still believe in following the evidence and following science and protecting children from preventable illness.

Alyssa Burgart (08:10)
Absolutely. ⁓ And, you know, we mentioned before that in a previous episode that the American Academy of Pediatrics and the American Public Health Association are suing HHS and they were originally suing because of the unauthorized and illegal changes to the COVID vaccine schedule. And just earlier this week, ⁓ Judge Brian Murphy rejected the government's motion to dismiss that case. ⁓

AAP is also suing to get those grants reinstated that we talked about last time.

Arghavan (08:41)
Yeah, well that's a small win, but you know, we'll take him when we can get him.

Alyssa Burgart (08:44)
We will take a win where we can get a win. And this is actually, I'm gonna give us another win, because I love a win. ⁓ Big shout out to Wyoming. Wyoming, girl, you are hot right now, looking good. ⁓ In a rare bright spot, the Wyoming Supreme Court was like, hey, these bans on abortion and abortion medication are unconstitutional. They said that the state failed to make their case that abortion is not healthcare.

Arghavan (08:46)
you

Yeah.

Alyssa Burgart (09:11)
Again, not surprising us because we know that abortion is an important aspect of healthcare. So Wyoming, cheers to you.

Arghavan (09:18)
Yeah, kudos absolutely to Wyoming and their Supreme Court for actually doing the right thing and following what we know to be true in medicine and healthcare. And we've seen, as we've talked about, I think before, the devastating consequences of these abortion bans all over the country that have increased the rates of maternal mortality and infant mortality.

and also led to increased criminalization of pregnancy and miscarriages and all sorts of really terrible things, if indeed you care about life.

Alyssa Burgart (09:55)
I have no words. just cannot believe our timeline. I both can believe it and I hate that it's here. ⁓

Arghavan (10:04)
Yes. Every night I dream

that we'll have a different timeline when I wake up and every night or morning when I wake up, it's even worse than it was the day before.

Alyssa Burgart (10:14)
It really makes me want to live in a sci-fi novel with, you know, again, parallel. I want to jump into a different parallel universe where things are things are better. ⁓ To it's too interesting in this timeline. I'll take another. Thank you so much. ⁓ But, you know, one of the big things that happened ⁓ in a the grossest Christmas Eve present of all is, you know, Elon Musk promoted ⁓ Grok, they're like AI.

Arghavan (10:21)
Yeah, absolutely.

Alyssa Burgart (10:43)
thing that they have on Twitter to do, they were like, the editing feature for audio and video is amazing. I can put a link to his tweet in the show notes. ⁓ But yeah, mean, turns out it just immediately started getting used for nudifying people and revenge porn and child sexual exploitation. ⁓ Some examples for folks who are trying to...

If you haven't heard of a Nudify app, there's also these apps that are rampant that use AI to take a picture of a person, for example, who is clothed and will remove their clothing in that photograph. There are also images. You may have noticed, ⁓ well, you, know, know about this, Orgobon, but for folks who may recall, a couple of years ago, there was a big advertising push for like, you can like, it was called like Yearbook and you could like, ⁓ put in your recent photos and

our AI thing will show you what you looked like in high school. Well, that's because these apps, of course, can make people look much younger than they are, which means that you can also create additional child sexual exploitation material using these apps, which is truly horrifying. ⁓ so Grok, can't technically, it will not technically show people who are naked, but it will show them in a number of other.

barely their items and so users put in things like put this person in a, know, remove their clothes and put them in a very transparent mini bikini or make it so they're only wearing dental floss, ⁓ remove her school outfit, spread her legs. So these are all things of course done without anybody's consent. And so these are really horrible things that are happening and know, Grok has just ramped up this.

Arghavan (12:34)
Yeah, and I want to just add that some people are using it for themselves, like here, can you make my photo look different? Or people are using it for kind of like less nefarious purposes. Can you remove this person from this photo, for example? But it's really been quite the proliferation of mostly men using grok to undress women and children without consent.

And it goes beyond that because yes, they're doing a ton of that. Like you said, ⁓ Grok put her in a micro bikini. ⁓ Grok, this is just trigger. I should have said this earlier trigger warning because this is all really disturbing. We're both sexual assault, sexual harassment, sexual violence, child sexual abuse, as Alyssa said. There are things like so if you don't want to hear that, you can skip forward. But what they.

Alyssa Burgart (13:15)
horrible.

Arghavan (13:28)
are also doing is intentionally putting women into grating and humiliating positions, like put her on all fours with cigarette burns all over her body.

Alyssa Burgart (13:37)
I

saw that image. It was horrible.

Arghavan (13:40)
Horrible and they're saying things like put glue on her face ⁓ Someone which I mean, think people know what that's supposed to be ⁓ Replicating there was someone who I had a video about this that went viral and somebody asked rock to put Me to take my clothes off and show me only in mustard Me myself they said the person who's making the video put the person who's in the video doing this

Alyssa Burgart (14:02)
You, you yourself?

Arghavan (14:09)
put her with mustard and I reported it by the way was on Instagram so Grok doesn't actually do it they just thought it was funny because Grok doesn't function on Instagram I reported to Instagram shocking news everybody it was not in violation of ⁓ Instagram's terms of service. The things that are there's a lot to me that's very disturbing here but one of them is that even now I think these images started really proliferating around New Year's Eve by the way so we're about a week out from that.

6,700 images an hour is what is being estimated to be made by Grok. I can't say, I didn't see if it's like all these non-consensual ones or the majority, but that's still happening because must. Yeah.

Alyssa Burgart (14:53)
But even if it was like one image or like one image an

hour, it's adorable.

Arghavan (14:59)
Absolutely. And Musk is fully aware this is happening. He thinks it's really funny. People are making jokes about it. He's asked Grok to put himself in a bikini, et cetera. So instead of being concerned in any way at the degree of sexual violence and child sexual abuse that he is permitting on his platform, he's just like laughing it off. And this is in violation of many countries laws, by the way, this material is.

Alyssa Burgart (15:05)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Arghavan (15:28)
supposed

to be allowed to be made, certainly not on a platform like this. So some countries and the EU are asking for explanations. And I haven't seen, I think I've seen one legislator in the US, which is AOC talk about it, but really the app should be shut down. That's my feeling. The app should be shut down, meaning Twitter, not Grok, Twitter. He's allowing this to happen on Twitter. Should be shut down until such time as they fix this. But the... ⁓

utter disregard from the vast majority of people has been really disturbing. And I know you want to say something, but I want to say one other thing, which I know and I always do too. That's kind of the problem. But the other thing that really was disconcerting to me, especially in the first few days that this was happening is that women were noticing that this was being done to their photos, right? Because the way it works is that like, if I posted a photo, you and I don't post on Twitter anymore. But if we did, if I post a photo,

Alyssa Burgart (16:02)
I always want to say something, you know.

Arghavan (16:22)
it would come as either a reply or a quote tweet. So they would reply to my photo and say, at Grok, remove her clothes and put her in a micro bikini. Sometimes they're like, turn her around and put her in a micro bikini. Sometimes they show her dead and bleeding. I mean, they're just ⁓ really disturbing requests that people are making. And so you see it under your photo. And so,

There was one woman, I think in France, who came back, she had posted her New Year's Eve outfit, which was a very cute outfit. And then she came back and found that dozens of people, men, were asking Grock to undress her. And that's how they were seeing that it was happening to them. So the response from a lot of men was, well, that's what you get for putting your photo on the internet. What did you think was gonna happen when you put your photo on the internet? If you don't like it, just don't post your photo on the

Alyssa Burgart (17:14)
Nothing like rape culture coming at you in just a new form.

Arghavan (17:18)
Exactly, exactly. This idea that it's got such a direct parallel to, well, why did you leave the house in that outfit if you didn't want to be raped? Why did you post a photo? And I want to be clear that, one, women should be allowed to post their photos in whatever outfit they want to wear. But the majority of these cases, it's not like it was already a scantily clad woman and they're changing the outfit. It's someone who was wearing a totally normal, you know,

Alyssa Burgart (17:20)
Terrible.

Arghavan (17:45)
This woman I mentioned in France, I think she was wearing a long sleeve shirt and a skirt and some tights. Nothing particularly revealing, but that's part of it, right? Because a lot of people were, when I had posted my video, were like, why are they doing this? There's so much pornography available out there. And that's the thing. They're not looking for something consensual. They're looking to violate our autonomy and to take control and to humiliate and to degrade us. And that is why they're doing it to people who don't want it done. They are removing hijabs.

from hijabi women. It is absolutely disgusting and depraved. And as I said, Musk will do nothing about it. So I will say on this point, is an action we can take. Well, there's multiple actions. If this has happened to anyone who's listening, you can go to ncii.org and they apparently help to remove images that have been made without your consent. You can report it to the federal government. Obviously you can report it to Twitter, but...

A number of people who did that with images of themselves that had been modified were told that it was not in violation of the terms and services of Twitter. But what we can do, I really think this is achievable, is to get X, which is what Twitter is formally called, removed from the App Store. And it's not hard to do. You just go to the App Store and then scroll to the X app or find the X app and then go all the way down to the bottom. This is on an iPhone. You go all the way down to the bottom, it says report a problem.

You click on report a problem and it asks you for a category and you say pornography. And then it asks you a follow up question and you can say child predatory behavior. It's a dropdown. These are two dropdowns. Please, please, please do. And then it just has a text box where you can write whatever you want. I think I wrote something along the lines of X is allowing Grok to create sexually explicit and child sexual abuse material. Please remove X from the app store.

Alyssa Burgart (19:18)
I'm going to do it right now while you're telling me about it.

Arghavan (19:39)
You know, I think in high volumes that really can make a difference because it also does violate the terms of service for the app store. So if folks wouldn't mind doing that, I would be grateful because it continues. I mean, it's just continuing nonstop despite all the attention, despite all the women who are saying, please stop doing this. These men, these specific men who are engaging in this activity are just delighting in us being upset about it. And so they continue to do it more.

Alyssa Burgart (20:11)
Yeah, I am looking at all of the options when you get to tell us more. And it says content is inappropriate for children, pornography or sexual content, hate speech, harassment, bullying or self harm, violence or terrorist content, abusive or inappropriate user to user interactions. So yeah, I'm going to go ahead and pick. I'm going to pick pornography or sexual content. You think that's and then predatory behavior towards children.

Arghavan (20:16)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah, that's what I picked too.

Correct,

yep. Yeah, because I didn't say too much about that, but yeah, they are doing this to photos of children and even babies. ⁓ It's exceedingly vile. ⁓ And it's clear, know, obviously children are not at the age where they can consent. So it's usually photos posted by someone other than those children. And then these men are coming in under those photos and doing this because they think it's funny or because they get off on it either way.

Alyssa Burgart (21:10)
Yeah, well, and this is actually why, you when it became clear that, you know, Facebook had scraped, this is years and years ago, had just scraped people's photos off of their platform in order to train their facial recognition software, in order to train, you know, now of course their AI materials and all of that. And like kids got swept up in a lot of things and ended up in a lot of data sets that have also all been used ⁓ for CSAM, ⁓ child sexual abuse material. So, ⁓

Well, thank you for teaching me how to do that. didn't realize it was so easy to report an app. Now I know.

Arghavan (21:45)
It's so easy,

it's so easy. And by the way, if folks want to do it to Grok, Grok itself has a separate app and a website. So according to some reporting from Wired that I just read yesterday, there are actually unknown numbers of images and videos that can be made through the website and the app. The majority of them are private, so we don't actually know what is there. But there are 1,200 or so links that were public that they looked at and...

Folks should read that article. We'll put the link in the show notes if you want to see what it was, but it's no less disturbing than what we've described to you here. And they're doing it also with celebrities as well. So that's a whole separate issue. So if folks want to report Grok separate from X, I would encourage folks to do that as well.

Alyssa Burgart (22:32)
Great. You know, this is something that I think is also helpful if folks are looking for, you know, high quality journalism around this type of issue and in particular, these Nudify apps and other ⁓ AI based tools that are being used to proliferate sexual harassment, sexual assault, ⁓ abuse of children. ⁓ 404 Media is one of the places that has been reporting on this now for many years. ⁓

their reporters keep being like, we would really love to not have to keep talking about this, but clearly there is no shortage of opportunities. So if you're looking for, again, like high quality journalism on this issue, I 404 Media is doing an incredible job.

Arghavan (23:13)
Thank you for that plug. And I'll just say one last thing, which is that in the US it actually is illegal to manipulate people's photos in this way, to sexualize people and children under something called the Take It Down Act. And I wanted to point that out because even I didn't realize that at first because if folks have been following, the Trump administration has been very opposed to any sort of regulation of AI. And they had initially in the big, beautiful bill, excuse me, a requirement that there could be no regulation for 10 years. So that's their dream. ⁓

So I didn't realize we actually do have an act called the Take It Down Act that was written into law, I think in either May or June of 2025. And so there could be...

Alyssa Burgart (23:54)
It was enacted

in May 2025. Yeah.

Arghavan (23:57)
Yeah, so there could be

legal action taken, but the problem is, you know, any individual person who's posting on Twitter, most likely a lot of people don't have access to the resources it would take to bring a lawsuit, because a lot of people are saying that to you. Why don't you sue XAI, which is the company that makes rock. Exactly. Why don't you sue Elon Musk? Why don't you sue Twitter? You know, yeah, somebody who has a lot of time and money could do that. Or if there was a lawsuit, sorry, a law firm that wanted to take this on, that would be great.

Alyssa Burgart (24:13)
Rich people get to sue.

Class section.

Arghavan (24:26)
But it's not a reasonable thing to expect that individual users on an app like this are going to have the bandwidth to bring individual lawsuits. And so that's why somebody had suggested, by the way, this idea of the reporting on the App Store was from somebody on Blue Sky. It was not my idea. But I thought, well, that's a thing we can actually do that I think would not be enjoyed by Elon Musk as much as he enjoys the photos. I don't think he'd enjoy his app being removed from the App Store. So anyway, that's my last note on that.

Alyssa Burgart (24:57)
Well, and I do hope that some enterprising law firm considers, you know, bringing a class action. There's definitely going to be a lot of people involved, but that's going to take a lot more organization and a lot more time.

Arghavan (25:09)
Yeah, and in the meantime, like, wouldn't it be great if our government at least would send like a cease and desist or something to stop this from happening?

Alyssa Burgart (25:16)
I mean,

since Trump and Elon hate each other now, I mean, you'd think that maybe this is like a good opportunity for Trump, right? Like the bromance is over.

Arghavan (25:24)
Oh no, they've had a reconnection over recent weeks. don't know if you noticed. Yeah, the bromance is back on as far as I can tell. Yeah, he deleted, must have deleted that tweet that he had posted a few months back if folks recall saying that Trump was in the Epstein files is gone, he deleted it. yeah, really like love is in the air, Alyssa, what can I say?

Alyssa Burgart (25:28)
Aw, come on! That sucks.

Okay.

No, it was,

it was good while it lasted. ⁓

Arghavan (25:49)
It was.

Alyssa Burgart (25:55)
man. ⁓

Do we want to talk about Minnesota? Do we want to talk about January 6th?

Arghavan (26:06)
How are we at? We're at 25 minutes? I think we can do both. Let's do January 6th and then January 7th.

Alyssa Burgart (26:09)
Yeah. Okay, let's do it. ⁓

All right, pineapple. ⁓ Well, you know, I keep this in my calendar. It is the fifth. We just passed the fifth anniversary of the January 6th insurrection. ⁓ I remember I was post call the day that the original insurrection happened and I like woke up, looked at Twitter because I was back when that's where I got a lot of my news and was like I called my husband. I was like, people are attacking the capital like.

things are going down. ⁓ But in a super weird turn, and I know that you've already seen this, ⁓ I went to go be like, I wonder who did sort of a summary of the last five years. And obviously there was the whole investigation and there was a bunch of people who had criminal charges. And then the president pardoned all these people. So I was looking for an overview and that's when I found the WhiteHouse.gov website for January 6th, which is literally

just a huge conspiracy saying that the Democrats like faked January 6th and there's all it's all this like huge splashy splash page of all the Democratic leadership from from January 6 and saying Nancy Pelosi is on on file saying it's all her fault. And ⁓ our our government man they're just they're just they're not even they're not playing anymore. They're just putting it out there.

Arghavan (27:40)
They're not in any way wedded to reality or truth. That's as far as I can tell. I will read just one section. So what they did, as you said, is they have a whole landing page that has a timeline of the day and it is fiction. They blame the Capitol police for any damage that was done, for inciting a riot. They blame the Democrats for everything. So here's one section.

Alyssa Burgart (27:44)
Mm-mm. Mm-mm.

Arghavan (28:09)
This is direct from the White House website, okay? The Democrats masterfully reversed reality after January 6th, branding peaceful patriotic protesters as quote unquote insurrectionists and framing the event as a violent coup attempt orchestrated by Trump despite no evidence of armed rebellion or intent to overthrow the government. That's literally what they said. None of that is true. None of that is true. Jack Smith.

recently testified in front of Congress and he said that they had evidence that Trump was behind the insurrection that happened that day, that it would not have happened without him and that he had criminal intent. This is the legal assessment of what happened that day and yet what is on the website of the White House is a complete alternate reality that did not exist.

that did not happen, they say in this thing, they say all while as you were pointing out that the ⁓ Democrats staged the insurrection and weaponized federal agencies to hunt down dissenters, all while Pelosi's own security lapses invited the chaos. And then they go on to say this gaslighting narrative. The gaslighters are trying to call the regular people telling the truth gaslighters.

that this gaslighting narrative allowed them to persecute innocent Americans, silence opposition, and distract from their own role in undermining democracy. Excuse me. Excuse me. ⁓ What? ⁓

Alyssa Burgart (29:49)
So

it's also, it is also, is an absolutely again, perfect application of Jennifer Freyde's Darvo, deny, attack, reverse victim and offender. Cause they're like, no, it wasn't us. It was them. They're the bad ones. We're victims. All we're trying to do is run a government.

Arghavan (30:09)
No, woe is us, we're just the victim. So here's the thing, so the Democrats organized a day of ⁓ testimony, if you will, from people about January ⁓ 6th, and that was on January 6th this year. And so there was, these clips are online if people wanna see, I think it's very powerful testimony. And one of them was from a woman who was part of the insurrection. she, ⁓ even she said,

You cannot tell me that it was peaceful. I was there. You cannot tell me that it was the other side that caused the problem. I was there. I saw it with my own eyes.

Alyssa Burgart (30:52)
And the videos are like so intense. Like I remember watching them like as they were coming out in real time. It was crazy.

Arghavan (30:52)
And

Yeah, and I was, so you mentioned being post-call. I'm pretty sure I was in the ICU because I don't remember seeing any of these images at the time. And so NPR has done an incredible job of collecting video from court evidence. And so they have, if folks are interested, you can go look at the archive that they have, but they also have put out a number of clips on social media that I've seen that are extraordinarily powerful.

Alyssa Burgart (31:08)
Mm-mm.

Arghavan (31:29)
And if folks have never watched those videos, I do think in this moment of like people trying to make us question our reality that it's worth it to reconnect and ground in what actually happened because it was a violent crowd that had weapons. They broke windows at the Capitol. They knew which windows had less reinforcement. So they knew which windows to go try to break through that they successfully broke through.

Police were severely outnumbered and did the best they could, but many of them were assaulted. At least 140 officers were injured that day and a number of them, so there's one man who died in the, one police officer who died in the short term, I think the next day. And then there are, I believe, well, I won't say the number, there's several police officers who've died by suicide after that.

And part of the reason, right, is this, well, I don't know those specific individuals, but part of the harm that's been caused to the police who were there that day and the law enforcement officials who were there that day is the lies that are being told by the folks in the White House in the current administration and most of the folks in the previous administration, by the way. And so some of, if folks go look at the NPR clips,

Alyssa Burgart (32:43)
Mm-hmm.

Arghavan (32:47)
One of the videos I think is the most powerful is about 26 or 27 minutes, which sounds like a lifetime in our social media age. And if I could watch it, you can watch it. That's what I'll say. But ⁓ I sat there and I watched the whole thing. It so gripping. But they talked to an officer named Daniel Hodges and an officer named Michael Fanone. And for both of them, they have body cam footage and they have footage from other people who were around them. And so they put together the day and for each of them on their own.

NPR walks through the day with them and they say, here's what we were doing at this time. Here's where, you know, at one point, I think it was officer Hodges, before he even gets inside the Capitol, gets surrounded by insurrectionists and he finds himself on the ground and he's not really sure he's gonna make it past that moment. ⁓ And anyway, it's really powerful because you see these people who were there that day doing their job and have been villainized.

by large segments of the population. And they both talk about how this has affected their lives and their mental health. And it's at the hands of their own government that they have been terrorized. And Michael Fanon specifically talks about how in many cases of trauma, you have a trauma and then you have the after the trauma. for...

Alyssa Burgart (33:49)
Hmm.

Arghavan (34:06)
him the trauma is ongoing because the lies are ongoing and the demonization of him as an individual is ongoing. When does it end for him? And I'm no like back the blue type person, but like these are human beings who did their very best and they ultimately they were all successful, right? They defended our capital and we were able to certify the election as we should have.

without being coerced by people trying to steal the election. And that's because of men like Daniel Hodges and Michael Fanon who stood there and defended our democracy. And now all they get for that, well not all, but a lot of what they're getting for that is hate.

Alyssa Burgart (34:50)
Hmm. I wonder how Simone

Gold feels about all of this being framed as a democratic hoax. Do you remember her?

Arghavan (34:58)
Yeah, isn't she one of the COVID conspiracy doctors?

Alyssa Burgart (35:01)
She was a...

Yeah, yeah, she was one of the... She was the founder of that right-wing group, ⁓ America's Frontline Doctors, and was all about unproven use of ⁓ hydroxychloroquine. And she was also at... ⁓ She was censured and she had temporarily lost her license, but I think it was reinstated. I don't think that she lost it permanently. ⁓ But yeah, she... ⁓

Arghavan (35:10)
Yes.

Yes. Didn't she lose her license?

Mm. Mm.

Alyssa Burgart (35:31)
She claims that it was incredibly peaceful.

Arghavan (35:35)
You can claim whatever you want, but there were cameras everywhere. It is documented. You can see it. You can see what was happening. By the way, the guy, a little moment of levity. If folks remember the QAnon shaman guy who had like paint all over his face and like an animal something, headdress thing. Yeah, whatever it was. He's running for governor of Arizona, just in case anyone wanted to laugh.

Alyssa Burgart (35:49)
yeah, the guy with the, it was, yeah yeah, the helmet. No shirt.

Arghavan (36:03)
I know it's, you know, in news of the odd as they say.

Alyssa Burgart (36:12)
I just, that's a lot to process.

Arghavan (36:19)
I know. he is, ⁓ I haven't done a deep dive on his politics, but he is distancing himself from the ⁓ Trump.

Alyssa Burgart (36:27)
the crimes of his breaking into the Capitol.

Arghavan (36:29)
Well, like the cult.

I think he's trying to distance himself from the cult, which is very interesting, but he's running as an independent if anyone was curious about that. Yeah, yeah. A lot can happen in five years. But the thing is, so this January 6 thing, I saw the White House page on January 6 and was just so disturbed by it. And I was watching all these NPR videos.

Alyssa Burgart (36:37)
That is so interesting. Wow. I guess a lot can happen in five years.

A lot of revisionist history.

Arghavan (36:58)
And I was like, wow, they're really trying to make us question reality. right, everyone, I mean, for a long time now, people keep bringing up that 1984 quote of, you know, the regime told you to ignore your eyes and ears. was, I mean, this is not verbatim, but people know what I'm talking about. They told you to ignore your eyes and ears, and ⁓ it was the last command that they gave. And that's, we've been living through that at so many different points in time, but this, the White House rewriting of the entire timeline really,

Alyssa Burgart (37:12)
Mm-hmm.

Arghavan (37:28)
felt to me like, this is it. Like they really are just outwardly doing it. There's no insinuation here. They're just plain lying. And they think that we're just gonna go along with it. Even though members of the current regime had posted in 2021 what they thought about it. And it was like, this is illegal. This is violent. should stop. mean, even one of Trump's sons was like, he needs to do more to stop this. This has gotten out of hand.

Alyssa Burgart (37:48)
They loved it.

Arghavan (37:56)
in a text message to I think Trump's chief of staff. Anyway, and now they're like, nothing happened. It was actually a great day for democracy. It was peaceful, country loving, anyway, whatever, we talk about forever. But the reason I mentioned that point of like trying to get us to deny what we see and hear with our own eyes and ears continues the very next day because what happened the very next day is,

the shooting of Renee Nicole Good by an ICE agent in Minneapolis. And we have this video in multiple different views. Anyway, so this man shoots her. He's outside a car, she's inside a car, she's a driver. She is in a neighborhood. Her car is at the beginning of the video perpendicular to the road.

she is seen with her arm out the window waving cars past her. So she's not obstructing because the government says she's obstructing, but she's waving cars past her. These ICE agents get out of their car and then they come right at her and they're, from people who are there, it's hard to hear on the video, but from people who were there, they say they were telling her conflicting things. Some were telling her to get out of the car, some were telling her to move. And so she starts trying to maneuver her car.

out of the way, so she backs up. The agents are in front of her, by the way, so she backs up. That's not going toward the agents, just to be clear. And they're to her left, and she tries to turn right. Again, not going toward the agents. And there's an agent who, now we know his name is Jonathan Ross, was originally on the right side of her vehicle. As she backs up, he comes around the front of her car, and he's the one who shoots her, saying that he was afraid for his life, that she was going to ram him with her vehicle.

as she actively turned her wheels away from him. You can see this. I I'm not recommending anyone watch this, but if you want to, you can see it. There's many angles available on the internet. Almost immediately, Kristi Noem was out there attacking this woman's integrity, and the president did as well. They said she was trying to run over this officer.

They and JD Vance and others have called her a domestic terrorist. They have called her a deranged leftist. They have called her this woman who was murdered by ICE. They have called her all sorts of terrible things to justify an ICE agent having murdered her. By the way, Laura Loomer, a good friend of the president, said she, her pronouns in bio.

as though having pronouns in your bio is justification for being killed in your own neighborhood, in your own car by an ICE agent. And she was 37 years old and she was a mother of three children who now do not have a mother.

Alyssa Burgart (41:07)
And just a few months ago is when Melissa Hortman and her husband were murdered in their home by a person posing as a law enforcement officer knocking on their door in the middle of the night to murder them. so why would people in Minnesota, I mean, it is appropriate to be afraid in Minnesota right now. ⁓ And so the idea that this woman was just trying to get away, ⁓

Hearing hearing the vilification of her in the aftermath of this is truly horrendous.

Arghavan (41:45)
Yeah, and they have no shame. mean, JD Vance yesterday, so the same day that this happened, was posting about how we are so grateful to our law enforcement officers and they must do what they need to do. I'll pull up the tweet actually so people can hear his exact words because it's actually quite disgusting. And ⁓ it's permission. He's giving permission to ICE and other law enforcement officers, frankly, to kill people if they want to.

That's what he's messaging. mean, he's actively messaging that to people. And that we should all be afraid. I mean, genuinely, we should all be afraid. He said.

Alyssa Burgart (42:24)
Well, I think they want us to be, I think that there is a concerted effort to want Americans to be afraid of doing anything that is perceived as counter to the

Arghavan (42:36)
Well, mean, not only, that's definitely true. They have that bill that, or order or whatever it was. I will forget the, has an acronym like NCSM seven or something like that, that Pam Bondi put out in December that attempts to define anyone who is opposed to the nuclear family and who's opposed to the Trump administration and who's ⁓ got pro immigration views or pro trans people views ⁓ as a terrorist.

So that, mean, that's not just like a guess or a supposition on your part. That is a thing they are actively trying to do. Now, yeah, I know.

Alyssa Burgart (43:13)
I,

so I was at a party. This is a number of years ago. This is, you know, pre-pandemic and someone was like, you know, this woke agenda. It's all just a bunch of thought police. People are just trying to police everybody's thinking. And I'm just going like, I don't know, man, I feel like maybe it's just like trying to be respectful of other human beings and like maybe just that maybe you should be more curious about other people. So it's so fascinating to me.

to then, I mean, obviously this is also horrible, but just thinking about that in context of like, that that was the problem. The thought policing that you should worry about the human dignity of other people, that that was what people were really afraid of. And now we have government officials telling you that you're a terrorist if you believe any of these things that they disagree with.

Arghavan (44:06)
Correct. And so woke isn't sounding so bad anymore, is it? But JD Vance said, and he has many, many posts. He's been really on a tear and I don't have all of them in front of me, but they're similar vibes. Yeah, they're all similar vibes. So he said, ⁓ this is at 6.30 PM Pacific on January 7th. I want every ICE officer to know that their president, vice president and the entire administration stands behind them to the radicals assaulting them.

Alyssa Burgart (44:17)
⁓ thank God. I don't need to hear all of those.

Arghavan (44:36)
Doxing them and threatening them. Congratulations. We're going to work even harder to enforce the law now If that isn't telling them to just go out and kill citizens and whoever else they want. I don't know what it is communicating ⁓

Yeah, it's hard to have words when the vice president of the country is saying that and over and over again. It's not like an accident. It's not like he misspoke. This is the message he is trying to convey. ⁓ And at the same time that you don't want to live in fear as a citizen, it's also the reality. It's not just like a

a ruse that they're putting over that like we should be afraid because we're they're big bad people. It's like they're actually showing us the harm that they're going to do to us over and over again. And it's important to remember that this is not the first person who has been killed by an ICE agent. And this is not the first person who has died in interactions with ICE. We've had many people dying in ICE detention this past year more than ever before.

because of the horrific conditions that they're being put in, largely black and brown people. And another ICE agent, off duty ICE agent on New Year's Eve shot a black man named Keith Porter and that man is now dead. This isn't the first such instance is what I'm trying to say, but it is, I think, one that was quite visible with tons of video and it happened in the middle of the day. And it was a white woman and people in this country care more often if it's a white person who's affected.

And so I think that's part of why this is getting more attention. ⁓ And it's not the only time that ICE has actively harmed people. And she was a US citizen in case anyone's wondering, but I don't think a citizen deserves to live more than a non-citizen deserves to live. And many have made great points that like, some folks on the right are saying, well, all she had to do was get out of her car and she'd be alive. It's that simple. And you know,

I think what they may not realize they're saying there is that if you don't get out of your car, you deserve to die. Do you know what I mean? We have to connect the dots with these arguments. And I should point out ICE agents are not, they have no jurisdiction over traffic violations, because, her car was sideways on the road. Okay, they're not traffic cops. They have no jurisdiction over that. She waved them around. They could have easily gone around her and this would not have been an issue.

they don't have a right, even if they were traffic cops, they don't have a right to pull a person from her vehicle when she's not doing anything, she's not a threat to anybody, she had no weapons that anyone knows of.

Alyssa Burgart (47:23)
No one has the right to commit extrajudicial murder.

Arghavan (47:28)
Yeah, but I don't think our president and our vice president know that. I will say one thing that might be amusing to folks is the New York Times happened to do...

Alyssa Burgart (47:35)
Thank God, I

need a laugh.

Arghavan (47:38)
I don't want to over promise here, but it's mildly amusing. ⁓ The New York Times happened to have a sit down with Trump yesterday. So after this had happened and after he had already put out his statement saying that, you know, she had been trying to run over this guy. So they bring this up. They're in person with him. It's not like a Zoom interview. They're in person and ⁓ he asks his aide to show him the video and they watch the video. And he has been saying that

Alyssa Burgart (47:40)
Yeah.

Arghavan (48:07)
again, that she ran him over, that it was terrible. guess we can give him that credit that he thought it was terrible, but that she was the one who ⁓ been at fault because she was trying to run over this guy. And so before they watched the video, he says, with all of it being said, no, I don't like that happening. Okay, I mean, that seems good. He's expressing some like negativity around this having happened. And then they watch a slow motion surveillance video of the shooting and

The journalist says it really doesn't look like she's running over the ICE officer. And Trump says, well, the way I look at it, it's a terrible scene. I think it's horrible to watch. No, I hate to see it.

You know, so he, I don't know if he hadn't watched the video. I genuinely don't know what was going on there. But he doesn't, the point is he doesn't come away being like, see, see, she ran him over. I mean, it's either that he never watched the video and just believed what people told him when he posted something damning her, like on his social media platform, or that he only watched, there is one angle that if you only see that one angle, it does make it look like she hit him. But if you,

The New York Times actually did a great analysis that they put out on the morning of January 8th, where they show all the different angles lining up. And it's clear that at that moment where it does from one angle look like she hit him, it's just that he's stepping back at a time when she's turning. Anyway, when you look at the other angle, it's very clear his body made no contact with the vehicle. And so maybe he'd only seen that other angle. I don't know, but it was kind of.

Alyssa Burgart (49:49)
I think

we talked about this on a previous episode, right? It's like when you learn how to read a chest x-ray, it's like this gotcha when you're in medical school where they show you a picture of somebody and there's this like giant circle in the middle of the patient and you're like, no, what is it? Is it a marble? Is it a ball? What is it? And then you see from the other side and you're like, it's a coin. And then,

You go, what size coin is it? And you're like, it seems gigantic. It must be a silver dollar. And then you're like, that's a dime. But again, because if you don't think about the perspective and you don't think about the way that images can fool us when you have limited information, it's like, yeah, you can walk away with a lot of terrible conclusions. And to draw this back to the things that we were talking about about Grok,

Arghavan (50:21)
Hmm.

Alyssa Burgart (50:38)
one of the things that's so challenging is that when we have new information now,

that is video-based, that is image-based, that is text-based, we all have to be asking ourselves, is this real" in a way that we never have

before. ⁓ And so I think that that's also, like when you were talking about the January 6 videos, like that was really before this massive efflux of all this AI-generated imagery. And so,

it was easier to believe our eyes. So when the government now is telling people, don't believe your eyes, don't believe what you see, don't believe what you hear.

There's a grain of truth in it, right? Because like so much of what we're gonna see and hear has the potential to be genuinely faked.

Arghavan (51:28)
absolutely. AI has gotten so much better at being hard to, you know, like we used to have even a year ago, lots of extra digits on a hand, for example. And even that is much better now than it used to be. And people are making pretty real, pretty realistic images and videos using AI. So I absolutely agree. Like really have to question everything that we see. and like in this case, we know there are all these videos are, you know, eyewitness

videos that were posted like contemporaneously and so on. I do want to say

Alyssa Burgart (52:02)
But if

you're somebody who wasn't following it, you have to go look for those things. That's the thing. It's all this extra labor. this is, when we think about the cognitive load of how much work it takes for us to be like, ⁓ this is something I need to care about. This is something that's important and real. It's just getting more and more complicated every day.

Arghavan (52:07)
That's right.

absolutely, and it is gonna be to the point where every single thing you see, you have to wonder is it real or not? And that's always been a challenge, right? Disinformation has always existed, misinformation has always existed, but it's just becoming harder and harder to recognize. I wanna say two more things about this incident, ⁓ I would call it a murder. One is, since you mentioned Grok, it probably would surprise no one to hear that

Alyssa Burgart (52:32)
Mm.

Mm-hmm.

Arghavan (52:53)
people have used Grok to undress this woman.

Alyssa Burgart (52:57)
⁓ God, the dead.

Arghavan (52:59)
Yes. Yes.

and it is so depraved it's hard to wrap my head around and it is even more reason that we need to get rid of Grok until such time as the owner wants to actually do something about it. sorry, I will say one more thing about Grok. Back in July, if folks remember, Grok also had kind of gone off in a weird direction because Elon at that time had been trying to make it less quote unquote woke.

And so it started saying things like Adolf Hitler was the, like if he was gonna praise a deity, it would be Adolf Hitler, the most whatever man of Europe, like the best man of Europe. And it was at that time indulging a lot of people's rape fantasies in different ways. It couldn't make images. And so it was describing like really vivid rape scenes. And at that time,

Alyssa Burgart (53:35)
Yes.

Arghavan (53:55)
Elon did take it offline for a little bit and rewire it and put it back up. It was calling itself Mecca Hitler. It was doing all sorts of weird things. And it's important to note that he has not made any attempt at all to fix this problem. The other thing I was going to say that's relevant particularly to us is that there was a physician in that neighborhood where Renee Nicole Goode was shot. right after, so she gets shot and then she's turning her car and then

Alyssa Burgart (54:18)
Yes.

Arghavan (54:25)
Also the ICE agent shoots her again after she's clearly like far and away, like going down the road away from him. And then she loses control of the vehicle and the car crashes into the car that was parked on the side of the street. After that, there's a physician across the street from where the car has run into this pole. And he says, can I go check a pulse? I'm a physician. One ICE officer says, I don't care. There's another one who seems somewhat more reasonable who says, ⁓

just give us a moment, whatever. But then they say like, there are medics, they say some conflicting things that there are medics on the scene. They're clearly, mean, like you can see it on the video. There's no medics anywhere. And then they say that EMS is coming. According to the witness who took that video that shows the physician there, her name's Emily Heller, it was about 15 minutes before an ambulance came. And there was a physician right there. And I will say, I saw one video of a different angle.

where the physician is just barely starting to move across the street and a number of ICE agents came at him with guns drawn. So they refused medical assistance when this woman was dying. Of course, we don't know. Maybe they had already delivered the lethal bullet. Maybe she was already dead. Who knows? They didn't know that though either. And there was a physician there ready and willing to provide medical assistance and they denied her that as she was dying.

The only conclusion I can take from that is that they wanted her to die. And even if you somehow can convince yourself that the guy was at risk in some way, that this ICE agent was at risk, how can anyone possibly in good conscience defend that decision? It's also important to note for folks who haven't watched the video, none of the ICE agents went to check on her either. They did not check on her. They walked away.

And the only time they walked toward her vehicle after that was when civilians who were there tried to go to check on her and give her assistance, and they would not let those folks do it either. And they went to physically obstruct people from doing anything that could potentially be helpful in that moment. And when the ambulance came, they couldn't even pull up to where the car was because the ICE agents had essentially blocked the road. So they had to park their ambulance down the road and then carry some

know, supplies with them and then check on her. At that point, she had already passed and they had to carry her by her limbs because they didn't have a stretcher because they couldn't bring her, yes, because they couldn't bring the ambulance close by. In the meantime, her wife was watching all of this from the sidewalk.

with their dog.

And I just want to, the reason I wanted to bring that up is that that's like an extra level of cruelty. Like whatever narrative you want to spin about why that man shot her, my personal feeling is that he wanted to, but whatever narrative you want to spin about it, to deny someone medical care as they're dying is probably the most cruel thing that I can imagine in that circumstance. And this is the behavior that our federal government is defending.

Alyssa Burgart (57:35)
you

Well, for those who are listening to the pod, won't know, but this was all so disturbing to me that my dog was like, clearly I need to go comfort you. And so my dog has leapt into my lap and is very, happy to be pet because she's like, you're too stressed. Let's think. This is unacceptable. You are my therapy dog. All right. Well.

Arghavan (57:59)
Yeah, you ⁓ need a therapy dogs, is it?

Alyssa Burgart (58:08)
Woof, what a thing to come back to in 2026, huh? Just terrible, terrible. My heart goes out obviously to this woman's entire family and to the folks in Minnesota. mean, I'm sure they all thought they were moving to some real safe, nice place and this is what we get instead.

Arghavan (58:28)
Yeah, mean, I've also seen, I'll just say, because in case it comes up for anybody in the audience, like people have said, well, what was she doing there? It was her neighborhood. That's what she lived there.

Alyssa Burgart (58:37)
She lived there.

Do you know who doesn't live there? The ICE agents. They don't live there.

Arghavan (58:41)
Haha!

Nope. then actually, was like a kind of a little funny story. Maybe the Hilton, there was a Hilton franchise in Minnesota, Minneapolis that the ICE agents had made a reservation at. And that place, that specific hotel said, no, we don't allow ICE agents here. They canceled all of their reservations.

Exactly. for like, right? So for like a hot minute, was like, amazing, I will stay at Hilton Hotels forever. And then very quickly, the Hilton like proper was like, oh no, that's not us. We welcome everyone at our da da. And that place is no longer gonna be one of our franchises. What a swing and a miss Hilton, what a swing and a miss. You had such an opportunity.

Alyssa Burgart (59:17)
⁓ make that a nationwide policy, folks.

I was about to be a customer for life. Now, well, that's really bummer. That's a real bummer.

Arghavan (59:40)
Right?

It is a real bummer and really poor decision making on the part of Hilton But anyway.

Alyssa Burgart (59:48)
Well, listen, now that we're both, well, I don't know, I'm really stressed out now. Let's do take two and call me in the morning. Yeah, well, I know, me too, but I know. Okay, take two and call me in the morning. So for everybody who is super stressed out because 2026 is already turning out to be a banner year, what do you recommend people do to amuse themselves or entertain themselves?

Arghavan (59:55)
I am stressed out all the time. Form of stress. ⁓ yes, let's talk about something positive.

There is a woman named, I don't know how she pronounces it, maybe Georgie, G-E-O-R-G-I, Georgie Arthur, and we'll put the link in the show notes on Twitter, who is acting out different song lyrics, which is, you know, an interesting idea on its own. But the one that really got me was, you know, that line from, it's a song by Fun, think, and it's, Sometimes I wish that my lips could build a castle.

Alyssa Burgart (1:00:22)
Okay.

⁓ uh-huh. Sometimes

I wish that my lips could build a castle. Yeah, there's something like

Arghavan (1:00:49)
Sometimes

I wish they'd just fall off is the next line. Anyway, it's a weird thought but she Decides that she's gonna do the lips building a castle apart

Alyssa Burgart (1:00:53)
It's a very weird song, yeah.

Arghavan (1:01:03)
and so she takes like little cubes ⁓ that she has in her home and she puts her hands behind her back and she builds a castle with her lips and ⁓ and and that includes some little you know the like triangular i think they're they're a cone in in real life but like in a 2d thing they'd be like a triangle so she she takes some paper and folds it into like these triangular pieces anyway it's hilarious she's

quite talented. anyway, I recommend that. And then the other thing I just wanted to add a second on, because we need, I feel a little bit more joy these days. I watched One Battle After Another, which is, it's a movie. It's the latest Leonardo DiCaprio movie. There's also, that's fair. No, that's fair. But let me tell you, let me tell you, this is different from a lot of his movies.

Alyssa Burgart (1:01:44)
What's that?

I don't really like him, so I didn't...

Arghavan (1:01:57)
For one thing he does not play a character who is particularly smart or savvy or like likable Even though he really is kind of a mean character, but he's he's you know We're used to seeing him in roles where like rooting for him because he's like strong and good-looking and smart and has a whatever like he's the good guy in a lot of not all of them obviously, but In this movie. He's kind of like you kind of feel sorry for his character like you still

want good things for him because he's like somewhat likable in his own way, but he's also like just so messed up in so many ways. And so it's a different type of role for him. But what I like about the movie, though, is not just that. That's what's different about it for people have feelings about him as an actor. But it's a it's a kind of a surprising, I think maybe people won't feel that way. I thought it was a pretty surprising movie. Like he plays a guy who is a revolutionary, like a leftist rebel type person.

bombing government facilities and things like that. But not like bombing, I should say, like little smaller things. I mean, he does have, he does play with some dynamite. But anyway, so that's the character, but you're, you're mostly seeing him 16 years after that, as he's trying to raise a daughter as a single dad. ⁓ But that life kind of catches up with him and it's, but he's like also not really lucid anymore. Anyway, it's very interesting and it's got some

Unexpected moments of humor in it. Sean Penn is in it. Benicio Del Toro is in it. ⁓ Who else? ⁓ my goodness, the main actress. am I? I'm gonna look it up in a second, but she's amazing. Anyway, I think I appreciated it because it was just a little bit more surprising than a lot of movies that we see and then also had that humor in there and was a different kind of story than what I'm used to seeing. So anyway, I would put a plug in for One Battle After Another.

How about you? What are you recommending?

Alyssa Burgart (1:03:56)
Okay, well, I will check it out.

⁓ Well, as you know, I am a knitter. I'm a crafty, I'm little crafty bitch, okay? ⁓ And so I like to do a lot of craft. I like to sew things. I like to make things. And like, know, lately I've just had so much going on and I'd really kind of not been making anything. And so I really picked up my knitting again. I've been doing that because it, you know, you can't doom scroll when you're knitting. There's no, you're not scrolling.

Arghavan (1:04:04)
You

Alyssa Burgart (1:04:25)
⁓ But what I've really gotten into lately is ⁓ visible mending, which is really fun. like in Japan, there's like Sashiko like the art of visible mending. But I have been learning how to use something called a speed weaver or like a mini loom to fix small holes in things. And if you're not into craft, like you do not need to learn how to do any of this, but I will tell you the videos watching people

Arghavan (1:04:45)
Mm.

Alyssa Burgart (1:04:54)
do these like tiny little looms and like making these tiny patches for clothes, it is very soothing. And so on social media, I'm trying to train my algorithm to just show me people fixing holes in their clothes. That's my commitment for 2026. I wanna see people fix their clothes. That's it.

Arghavan (1:05:01)
Mm-hmm.

That definitely, can see how that would be very soothing actually.

Alyssa Burgart (1:05:18)
So I think that.

Arghavan (1:05:18)
Teyana,

sorry, Teyana Taylor is the name of the actress.

Alyssa Burgart (1:05:22)
⁓ excellent, okay, okay.

Arghavan (1:05:24)
Yeah.

All right. Well, I guess that's it for this week's episode. What a whirlwind. ⁓ If you didn't like what you heard, this has been the diary of a CEO. If you liked it, don't forget to subscribe to The Present Illness. Please, if you can, leave us a review or rating and tell anyone you know that you enjoyed listening or watching our show.

Alyssa Burgart (1:05:44)
You can follow us on all the places, TikTok, Instagram, and now YouTube, at The Present Illness, and you can stay on top of all of our TPI-related news.

Arghavan (1:05:52)
We'll be back next week with more headlines, hot takes and doom scrolling, hopefully wrapped in some laughs.

Alyssa Burgart (1:05:58)
So until then, agitate, hydrate, take a nap, and we'll see you next time on The Present Illness. Production by Arghavan Salles and Alyssa Burgart, editing by Alyssa Burgart social media by Arghavan Salles, original music by Joseph Uphoff, and our disclaimer, don't take medical advice from two random people on a podcast. This shows for informational purposes. It's meant to be fun, and it's certainly not medical advice. So please take your medical questions to a qualified professional.