Hello there audient, How's life? So, for this summer of lovely weather and lovelier news the Tossers bring you the first of a two-part series of pods dealing with A.I. It'll be fun and light, much like this summer! This one was just me and Jake, as Andy and Jack are (surely) having the time of their lives elsewhere.. and we discuss so, so much. What is AI? Sagi argues it's not deserving of its name, giving a bad rap to intelligence, assuming we can indeed create it, that intelligence is within o...
Aug 14, 2025•1 hr 42 min
As promised, our fun episode: pets! Did we end up keeping it G-rated and uncritical, no! Did we find a way to critique the adorable perfection of our feline and canine friends, yes! We also talked about sweet-16 Ponies, crazy cat ladies, imperialism, and Lacan's Imaginary.
Jul 19, 2025•1 hr 38 min
Hello audient! (Jake says we have one more but I know it's still, as always, just you...) So we did an episode about fracking. Missing Jack on this one... We had a lot to say. But it was all pretty depressing. Still, as someone else had probably already said (#nocuck), if you don't open your eyes in the dark they could never get used to it (and see the little light that's left). Fracking is a technology meant to extract oil and gas, not from underground repositories or "pockets," but from rock; ...
Jun 21, 2025•1 hr 34 min
Today we shared 4 of our favorite quotations and discussed them on their own and in relation to each other. We quoted Dorothy Parker, Lex Luthor, Friedrich Nietzsche, Bob Dylan, Marvel Comics, Richard Rorty, Moby Dick, Ru Paul, Jacques Derrida, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Franz Kafka.
Jun 02, 2025•1 hr 47 min
Greetings, audient! This.. was... a long one. We each have our own scar tissue from university encounters, passionate moments of transformation and inspiration experienced alongside sad encounters with hopelessness, mediocrity and slave morality. So this one was more personal. The state of the University - as an institution, as a public good - has been in free fall for quite a while, well before contemporary dictators started slamming it down more forcefully (bullies invariably go for the weaker...
May 18, 2025•1 hr 57 min
Jake can't stop cursing in this episode. We discuss the terribly obnoxious, punch-deserving, smirk that refuses to listen to the Other. Though prevalent especially in the world of Maga punditry, whether it be Zionists smirking at the word genocide, or Michael Knowles donning smarm as his personality, the shit-eating grin is a weaponized rejection of thought. It also reveals the shame and guilt of the would be cocky grinner. Andy thinks about how despairing it is to see this contagious proliferat...
Apr 19, 2025•1 hr 50 min
Audient! This episode imposes upon us (well Jake mostly) the horrors of shoddy writing and bad aesthetics. And yet, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's creation seems to be very much alive. How is that? Why? We get to touch on some long-neglected Star here, Il vaut mieux Lyotard que jamais, hearkening back to its post-structuralist origins. We go back down memory lane to when me and Jake were reading this exact critique of that exact attitude, that time between Analytic philosopher John Searle and the evil...
Mar 31, 2025•1 hr 27 min
You gotta listen to it to believe it. Jake, Sagi, and Andy go Foucault, Nietzsche, Derrida, Lacan and Freud all over Nosferatu's Ass. There's demonic possessions, feminine jouissance, the Marquise de Sade shows up, Sagi defends masculine dignity, Andy introduces the Symbolic of Blood, Jake folds the text inside and out, Dracula is proclaimed the OG gooner, and we couldn't edit out all the laughter.
Mar 11, 2025•1 hr 38 min
Greetings, audient! David Lynch passed away, and Sagi insisted on embarrassing his memory and us by making a tribute pod. Of course an oeuvre analysis is not Tossers style, but we found a nice angle in comparing his The Lost Highway with David Cronenberg's Dead Ringers. Both movies deal in the impasses and monstrosities of masculine desire, a shared theme that reveals a deep, informative, difference between the two directors, each using the literary device of the double in his own film, but in e...
Feb 23, 2025•1 hr 36 min
Welcome to a sad episode about the sad state of our world. If you thought the nerds taking over for the jocks was a sign of liberation, think again. The spiteful nature of the nerds knows no limits and certainly knows even less about care. Referring at times to the now canceled 1984 movie Revenge of the Nerds , we read this fantasy into the new conservative self-made man, the one who "does their own research," but never rereads. Are algorithims and social media inducing us all to live as sociall...
Feb 02, 2025•1 hr 26 min
Hello, audient, We are discussing the NBA's crisis of viewership these days, how to analyze it, where to approach it from, who to blame... Jake takes the side of the NBA "worker"; a late-stage capitalism employee that has already fully adjusted to the true mentality of the sport - personal profit. He also raises the issue of homoeroticism, which becomes particularly resonant with the fantasies of the white man towards the black man's body - othered, mystified and "supercharged." It's a fantasy w...
Jan 25, 2025•1 hr 43 min
Sagi and Jake take on the toxic political masculinity of Jack Bauer on their own. They speak about how the State of Emergency places Jack in a position outside the law, both beast (criminal) and sovereign. In this state Jack finds a Christian faith that ensures that every extra-legal decision he makes will save the lives of pure innocent and good Americans, specifically his erotic yet virginal daughter.
Jan 11, 2025•1 hr 18 min
Dear, stubborn, listener, Are you still there? For our weirdly unlikely 50th Episode -- mine and Jake's Gold Anniversary or something(?) -- we went populist. Donald Trump's re-election is now fact, but the meaning of that fact remains to be articulated, engaged-with. We seem to be in agreement that more than Trump's winning the elections, the Democratic party lost it. Jake calls it 'libtardation;' we think it is a new socio-political category. Were they ever an alternative? Trump's campaign (amo...
Dec 01, 2024•1 hr 35 min
In this episode we discuss the absurdity of the taboo against cultural appropriation. Introducing specific examples like which Halloween costumes to wear, or which recipes you can and cannot cook, the Tossers argue that culture is itself appropriation, and thus the taboo attempts to inhibit something that can never be inhibited. To emphasize this universal necessity of cultural appropriation, we introduce theories of language. Jack introduces Wittgenstein's theory of language games and the impos...
Nov 16, 2024•1 hr 34 min
We all loved a movie, oh, actually Jack hated it. This is a perfect episode, you should listen to it. Aside from withering take downs of the myriad misreadings of Coralie Fargeat's new movie The Substance, we introduce you to the narcissistic split of the melancholic subject. Beginning with Freud and moving to Melanie Klein, we read this movie as a visceral portrayal of the infantile position that clamors for the good breast while being persecuted by the bad one. Andy discusses the metonymic qua...
Oct 21, 2024•1 hr 47 min
With a healthy dose of disdain, we enter the multiverse via the Marvel movie Deadpool and Wolverine and the Oscar-winning movie Everything Everywhere all at Once . Sagi talks about the hollow nostalgia of the cameo, and the way that the characters become something of a Heideggerian standing-reserve for more scenes, more plots, and more revenue. Is Sagi finally doing Marx Grudge? Andy wishes that the multiverse would remain solely a video game construct, ruing the day when Mickey Mouse and Wolver...
Oct 06, 2024•1 hr 24 min
Oh boy... This episode is longer than usual, more contentious, as it addresses the current genocidal violence in Gaza in ways that neither 'the left' nor 'the right,' as they are now called (defined?), would stand behind; except perhaps with a dagger?.. We are both against what Israel is doing in Gaza, and think it ought to stop immediately (which would still be much much too late). Our discussions, our rhetoric, our frameworks of understanding, however, are neither neutral nor universal. They i...
Aug 30, 2024•2 hr 29 min
In a political climate of unbearable urgency, the Tossers ask: "What if we just stopped talking?"
Aug 06, 2024•1 hr 52 min
Hello listener, How's it been? Great, right? Right?.. This episode follows Naomi Klein's recent book Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World , and Errol Morris' 2018 documentary around Steve Bannon, called American Dharma (2018). In both, we get a rare glimpse into the mind of this highly effective manipulator, or enemy, of (social) media; who treats it like a political actor that understands only (algorithmic) violence... It's like being stared in the face by the hard pragmatism of a delusio...
Jun 01, 2024•1 hr 39 min
In this episode, we look at one of the longest running sitcoms in Televisual history (1987-1998), Married... with Children . Ostensibly a misogynistic pigpen ripe for retroactive cancelation, we Tossers find the show delightful and read an unabashed radicality into the relentlessly bitter depiction of the horrors of married life . We bring up the Marxist tradition of family abolition to help think about the show's "study" of a starving lower middle-class family stuck together by money they don't...
Apr 30, 2024•1 hr 35 min
In this episode, we discuss the thought-provoking 2019 New Inquiry essay by Asa Seresin "On Heteropessimism: Heterosexuality is nobody’s personal problem." Andy defends the future of heterosexuality from the sidelines so to say. Jake introduces Lacan's "there is no sexual relation," gets personal, digs his own holes, holds back his tears, and offers the formula "the penis lies too" as a way for men and women to discuss the terror of their mutual performativity. Our guest Anaís steals the show, o...
Apr 08, 2024•1 hr 37 min
Greetings, audient! Thanks for hanging in there. It can't be easy. This episode tackles the Tossers' own Marx Grudge Star -- come to collect its resentful dues. Karma imposes its menacing presence in the form of a book by Daniel Tutt, with the provocative title How to Read Like a Parasite: Why the Left got High on Nietzsche . A unique pleasure it was to host Jamie, who joins us from a more Frankfurt School angle, and helped reign-in Sagi by riposting some of his cheaper jabs at our buddy Karlo. ...
Mar 25, 2024•1 hr 38 min
Sagi has recently learned about the Internet and relations that people have on it. We discuss. Parasocial relations lead us to think about a plague of narcissistic personality disorder that capitalism breeds.
Mar 04, 2024•1 hr 26 min
Welcome back, listener! No joke with the title, some real Hunter Thompson, Bazooko Circus vibes in here And it seems to be spreading beyond the wrestlers, converting everyone in sight. All are engrossed in a spectacle that permits no shadow and emits the meaning of the 'manifest' in all its glory. It is meaning that must be immediate, spectacular, the kind that bypasses judgment and obviates Law (and thought). The kind that can be used to justify shit like violence, or, in this case - as Sagi se...
Feb 18, 2024•1 hr 27 min
The Tossers gave themselves a rather impossible task: prove that Barbie and Oppenheimer are the same movie. In typical Tosser fashion, we try to turn our failure into charm. Our sometimes quiet podcaster Jack comes out of the woodwork to take some heavy hits at Christopher Nolan's directorial chops and to educate Sagi on the reason why teenage girls hate their mothers. Jake is really out to lunch in this one, he tries to talk about the phallus, he quotes other podcasts, and forgets Margot Robbie...
Feb 03, 2024•1 hr 37 min
(*) I refuse to check whether this is/was a porn title. It's finally out, dear listener! Our new episode, long time coming, will take a whack at the concept -- and the social/sexual/political/racial/economic/religious phenomenon (did I miss anything?) -- of cuckoldry. Though Sagi originally suggested it for the obvious purpose of exploring the alt-Right and their repeated "Cuck" accusations towards the left in the United States, Jake had the ludicrous idea that a Shakespeare play that deals with...
Jan 20, 2024•1 hr 32 min
Though absent from the title, we watched Ricky Gervais's "The Invention of Lying" and Jim Carrey's "Liar Liar" for this episode. Mainly as an excuse to discuss whether lying is something like the fundamental human factor. Jake bundled the stars Beast and Sovereign, Pervs 'R Us, and Il vaut mieux Lyotard que jamais together to study Jacques Lacan's famous idea that animals cannot feign a feint, or falsify a falsification. The main idea here being that humans fundamentally lie at their core and an...
Dec 27, 2023•1 hr 40 min
Hello listener, This is a "retoss" of a January 6th (no relation) episode, where we discussed 'From Software' games, particularly Elden Ring, particularly how Sagi sucked at it, which led to his radicalization, with him expressing Souls-phobic, extremist positions.. It's not the first time. In the meantime Sagi went on a journey -- of self-discovery and community discovery -- through the 'Souls-Borne' gamer community, in its Twitch, YouTube and dedicated websites (stayed out of Reddit). He came ...
Oct 14, 2023•1 hr 27 min
Tossers are back. We always come back. This time we compare the "comedy" stylings of Larry David and Louis C.K. The frame for this comparison is that they are both assholes, but they are assholes of a different color: one is Jewish and the other is Catholic. This introduces a discussion on the different way that they interact with the law and also the different way that they make us (or fail to make us) laugh. Jake dangles throughout the episode a complex thesis inspired by the work of Alenka Zu...
Sep 11, 2023•1 hr 38 min
Oh boy... Well Sagi found this obscure blog written by some academic dropout that had an interesting take on Mansplaining (but after listening to this podcast you will have gotten everything of substance in that ode to desperation this guy calls a blog)... Again it's a hard nose dive into the shit, in the hopes of finding a golden shovel. Did we? Time (and death threats) will tell. We discuss mansplaining as an outdated social function of masculinity, and try to affirm it without pandering to it...
Jul 12, 2023•1 hr 23 min
