That line was an absolute gem. I think it's very true that men would be far more tolerant of a woman with opposing political views. (That's if the woman establishes at the beginning that it's not a deal-breaker for her).
You can be assured that if there's a parallel universe where Briahna Joy Gray knocks on my door., I would quickly forget that she's an insufferable SJW.
And yes, Obama's fake black dialect was highly cringe. Both Sarah and Coleman were too young to understand why.
The discussion on "phonies" in this episode hits on something that I think is a significant cultural difference between younger and older generations in the US right now. My generation (Gen X) and older did not want to be phony or "sell out". Authenticity was definitely valued. When I look at Millennials and Gen Z, they seem much more comfortable with inauthenticity. Having significant daylight between your normal self and your online persona seems to be standard. They created a whole new job called "influencer", which seems to entail being a phony and a sellout professionally. Taking videos of yourself acting silly to get views while wearing the clothes or using products that you were clandestinely paid to promote is totally normal. I find it a little gross. Holden Caulfield would be appalled. I think this is a generational shift that is under appreciated and I'd love to hear more analysis of it.
Coleman noted that women today are (supposedly) more liberal than men, and that this is apparently a contrast with prior patterns, where women were (on average) more conservative than men. I wonder, though, just how liberal (in the sense of open, free-wheeling) modern social justice ideology really is. It certainly has something in common with a certain kind of strict, proper, churchy mindset of earlier eras. A woke liberal person today is not so different from a conservative religious person, at least in certain ways.
Unlike with trans issues I am actually a professional expert in alternative medicine; my master's degree is in alternative medicine research and I have some publications and I peer review articles in this area, and I'm working on an integrative medicine certificate through the Andrew Weil center. My general philosophical stance is that alternative medicine is a social construct (as is regular medicine), but in reality there are simply things that work and things that don't.
The steelman case for alternative medicine is that people will naturally gravitate towards things that work, so they may use medicinal plants without understanding chemistry, but will still tend to prefer ones that work (and many of our drugs come from plants whose uses predate modern science). Or they will tend to do body-based therapies that reliably make them feel better like yoga or massage therapy, or they will tend to use meditation techniques that help them live better. In theory, better approaches should win in a free market. It's also the case that many alt med approaches are harder to study than isolated pharmaceutical products. And acupuncture is very interesting; it has a western analog called trigger point dry needling and there are plausible theories that soft tissues are amenable to being manipulated at certain areas in ways that could be therapeutically beneficial. So it may be that there are all sorts of things that do fall under the category of real medicine that aren't recognized as such because they're hard to study or not part of our culture.
The reality is that there is almost certainly an enormous amount of bunk under the alt med label, and that as discussed in the interview, diversion towards woo and away from effective medical treatment can be disastrous (this is widely believed to be what killed Steve Jobs as well).
The cultural phenomena are also very interesting; the whole story about classical "anti-vaxxers" who were all natural, no conventional medicine but just immediately went all in on COVID shots the minute it became politically coded the right way is telling. And if you haven't heard about the whole "science-based medicine" thing, this is a blog run by a surgeon named David Gorski. He put out content extremely hostile to alternative medicine for many years (sometimes reasonably, sometimes strawmanning it in my view). Then they ran a story that was mildly critical of transgender medicine. Then they got some backlash, and retracted the article, published three full-on TRA pieces and promised to "do better", and the surgeon who built his reputation on being a hard line science-based medicine guy immediately went full in on trans ideology and uses the same harshly worded, high and mighty rhetoric he used to deploy against alternative medicine to criticize anyone who disagrees with the maximal queer theory position. It's remarkable to read if you haven't.
I found that blog after getting diagnosed with cancer. I really liked some of it, then saw the spiral of nonsense into transgender stuff and backed away. I’m not so anti regular treatments or alternative, but some stuff seems more obviously bunk than others.
Sure. I had a faculty supervisor who was a homeopathy researcher. I was very clear with her that I did not believe there was any validity to homeopathy. We get along. But there’s a lot of things that I think are total bunk, and even the areas where there might be some legitimate thing I think are often intermingled with a lot of nonsense. For instance, massage is obviously really useful, but massage studios often have all sorts of energy medicine nonsense going on.
What I found interesting about studying this area is that I was allowed to do so with an open mind; to both accept that claims outside of the scientific mainstream might be valid, or even have evidence of such suppressed through hostile action, but also to ask any question and doubt any claim. It seems like that might have been the last bastion of real liberal arts education.
I wish it was possible to have more of those open minded convos these days. Feels like it is either or and even people who claim to do both like those functional oncologists (or whatever they are called) or other functional drs still say some crazy shit with a clear bias.
When I actually entered medical school, we got a survey at the beginning (and at the end) measuring various things including “uncertainty tolerance”. I am used to ambiguity and I have a high level of tolerance for being in complex, shades of gray situations. That simply may not be true of everyone.
I was completely skeptical of post-Lyme syndrome until my dog got it; I have to assume she isn't susceptible to human social contagion or logging in to alternative medicine forums at night behind my back.
The theory (or a theory, anyway) is that it’s not “post-Lyme”, it’s a chronic infection that is hard to detect and hard to cure. Spirochetes (the type of bacteria) are sort of like a virus in that they hide inside of your cells and they are tougher to deal with than a lot of the other common pathogens. I generally believe there’s probably some element of real chronic Lyme, but it’s tough to prove, and I definitely think there’s a lot of psychosomatic illness that gets lumped in there.
So our hosts had a 50/50 chance of guessing that language is centered in the left hemisphere in most people, with the simplistic view being that an area for understanding language (Wernicke's area) is connected to an area for producing speech (Broca's area) by a strand of nerve fibers (the arcuate fasciculus). Perhaps more interestingly, the right hemisphere is preferentially involved with music and vocal tone. So people with certain left hemisphere damage become aphasic, while certain right hemisphere damage causes an inability to understand music (amusia) or to produce appropriately tonal speech (aprosodia). There is obviously more complexity to it and I am not a neurologist.
A corpus callosotomy is not common (I didn't see any patients with it during my time on epileptology), but they are still performed for bad epilepsy. The implications of a split brain are indeed interesting, as are the implications of split functions within a hemisphere. Whatever else one says of Freud, the whole notion that there is no single unitary "self" but instead a conglomeration of vaguely interdependent brain areas is counterintuitive and probably pretty disturbing to most people.
They need to have you on at the end of the podcast as the fact-checker, the way that Tony Reali would come in at the end of PTI back in the 90s. I haven’t watched that show in awhile!
That's actually a great example; for the uninitiated, this was a sports talk show in which two Washington Post columnists would banter back and forth for 28 minutes or so, and then throw it to this third guy in the background for a one minute list of all the things they got wrong, which was blunt and matter-of-fact, but all in the interest of ultimately getting things right.
I'm not trying to say that M+S shouldn't be talking about medical things, or that it would be reasonable to expect them to get everything right in real time, but it is physically painful to listen to someone yadda yadda which brain hemisphere is which when you've actually treated patients with strokes and brain cancers where this matters. So I post.
I think they're the sort of folks who want to be right, which is why I follow them.
Ooh, you're back! Watching now! What would be really great would be if you had the video on Spotify as well, as the feed is still audio only over there! Many thanks again!
I post with the acknowledgment that many folks are triggered by "Tucker Carlson" - please focus on the underlying point, which is that Meghan is far from alone in noticing Obama's irritating condescension.
Regarding heterodox origin stories: I think the arc for young folks like Sarah and Coleman is a little easier to track because their formative years were spent immersed in the internet, particularly social media. They can more easily point to specific incidents that influenced them such as the rise of BLM, MeToo, the reaction to Trump's election, George Floyd, rapid onset gender dysphoria.
For those who are Generation X and older, the arc is a little more jagged, with fits and starts. I suspect that we may have long had some heterodox leanings, but didn't have the language to articulate those leanings and there was no platform to express them. I remember being in college circa 1990 when "political correctness" created a minor culture war that quickly fizzled out. I was a "liberal" who was skeptical of some of the excesses of PC, but didn't know how and where to express that skepticism. The internet has provided us with collaborative spaces that heretofore didn't exist.
I've been looking forward to your return! Coleman did not disappoint. And it was so cool to see you guys sitting in the same room. You all looked put-together and relaxed. Perfect!!!
One thing that fascinated me is how smoothly the audio is edited between recording sessions. It really does sound like it's all recorded at one time, even though I know the intros are recorded separately.
Agree. I've more than once said you don't need video, but I watched about half of this on video and it was a pleasure to watch something so well produced, as well as put faces to the voices I've been hearing for so many months.
Great conversation. I love Coleman Hughes. One of his most admirable qualities (besides his intelligence and careful thought process) is that he doesn't interrupt. When there is a lively conversation natural interruptions will occur, and that's normal and expected, but I still enjoy your interviewing style when you have guests because you let them speak.
People "hate" elites because they want to be elites. Trump was great at placing blame. It was a winning formula for people who like to think that others are the cause of their problems. He definitely knew what buttons to push as Sarah mentioned.
I still have a hard time believing late-stage Lyme disease is real. I remember watching the documentary The Punk Singer about Kathleen Hanna. I remember thinking it's all in her head, and I even thought she was lying about her symptoms.
What was he talking about when he said women used to be more conservative? Women have leaned Democrat for over 40 years in voting record but even before voting, women were always at the forefront of social reform movements, like the temperance movement in the 19th century or the 1890s movement to improve living conditions for immigrants. A female-dominated social justice political landscape seems more of a continuation of women as social reformers even before they were voters.
I would certainly call the temperance movement socially conservative in a contemporary use of the term. Women are more religious and more risk-averse, so depending on how you use the word "conservative", it can make sense. But I don't know what he was thinking when he said that.
Oh yes, true, religiosity was intertwined with a lot of social movements. The women went straight from the revival tents into towns to tell people to quit drinking. Maybe that was what he was thinking. But also, religion and social reform movements seem mutually reinforcing, like in the civil rights movement. Maybe that is why the atheists on the left are the ones most critical of this iteration of the social justice movement, they are averse to the any trappings of a social crusade.
Hi Meghan and Sarah. Wanted to let you know that your podcast is not showing up in my Inbox on Substack. I knew you'd released a new podcast because I got an email, otherwise I wouldn't have been aware of it. Also, if i go into your Substack and try to play the podcast there, I get this message: "Failed to play this media: it may not be supported by this browser." I eventually listened to it on the Apple podcast app - great episode with Coleman Hughes.
Did the full audio only before watching five minutes. Suspect I'll keep it in my ears from here on. For me, the visual distracts/detracts in a way I didn't anticipate.
“It’s like having an STD” 😂👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻
That line was an absolute gem. I think it's very true that men would be far more tolerant of a woman with opposing political views. (That's if the woman establishes at the beginning that it's not a deal-breaker for her).
You can be assured that if there's a parallel universe where Briahna Joy Gray knocks on my door., I would quickly forget that she's an insufferable SJW.
And yes, Obama's fake black dialect was highly cringe. Both Sarah and Coleman were too young to understand why.
Thank you for calling out the cringe! It's one of those things white people can *kind of* hear but definitely don't comment on ;)
The discussion on "phonies" in this episode hits on something that I think is a significant cultural difference between younger and older generations in the US right now. My generation (Gen X) and older did not want to be phony or "sell out". Authenticity was definitely valued. When I look at Millennials and Gen Z, they seem much more comfortable with inauthenticity. Having significant daylight between your normal self and your online persona seems to be standard. They created a whole new job called "influencer", which seems to entail being a phony and a sellout professionally. Taking videos of yourself acting silly to get views while wearing the clothes or using products that you were clandestinely paid to promote is totally normal. I find it a little gross. Holden Caulfield would be appalled. I think this is a generational shift that is under appreciated and I'd love to hear more analysis of it.
Coleman noted that women today are (supposedly) more liberal than men, and that this is apparently a contrast with prior patterns, where women were (on average) more conservative than men. I wonder, though, just how liberal (in the sense of open, free-wheeling) modern social justice ideology really is. It certainly has something in common with a certain kind of strict, proper, churchy mindset of earlier eras. A woke liberal person today is not so different from a conservative religious person, at least in certain ways.
Good point
Unlike with trans issues I am actually a professional expert in alternative medicine; my master's degree is in alternative medicine research and I have some publications and I peer review articles in this area, and I'm working on an integrative medicine certificate through the Andrew Weil center. My general philosophical stance is that alternative medicine is a social construct (as is regular medicine), but in reality there are simply things that work and things that don't.
The steelman case for alternative medicine is that people will naturally gravitate towards things that work, so they may use medicinal plants without understanding chemistry, but will still tend to prefer ones that work (and many of our drugs come from plants whose uses predate modern science). Or they will tend to do body-based therapies that reliably make them feel better like yoga or massage therapy, or they will tend to use meditation techniques that help them live better. In theory, better approaches should win in a free market. It's also the case that many alt med approaches are harder to study than isolated pharmaceutical products. And acupuncture is very interesting; it has a western analog called trigger point dry needling and there are plausible theories that soft tissues are amenable to being manipulated at certain areas in ways that could be therapeutically beneficial. So it may be that there are all sorts of things that do fall under the category of real medicine that aren't recognized as such because they're hard to study or not part of our culture.
The reality is that there is almost certainly an enormous amount of bunk under the alt med label, and that as discussed in the interview, diversion towards woo and away from effective medical treatment can be disastrous (this is widely believed to be what killed Steve Jobs as well).
The cultural phenomena are also very interesting; the whole story about classical "anti-vaxxers" who were all natural, no conventional medicine but just immediately went all in on COVID shots the minute it became politically coded the right way is telling. And if you haven't heard about the whole "science-based medicine" thing, this is a blog run by a surgeon named David Gorski. He put out content extremely hostile to alternative medicine for many years (sometimes reasonably, sometimes strawmanning it in my view). Then they ran a story that was mildly critical of transgender medicine. Then they got some backlash, and retracted the article, published three full-on TRA pieces and promised to "do better", and the surgeon who built his reputation on being a hard line science-based medicine guy immediately went full in on trans ideology and uses the same harshly worded, high and mighty rhetoric he used to deploy against alternative medicine to criticize anyone who disagrees with the maximal queer theory position. It's remarkable to read if you haven't.
I found that blog after getting diagnosed with cancer. I really liked some of it, then saw the spiral of nonsense into transgender stuff and backed away. I’m not so anti regular treatments or alternative, but some stuff seems more obviously bunk than others.
Sure. I had a faculty supervisor who was a homeopathy researcher. I was very clear with her that I did not believe there was any validity to homeopathy. We get along. But there’s a lot of things that I think are total bunk, and even the areas where there might be some legitimate thing I think are often intermingled with a lot of nonsense. For instance, massage is obviously really useful, but massage studios often have all sorts of energy medicine nonsense going on.
What I found interesting about studying this area is that I was allowed to do so with an open mind; to both accept that claims outside of the scientific mainstream might be valid, or even have evidence of such suppressed through hostile action, but also to ask any question and doubt any claim. It seems like that might have been the last bastion of real liberal arts education.
I wish it was possible to have more of those open minded convos these days. Feels like it is either or and even people who claim to do both like those functional oncologists (or whatever they are called) or other functional drs still say some crazy shit with a clear bias.
When I actually entered medical school, we got a survey at the beginning (and at the end) measuring various things including “uncertainty tolerance”. I am used to ambiguity and I have a high level of tolerance for being in complex, shades of gray situations. That simply may not be true of everyone.
I was completely skeptical of post-Lyme syndrome until my dog got it; I have to assume she isn't susceptible to human social contagion or logging in to alternative medicine forums at night behind my back.
The theory (or a theory, anyway) is that it’s not “post-Lyme”, it’s a chronic infection that is hard to detect and hard to cure. Spirochetes (the type of bacteria) are sort of like a virus in that they hide inside of your cells and they are tougher to deal with than a lot of the other common pathogens. I generally believe there’s probably some element of real chronic Lyme, but it’s tough to prove, and I definitely think there’s a lot of psychosomatic illness that gets lumped in there.
So our hosts had a 50/50 chance of guessing that language is centered in the left hemisphere in most people, with the simplistic view being that an area for understanding language (Wernicke's area) is connected to an area for producing speech (Broca's area) by a strand of nerve fibers (the arcuate fasciculus). Perhaps more interestingly, the right hemisphere is preferentially involved with music and vocal tone. So people with certain left hemisphere damage become aphasic, while certain right hemisphere damage causes an inability to understand music (amusia) or to produce appropriately tonal speech (aprosodia). There is obviously more complexity to it and I am not a neurologist.
A corpus callosotomy is not common (I didn't see any patients with it during my time on epileptology), but they are still performed for bad epilepsy. The implications of a split brain are indeed interesting, as are the implications of split functions within a hemisphere. Whatever else one says of Freud, the whole notion that there is no single unitary "self" but instead a conglomeration of vaguely interdependent brain areas is counterintuitive and probably pretty disturbing to most people.
They need to have you on at the end of the podcast as the fact-checker, the way that Tony Reali would come in at the end of PTI back in the 90s. I haven’t watched that show in awhile!
That's actually a great example; for the uninitiated, this was a sports talk show in which two Washington Post columnists would banter back and forth for 28 minutes or so, and then throw it to this third guy in the background for a one minute list of all the things they got wrong, which was blunt and matter-of-fact, but all in the interest of ultimately getting things right.
I'm not trying to say that M+S shouldn't be talking about medical things, or that it would be reasonable to expect them to get everything right in real time, but it is physically painful to listen to someone yadda yadda which brain hemisphere is which when you've actually treated patients with strokes and brain cancers where this matters. So I post.
I think they're the sort of folks who want to be right, which is why I follow them.
Ooh, you're back! Watching now! What would be really great would be if you had the video on Spotify as well, as the feed is still audio only over there! Many thanks again!
Actually, if you feel it might affect your hit count on YouTube, leave it as it is!
At about the 29 minute mark, Adam Carolla plays a clip from Tucker Carlson mocking Obama's black preacher schtick.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZmRL3bx1El4
I post with the acknowledgment that many folks are triggered by "Tucker Carlson" - please focus on the underlying point, which is that Meghan is far from alone in noticing Obama's irritating condescension.
Regarding heterodox origin stories: I think the arc for young folks like Sarah and Coleman is a little easier to track because their formative years were spent immersed in the internet, particularly social media. They can more easily point to specific incidents that influenced them such as the rise of BLM, MeToo, the reaction to Trump's election, George Floyd, rapid onset gender dysphoria.
For those who are Generation X and older, the arc is a little more jagged, with fits and starts. I suspect that we may have long had some heterodox leanings, but didn't have the language to articulate those leanings and there was no platform to express them. I remember being in college circa 1990 when "political correctness" created a minor culture war that quickly fizzled out. I was a "liberal" who was skeptical of some of the excesses of PC, but didn't know how and where to express that skepticism. The internet has provided us with collaborative spaces that heretofore didn't exist.
I've been looking forward to your return! Coleman did not disappoint. And it was so cool to see you guys sitting in the same room. You all looked put-together and relaxed. Perfect!!!
One thing that fascinated me is how smoothly the audio is edited between recording sessions. It really does sound like it's all recorded at one time, even though I know the intros are recorded separately.
Agree. I've more than once said you don't need video, but I watched about half of this on video and it was a pleasure to watch something so well produced, as well as put faces to the voices I've been hearing for so many months.
Great conversation. I love Coleman Hughes. One of his most admirable qualities (besides his intelligence and careful thought process) is that he doesn't interrupt. When there is a lively conversation natural interruptions will occur, and that's normal and expected, but I still enjoy your interviewing style when you have guests because you let them speak.
People "hate" elites because they want to be elites. Trump was great at placing blame. It was a winning formula for people who like to think that others are the cause of their problems. He definitely knew what buttons to push as Sarah mentioned.
I still have a hard time believing late-stage Lyme disease is real. I remember watching the documentary The Punk Singer about Kathleen Hanna. I remember thinking it's all in her head, and I even thought she was lying about her symptoms.
Did the Race to Dinner thing fall through?
Next ep!
-S
What was he talking about when he said women used to be more conservative? Women have leaned Democrat for over 40 years in voting record but even before voting, women were always at the forefront of social reform movements, like the temperance movement in the 19th century or the 1890s movement to improve living conditions for immigrants. A female-dominated social justice political landscape seems more of a continuation of women as social reformers even before they were voters.
I would certainly call the temperance movement socially conservative in a contemporary use of the term. Women are more religious and more risk-averse, so depending on how you use the word "conservative", it can make sense. But I don't know what he was thinking when he said that.
Oh yes, true, religiosity was intertwined with a lot of social movements. The women went straight from the revival tents into towns to tell people to quit drinking. Maybe that was what he was thinking. But also, religion and social reform movements seem mutually reinforcing, like in the civil rights movement. Maybe that is why the atheists on the left are the ones most critical of this iteration of the social justice movement, they are averse to the any trappings of a social crusade.
Hi Meghan and Sarah. Wanted to let you know that your podcast is not showing up in my Inbox on Substack. I knew you'd released a new podcast because I got an email, otherwise I wouldn't have been aware of it. Also, if i go into your Substack and try to play the podcast there, I get this message: "Failed to play this media: it may not be supported by this browser." I eventually listened to it on the Apple podcast app - great episode with Coleman Hughes.
Did the full audio only before watching five minutes. Suspect I'll keep it in my ears from here on. For me, the visual distracts/detracts in a way I didn't anticipate.
He's always a fruitful balm of a listen.
Glad you're back.
Thanks.