Dating, Gender, & Virtue Signaling with Sarah Haider & Meghan Daum [S4 Ep.13]

He is a good friend, and he is a good friend. And he is a good friend. I can't believe I really am a good friend. I sleep with some beer. What? I sleep with some beer? Yes, it is, but I have to sleep with some beer. This is the way that we are eating our house. We are going to be eating our house. I am going to be eating our house. What do we do? We are going to be eating our house. I am going to be eating our house. I am going to be eating our house. I sleep with some beer. I sleep with some beer. Yeah. Don't I sleep with some beer? Hip-hop is always called out to any qualities in America. But even within it, nothing's ever been equal. This season, Lauda Nariya Podcast is tackling sexism, homophobia, and all the unwritten rules that hold the entire culture back. Listen to the Lauda Nariya Podcast from NPR Music, or wherever you get your podcasts. Forges and fakers always in the end get discovered like a young Kobe. And the Lakers, my shit is sizzling and bubbling. Who said it's cold? That's mistaken. Never forgiven my mother for this. There's no much he gave me. Remember, Cheff was a trumpeter more than he was a baker. A name could be deceiving, right? Connecting left and right, because I'm a fucking free to type. If life is like a box of chocolates, I need a bite. So let me end by saying I got what I need in life. I can't see a peaking sight. Keeping my chinos nice and trying to find a name that I haven't defeated twice. The track you just heard is an excerpt from my brand new album Amor Fatih. You may remember the music video as I put out last year, blasphemy, straight A's, and forward. This new album features all three of those singles plus seven brand new songs. Now I put my all into this project and it's a real representation of my passion for music. So if you want to listen to the whole thing, click in the description, or search cold X-man on Spotify, Apple Music, or wherever you listen to music. Now back to the podcast. Welcome to another episode of Conversations with Coleman. My guests today are Sarah Hader and Megan Downe, who co-host the podcast called A Special Place in Hell. Sarah Megan and I talk about the difficulty of dating in New York City when you have heterodox politics. I talk about how the death of my mother influenced my attitude towards science and alternative medicine. We talk about social contagion and gender dysphoria. We talk about Sarah Hader's origin story as an ex-Muslim. We talk about Megan's origin story as a hater of phoniness. We talk about Robin Hanson's great book, The Elephant in the Brain and the evolutionary logic of virtue signaling. We talk about split brain patients. We talk about the bad incentives facing public intellectuals. We talk about lab leak and much more. I really recommend you all check out their podcast called A Special Place in Hell. If you like what I'm doing here, then you're probably going to like what they're doing over there. So without further ado, Sarah Hader and Megan Downe. All right. How are you guys doing? How are you doing? I'm great. Who's show is this? Who's interviewing who? So you thought it was your show. I thought it was my show. Let's just make it both of our shows. Well, you're the one in the beanie. That's true. So you must be the host. I'm dressing my podcasting uniform as a male. Did you only start wearing a beanie when you started podcasting? Well, it's actually you have to. It's part of the regulation in New York to get your podcasting license as a man. They give you, they hand you your beanie at the DMV. We don't qualify for licenses yet. Not yet. Not in the podcasters world. Well, did you see this article recently in the New York Times about why you should not date a podcast, bro? Yes. I heard about it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Saying you have a podcast is like the biggest turn off for women in the dating market right now. And you should basically just stay away from podcasting guys. It was, I felt very attacked. I felt very erased by that article. Yes. I saw that you tweeted that. I did. It was why a woman who was talking about how she dated a guy, but she forgave him for being a pocket or he didn't reveal that he had a podcast until they had been dating for a while. She catfished him as a podcaster. She did? Or he catfished her rather by saying he wasn't a podcast, bro. And then turned out to be a podcast, bro. And guys don't include it in their bio and all this stuff. What's the wrong about it? Like what? Well, I mean, the idea is like if you have a podcast as a guy, then you're and your tape. Okay. Yeah. Mm hmm. And you're a misogynist and you're horrible and you can't find the clitoris and all this stuff. I mean, if you spend too much time podcasting, you can't find any human body part. I don't understand these kinds of like articles that are just one woman's dating experience, you know, like she had a bad date and now it's an article. Yeah. And now it's an article about the whole world. And it's true about all of society because on the other hand, I felt like in a way, maybe this makes it kind of dangerous and sexy to be a podcaster. It might actually backfire. Like if you tell women, oh, you should, you shouldn't date this one type of guy. They're too dangerous. They're like in a way that raises my capital. Yeah. So what about like Michael Barbero and Ezra Klein, like their podcasters, right? And they, so maybe this is like, but their podcasters that hard like kind of hard signal their feminism in some ways, which so they wouldn't really be included in this nor would I. I mean, I'm not like a shock jock podcaster type, but you have like heterodox opinions like us. So actually, like one of the things I think like I was really curious about and want to talk to you about is, you know, what's what's it been like for you as a young guy in a very liberal, like liberal city who is kind of a star in this heterodox space and do people like do what's it like to be like, is it hard for them to get dates? Is that what you're asking? Kind of. Yeah. I have a girlfriend, but I was single for quite a while during this period of my life. And I would. So like in New York City, it's not necessarily an advantage to be a writer and podcaster with the opinions that I have because basically what would happen is this. I would go on a date, right? I would match with somebody on Tinder or hinge, go on a first date and just be basically waiting for the shoe to drop in terms of I googled you. I saw you testify before Congress. I read your article for Quilla. I read your article from New York Times or whatever. I disagree with it. Why do you think racism doesn't exist, which I've never said? I had I had one back when I was in college, just probably would have been closer to the time I met you like four or five years ago. I matched with a girl at Columbia who went to Columbia as well. And she liked a jazz group that I play in. She was like a huge fan of the Mingus Big Band, which is this jazz group I've been playing in downtown in New York since I was 16. So I was like, wow, this is amazing. She's already a fan of something and it just came up naturally and I happened to be. So I was like, oh, this is going to be great. I'm in, easy money. So we were continuing to talk and eventually she says, oh, what else do you do? I say, oh, I'm a writer. She reads my article, says, sorry, I cannot go on a date with you because I can't be with someone. I can't go on a date with someone who thinks racism isn't real. So it's a double it's a double life. It's a double life. Then like right in the beginning, just like as you match with somebody, you're like, hey, this is kind of an ethical thing. It's like having an STD. Should you disclose it? Heterodox is kind of like an STD. Because your opinions do spread through sex. Just like STDs. That's true. Through exposure, definitely. You could probably be sued if you give your heterodoxy to somebody else without disclosing it first. Yeah. If you make someone a Republican, that's like a. All those people that I've turned on to the fifth column over the years, they could still come back and sue me. They could do class action. It's true. It's true. So wait, this girl, so you hadn't even gone on a date? We hadn't even gone on a date, but she was super excited initially to go on a date with me because I was like in this band that she loved, right? She said, I asked her like, oh, what is your favorite jazz group? And it happened to be the one that I was in, right? And not even that was enough to counteract the political ideology difference. On the other hand, being as a young man, having a career that is far more advanced than most young men, my age is definitely appealing to women and like having my quote unquote shit together to the degree that I do, whatever degree that is, that's definitely, that was definitely a plus when I was single. So is a double edged sword? Yeah. Do you, okay, how am I going to ask this? But do you feel like female podcasters are really hot? Like, would they be a big commodity or no? Is it like kind of kind of like a turn off to me or to anybody? I think so. Yeah. Because it depends your persona when you're podcasting. Like you could have a very attractive persona when podcasting. Well, not really. As a woman. I think you could. I think it's like being a conservative woman, you know, like it doesn't really, it doesn't harm you that much. It doesn't harm you the way you think men would like it. I have a friend, my friend, a very good friend of mine dates a female podcaster and she is a big podcast and I don't, I've never gotten the sense that that's like a demerit. Right. So, but I feel like heterodox women would have an advantage because the men would be relieved that they weren't going to be me-tude by her or something like that. This is probably true. I mean, I think it's definitely a real, well, first of all, there's a huge gender component to political ideology. Which my understanding is that used to go in the opposite direction. Like women at one point were on average more conservative than men many, many decades ago. And at least for younger Americans, that profile is flipped, which is interesting if true. But I do think it's if I understand that somebody is, if somebody says something on a first date that indicates to me that they're not like a censorious woke person, that I definitely breathe easier. And I remember another day that I went on when I was in college and we tried to go to some restaurant, ended up going to Chipotle, which is whatever, not my best. Look, it's college. I'm amazed you would go to any restaurant. And as an undergraduate, you're like going to take you girls at a restaurant? And like five minutes into it, we're talking about, oh, what are you into? What am I? And she says, I'm writing a thesis on the intersection of racism and capitalism. Yeah, that's not going to get out of there. Oh, God. Am I going to be retuned by being in that room with her? Yeah. It's too late. That's like a mad lib. Like I am writing a thesis on the intersection between blank and blank. Intersection, like that word, it's one of those words, like marginalized intersection. Like you see it anywhere and you know that like they've absorbed the language, so they've probably absorbed the ideology and just need to get out of there. I think it's like, I only dated for like, like I was only in the dating space for maybe like two months before I got into another dating space relationship. And that's it. And yeah, I'm what dating space. What the day is? Is it the day? The day of the day? That is so the day of the moment that you would call it. Okay. That it would be called the dating space. The dating universe. The dating scene. Okay. That's what we said in my day. So I and then I signed up for a website like before there were apps where when they were just like online like dating websites and I put in atheist and I remember at first I didn't I didn't add that in there. I just put like not religious or something and then I changed it to atheist and I remember my inbox was suddenly flooded with like all these guys and then I realized oh there's like no women that are willing to put that on their profile and there was like a whole horde of men that are like oh my gosh. Yeah. So amazing wonderful. Yeah. Yeah. It was crazy. So I think that it's a big. Like I think so like because left wing men aren't afraid of you and right wing men aren't afraid of you. Right. You know what I mean? Right. Right. If somebody puts their their pronouns in their profile do you overlook that because I think sometimes men feel that they have to or they're so clueless. Like if they're not aware of the stuff at all if the app asks for the pronouns they're just gonna be like oh yeah he had whatever depends what a man is looking for. If you're just looking for casual hookups I think most men are pretty happy for you to like believe whatever. It doesn't matter. Like I have a friend. This is one of my favorite stories. One of my best friends from college he is a conservative and he used to have a picture of Reagan in his dorm room right but when he would bring a girl over which was often in those days he would he would turn it over. And it would be a picture of Bernie Sanders. Exactly. He would get laid instantly. Yeah. But then if he liked a girl and it was like couple they went on a couple dates eventually he would choose the moment to like put it back. Put it back. Or reveal himself and see whether he was accepted or not and that was the crucial moment. But in those first few instances I think most guys who aren't looking for something serious are just happy to say like oh look you got pronouns in your brow maybe I'll make a little innocent joke about it because like I'm not trying to have a Socratic dialogue with you. Like for example that the girl is issuing to like the intersection of racism and capitalism I remember I just had this moment where I was like am I going to tell her about all my critiques of the concept that racism and capitalism are linked from my hundreds of pages of reading and like furious 30 page self Google docs on this specific issue or am I just going to keep the piece and not you know not text her again. And I think I chose the second one because I was like. Now are these like white girls who. This was a black girl. This was a black girl. Okay. But do you have like the other one was a white girl that canceled on me. Do you think that you were tending to get like some woke white girls who wanted to date you because you were a black guy? A little bit. Yeah. I mean I that thought has been in the back of my head at times if I try not to you know like prejudge anyone but I definitely do think that that's like a feather in their cap. Yeah exactly and then lo and behold you meet Coleman he is you're waiting to get like this like. You're like a dog to piss your daddy off and then it's and then it's Coleman he is like. And the daddy's with love you. Yeah exactly exactly. Exactly. Yeah. Oh my gosh. I'm glad I don't have to deal with that. Oh my gosh. That sounds horrible. Well also big just as a woman I don't think men care that much like regardless of it so long as you accept their politics like you tell me about how you feel about these if that girl the intersectionality of whatever racism capitalism woman if she said you know what this is what I think it's cool what you think. Yeah. You know I wouldn't care. I wouldn't care. It might even be nice to have that kind of like a like a deep bond and but have a difference of opinion. Do you think you can handle that though? Like if the person could you be long term with somebody who wasn't really. It would really depend how they. How same. And what style they held their opinions and in what style they engaged. Yeah. I because I interviewed John McWhorter on my podcast a couple years ago and he was sort of recently divorced and I and he was like dating and I asked him like could you be in a relationship with somebody who wasn't like really into this stuff or like you know very much opposed to you and and I think he said it's like I don't want to be I don't want to feel like I have to censor myself like I don't want to be walking on eggshells and I and if I'm going to be like you know cooking dinner and having a glass of wine I want to be able to like talk about my day and all the people who came after me. That's like a feature of modern society. I think people used to have disagreements in their relationship but there was no sense that you had to censor yourself right. I mean I know my parents growing up were very diametrically opposed on politics. My dad was more of like an iron Rand libertarian and my mom was literally a communist. My mom was a Marxist. She was reading Marx and Durkheim to me when I was five years old like indoctrinated me. That's child abuse. Like Fox News is worse nightmare. It was great though. She was reading dark common Marx to you when you were five. Absolutely. Was it like social as a baby? Yeah. It was literally like communist baby. It was like communist baby. Did it rhyme? I mean like were there pictures? No she was reading me like out of Das Kapitel. I didn't know. I still don't understand Das Kapitel. This explains. Okay. Did you have siblings? Yeah I have two sisters. And are they like this? Are you just a freak in there? Are they into this stuff too? Are they like are they heterodox? No. No I mean one is sort of democratic socialist I would say like AOC broadly and the others kind of difficult to pin down. Are you the oldest? No I'm the youngest. Oh interesting. So one of the things, so Sarah and I were talking about this. So one of the things we wanted to ask you is sort of like what is your heterodox origin story? Because I feel like everybody has something that kind of led them to thinking in a more counterintuitive way or anything like that. And you actually, I want to let you take this but I did, I heard an interview with you where you were talking about something and I was like that's what it is. And so you can answer and then I'll tell you what I think it is. Tell you if it's the same thing I said that it's funny. I wonder if my story will be different because sometimes on different days you write a different narrative of your life. Well you didn't say it was your origin story but you said something about your life and I thought that's why he is the way he is. So I think I would say two factors seem significant to me. Significant. I grew up in a very racially diverse town where I had friends of every race and I did not think of them as belonging to a race. And I naturally rebelled against the significance I think given to race later in life as a result of growing up in that way. And secondly I think as a teenager my main passion was music and jazz in particular which is extremely racially diverse and we're kind of like the army or something. You end up becoming extremely close friends with people of very different races and even other parts of the world. And that background being like my whole life then being thrust into like a post 2014 great awakening era hotbed of Wokism at Columbia. And all these people telling me like I'm a victim, racism is everywhere. It was a sudden, it was a level of concern about racism that was greater than what I experienced from my black family that grew up in Jim Crow. Kids would be talking more pessimistically about society than my grandparents. And something seemed just like that broke me. I just had to understand what is going on here because this is just an insane phenomenon. And you were an undergraduate around this time in 2014? Yeah. Wow. That answers part of the question. Okay, well this is curious. Okay, I don't want to like. I was also bitten by a spider when I was 16. Really? No, that's my origin story. I was bitten by a vampire myself. Support for conversations with Coleman is brought to you by Manscaped. Take your grooming game to the next level with Manscaped Precision Engineered Tools. Performance Package 4.0 is the Ultimate Men's Hygiene Bundle. Join over 7 million men worldwide who trust Manscaped with this exclusive offer for you. 20% off and free worldwide shipping with the code Coleman at Manscaped.com. The Performance Package 4.0 has arrived and it's a game changer. In this package, you'll find their lawnmower 4.0 trimmer, weed whacker, ear and nose hair trimmer, crop preserver, deodorant, crop reviver, toner, performance boxer briefs, and a travel bag. Lawnmower 4.0 trimmer is the future of grooming. 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That's Indeed.com slash conversations, terms and conditions apply. Cost per application pricing not available for everyone. Need to hire? You need Indeed. No, I heard you talk and I can't remember where this was. So you, your mom passed away, right? You lost your mom to cancer when you were a teenager? Okay, I heard you talking about how she was relying on alternative medicine a lot. And I don't know what the situation was, but I was listening to you talk and I thought, and you sounded a little bit like you were frustrated that she had maybe over relied on that or not gotten this Western, modern treatment that might have helped her. And I thought, I wonder if that is what is informing a lot of the like allergy to bullshit? I think that's right. I mean, that's an aspect I often don't think about because it's painful. But yes, my mom got very deeply into alternative medicine probably around 2010. She got cancer and then went into remission and then she started getting deeply into alternative medicine, especially Ayurvedic medicine, which is ancient Indian medicine. And it was really like her main passion in life and she got kind of deeper and deeper into it and more and more radicalized to the point where she changed her main doctor to this guy who still has a practice in New York actually, Dr. Ali, who has like very bizarre theories about, you know, like he believes like all chronic diseases have the same cause, which is like lack of oxygen metabolism in the cells and it can be solved by like deep breathing, like anything from like a lupus to cancer to diabetes, like all of these have one cause. And so she got deeply into this guy and this guy did not do, did not believe in scans in typical kinds of scans. And so she started, he didn't run any tests on her, right? And as a result, her cancer came back long before she detected it. And at that point, it spread to her skeleton and she only detected it because the way I remember it at least is because she said she was in pain. And I told her to go to a chiropractor because it worked for my friend. Chiropractor did normal scans, any Western medical doctor would have done and found cancer all over her body, right? Where she had been going to this guy for years and at the end of her life, she felt of bitter and in some sense betrayed that she could have lived longer had she had this guy been better and so I do blame that for her premature death. Who knows how long she would have lived otherwise, but I definitely blame the uncritical hatred of Western science, Western scientific institutions and all the rest for that. And I also feel there's a really strong value in just insisting on the truth and all of that. So I think that's definitely part of it. Yeah, because it seems to me like, you know, we all sort of have our areas, whether it's race or gender or free speech, like sort of, you know, free thinking movement has been free thinking kind of ecosystem has many sort of like subsets of interest. But ultimately, it's about hating bullshit, you know, no matter what your particular bugaboo is. Especially good sounding bullshit. Yeah. Others I could not I could not bring myself to to actually look at that doctor. I couldn't bring myself for years to look into his philosophy and of the guy that was medicating my mom for years. And then some sometime a year or two ago, I just couldn't sleep one night for some reason. And I watched like a hundred of his Vimeo lectures to understand his philosophy and it was very it was very difficult to thought that my mother had been duped by this guy and that that had cost her potentially years of her life. And this guy is a very kind of charismatic critic of Western medicine. And I see how especially someone who's had trouble with the medical system, which is like a lot of people because there are so many problems actually with our medical system, and who had bad experiences, horrible doctors, surgical errors, all kinds of crazy stuff can go to that extreme. But it nevertheless is extremely dangerous. And I definitely think that's a that's a part of my origin story. Did you ever reach out to him or like say I mean, I would have. I have so much bile for this person. I like, I don't think that I want to. I don't know that I could engage with him without wanting to destroy him. That's hard. No, I was surrounded by like pseudoscience stuff, but it wasn't, you know, I guess maybe it's like a South Asian thing or like a non-Western thing. But you know, in in Pakistan at least, and I think also like in India, it's like there's a fusion of all kinds of different ideologies and people aren't thinking clearly enough to be like this contradicts this, you know, so you maybe you go to, you know, homey, like homeopathy and you you go to that kind of doctor and they give you some sugar pills and you go to a Western doctor, maybe if you have the money and then you take, you know, you like see what they have to say and take whatever they have to give you is I don't know if like my parents ever saw it as necessarily something that contradicted in their minds, but I remember always having all these like little sugar pills like, you know, like those, I don't know if you really. Yeah, yeah, because of the show. Well, yeah, they're just sugar pills. That's all they are. That's all like that your parents gave you or that you would get from a doctor when you they took you to a doctor both like they knew doctors who practice like homeopathy in Pakistan and also in the United States they found like people who could do that and I remember, you know, I was sick and they would give me these things and they tasted really good and I actually loved that medicine. So I would like pretend to be like a little sub-sick and smarty. Yeah, it was just it was like candy and I remember one time I woke up in the middle of the night, my cousin was over, she was taller and I had her. I was like, let's go get some like let's go get some. And we went to the cabinet, I like she held me on her shoulders. We got like a big thing of medicine and like gourged on it. And nothing happened. You didn't think you were going to have an overdose that this proves that. I was like four or five. It was like a kid and she was like not much older than me. And so obviously we just kids you're going into the medicine cabinet and nothing happened and years later, I heard, you know, the phrase like the dose makes the poison. And I remember thinking, why wasn't that poison? Like, why did nothing happen to me? Like, oh, okay, because there's no dose. There's no it's not medicine. Nothing there is working at all on any level. So did your parents know that they were sugar pills? No, they didn't think about it. They didn't think about it. Something else. And they even call them doctors. So it's like doctor, whatever, you know, like who our local like doctor. So in addition to the Western doctors, they have Western doctors, but Western doctors are expensive. Like those kinds of medical doctors are expensive, you know, both here and there. So this was like another alternative and you see what they have to say and you take and it can't hurt. That's what that's what they that's how they approached it. And it's amazing the power of placebo and no, see, Bo and just the power of suggestibility in everyday life. It's just it's incredible. Like, sometimes I think I have a bit of a complex about whether I get enough sleep. Like if I get I only got like four hours of sleep last night. And usually I feel fine right now. But usually when I when that happens, I'm just in my head all day about, oh, I'm not going to be at my best for this podcast. You know, with Sarah and Megan. I like, why did I why did I stay up? Why do you want to go for hours? Exactly. You know, why did I not plan better? So I got everything done, blah, blah, blah. But that very line of thinking is part of what makes me feel bad, right? Like if you could somehow do an experiment where I have no idea how much sleep I got last night, I'm not sure I would detect feeling bad at all. I would probably feel absolutely fine. I think pain has a lot pain is related to that as well. Just like your mindset in a lot of ways. All these chronic illnesses that people have like long, long, long, long, maybe it's maybe it's real, maybe it's real. But there are so many like psychosomatic illnesses that become fads and people adopt them and think and they begin to rule their lives and they begin to define themselves by this chronic illness that they have. The doctors can't pin down and you know, they don't they can don't know the real cause. They don't know what's what's happening here. And it just happens to be that people with anxiety disorders, like people who are generally of the nervous temperament are the kinds of people who gravitate towards having over index for other ailments. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's so interesting because to me, I mean, there is like so there is a biological component at some point, you know, like there's some kind of person, you know, through their genetic materials or whatever is predisposed to be highly suggestible or like, you know, nervous levels. That's what they used to call them nervous, nervous disorders. And now they have all these chronic illnesses. And it's pretty it's amazing like their community. Did you see a Ross Dauffitz who's a great, my favorite New York Times, I think he's the best. He's a fantastic writer. Yeah. And it is, I think it was both a column and a book about his having long lime. I didn't read it, but it's apparently really, really excellent. It was very compelling because I agree with everything you just said about, like, you know, the suggestibility of and I'm also skeptical of, you know, how many people who think they have long COVID really have long COVID as opposed to you feel shitty and tired for the normal reasons. And you saw that on the news and now that's the thing you blame. That's a real phenomenon. But Ross Dauffitz wrote about how he started, you know, in middle age having these cluster shitty symptoms, which is just like all the shitty symptoms you can have. And he would go to doctors and many doctors would like doubt that it was a real thing because I think it is somewhat controversial whether long lime disease is a real illness or a psychosomatic illness. And the difference between those two may be somehow conceptually not unimportant, right? Because if you can think your way into really feeling bad, then it doesn't matter. And what's interesting about it is that Ross is a very rational guy, I would say, other than his probably commitment to Christianity. It's Catholicism. Yeah, other than he's extreme. I know that sounds funny. Other than the fact that he murders a lot of guys, that's a very nice guy. He eats Rosemary focaccia, baby. Exactly. Maybe flatbreads. Yeah, but no, he is a very suspect for this kind of thing. I mean, so the fact that he was really on the side of, you know, take people's illnesses seriously because, and don't dismiss them as psychosomatic was a very interesting angle for me and kind of pushed my views around on it. And he had even tried strange things like light therapy or sound therapy, kind of like woo stuff. And some of it worked or one crucial thing actually reduced his pain. And at the end of the day, if you have pain for whatever reason and you do X and pain goes away, you're going to keep doing X, no matter how scientifically grounded you are. I don't care if you read 10 peer review studies saying light therapy doesn't work. If it makes the pain in my lower back, go away, I'm in there, right? So it's an interesting conversation. I think the Lyme disease, I tend to be more, I believe that more than other things. I mean, I certainly know many people who've struggled with that and they're not necessarily people that would fall for those. I mean, it could be a bit of both, too, because there's something that happens like conceptually when you like, let's say you have like a tingle here and like a problem here and then you you look it up and then you find out that there's a name, you know, like there's a there's a condition and there's all these other symptoms. And then you think, huh, you know what, I am also feeling this and this and this. And it's, I think, you know, I don't want it to come across like these people are stupid because not only do I think that I could fall for this, like I know that I have fallen for this, you know, to just to see a list of things that kind of match in my brain, which is like this pattern match in machine is sitting there. I have this. Now I feel all the other symptoms too. And it's, you know, and I think that there's something about the mind, body connection there, which not to sound woo, that sounds woo, mind, body connection. Yeah, we're going to believe that out. Clearly there's something, clearly something's going on that we can suggest ourselves into feeling really, really terrible. And vice versa, you can, you like, you can suggest yourself into feeling amazing. You can. And when you're around people that feel amazing and it's contagious, like emotions and states of being or contagious at some level. I once read like this article, um, it was like going around like my Twitter circles was this guy who was like, actually you don't need any kind of, you don't need a lot of sleep. Everyone's it's all BS and you only, I lived on like four hours of sleep for like this amount of time and he like logged it and he wrote about it and it was very compelling and he was a smart person. Therefore that's true for everyone. And well, you know, I read that and I remember like for a few days afterwards, like even when on the days where I got four hours of sleep, I was like, you know what, I'm fine. And I felt fine. It's amazing. They came out and said, Oh, you know what, the research is now showing that nobody needs more than four hours of sleep. Like this has all been, this has been incorrect and going forward. This is all you need. I bet people would get used to it. I think a surprising number of people might, although that four hours of sleep thing, if Matthew Walker, that sleep expert guy that wrote that big book a few years ago, if he's right, there's just a certain gene that governs that and certain people just have the super sleep gene where they feel as good on four as the rest of us feel on eight. And are those people like, you know, tech billionaires and CEOs? Those are no, they're, I mean, they're, they're like, but they're productive. Or they're up in their mother's basements playing Call of Duty until. Yeah. Yeah. My husband's like that. He's like a super, he can survive on like five hours. Good. He's good. I could, I could sleep for 10 if you let me, if nobody woke me up and I had nothing to do, I could sleep for 10. But this gets into like the social contagion issue, which touches on trans and gender dysphoria, but is also just in its own right, one of the most interesting phenomena. We don't talk about that. You don't talk about that. We don't talk about trans or gender dysphoria. Yeah. I know. I know. I heard that's the one topic you avoid on your podcast. We're not, we're not just not interested in it. So I don't want to drive you in there. But no, like there are, what's interesting to me is like forget the topic of gender dysphoria for a moment and just think about social contagion in general. There are these fascinating cases where a whole, you know, school develops, say like hiccups. Or Tourette's. Or Tourette's. There was a case, there's been several cases. Yeah. Take talk Tourette's were suddenly there's a spike in Tourette's doctors all over the country saying what the hell is going on. Is it something that's in the waters or something? And the only thing that explains it is all the new cases of Tourette's have tic toks and follow influencers who have Tourette's. And I've seen some of these influencers actually very interesting content for someone to let you into their Tourette's tic. But then it becomes this status thing of like they're cool because they have this tic and oh, like maybe I, maybe I sometimes stutter. Maybe that's like, and then it develops into a thing and people fix ain't on it. And there may even be a comp, an autism component to where people more likely to fixate because they have asp or artistic tendencies can go deeper down certain rabbit holes and ways of being and are less flexible and maybe take things more literally. And so you see that hiccups outbreak at some school, I think it was Massachusetts or something. Is there a hiccup tic toks? There was a hiccups. But is there a hiccup in the water community? No, I don't think hiccups in TikTok have linked up. But there was a hiccups outbreak at a school, at one school. It was either Massachusetts or Delaware, I forget. And they literally, they were literally looking at is it something in the water supply in the town? Is it something in the, and it was just a kind of spontaneous emergent phenomenon that and it for some reason they tend to hit young women the worst, more than young men and more than adults in general. So when you take that background and then you look at the facts, which I know you've talked about on your podcast, the wild spike in the number of natal female identifying as gender dysphoric as opposed to natal males, which have gone up a little. It's done. I see more and more natal males in this. But I remember seeing like, at least in, I think it was the American plastic surgery association. This is from Abigail Shire's book. But I checked it and it seemed legit, which was that there was like a 400% spike in natal female. 4000. 4000. There was, I've heard, well, I think there was data out of the UK, maybe Tavistock. Yeah, 4000% increase in natal females going to gender clinics for some form of dysphoria. But I mean, dysphoria is a very broad term. So that could mean any number of things. But yeah. Right. It was like, there was like a fourfold difference in the increase for natal females as opposed to natal males, which is interesting because if the theory is, oh, we're all just becoming less bigoted against trans people. So trans people are coming out of the, you know, coming out of the closet essentially, that would seem to affect both genders equally yet there's this huge disparity, which definitely lends itself to a social contagion element for sure. Like, even if there isn't, if that's not the whole explanation, there's definitely an element and that's a good, like almost an axiom that anytime you see a wild, like an explosion of young women participating in anything, especially if it's, if it's like a medical thing or, you know, it somehow distinguishes themselves from them, from everyone else, it's maybe start thinking about it as, as social in some form. Because it's women, but is there some, is there some personality trait, like women are higher in like, what are those, like, there's like neuroticism and all these, what do they call like the big five traits or something? Yeah, big five personality traits. So is there one of those traits that are like make women more susceptible or are we more, I think we're just social, yeah, we're social thinkers. It may be ours, yeah. Because we're like absorbing sort of emotionally. Yeah, it may be empathy. Yeah. Because if you were actually feeling what the people around you are feeling, then conditions can spread, right? Psychological conditions can literally spread. That's fair. Thank God, Sarah, and I don't have any empathy. We wouldn't be here. Do you feel like, I feel so like not female in this sense? In the empathy sense? You were just like, I would never be, like, I see something like that and it makes me less interested in having anything to do with it. I'm sympathetic to a lot of people. Like, I'm a sympathetic person. I can, you know, like, I have compassion for other people, but I don't, I don't absorb their, their feelings. Well, let me turn that question back on you. What are your heterodox origin stories? Like, what do you attribute it to in each of your cases? Well, we know Sarah's because she was a religious fundamentalist. No, I wasn't. I was just fun. I was a religious person. Yeah. Like religious. I started questioning religion when I was 15 and I laughed like soon after. Like, it didn't take long at all. But I had been thinking, like a thinking person thinking deeply about, you know, values and but most importantly, like what's true in the world, you know, and like, how can we know it? The arguments that worked really well for me and there was no going back where, you know, some of like the logical contradictions of Abrahamic belief specifically. And then I, you know, and then I left Islam, well, I left religion. I stopped believing in God and then I stopped believing in Islam as a consequence. And you know, cause a lot, a lot of women, they talk a lot about women's issues when it comes to Islam, right? When it comes to gender problems, hijab and all this stuff. But for me, like, I'm such a, I don't know, Jaha this at heart, but it's like, for me, like here's what I mean by that. But I mean that if, if the Quran is true, then the moral, you know, universe, like that, the Quran inhabits, like that's, that's true. We have to accept that even if we don't understand it, even if it seems like oppression, we don't know God knows by definition. So we have to, we have to accept the morality as well, like that, that the Quran comes with. So for me, I had no problem like kind of just accepting it. If I thought the objective claims were true. Once I started doubting those, everything else fell apart very quickly. That was an easy thing to just like sort of give up. But that, I think I was always a skeptical person, like always. And I think in one way or another, I would have ended up here. I don't know if there was like a point at which I became the, you know, like without which I wouldn't have been here. I think I would have been here regardless. Maybe I'm just a little bit more extreme. I think you and I definitely have in common that that cast of mine that would really want to know whether something is actually true and take that to its logical conclusion. And that might just be like personality almost, almost hardwired. But if there were any aspects of your experience, are there any aspects of your experience that you think explain the fact that you really cared about sharing your way of thinking with the world? Because many people with that cast of mine would say, okay, I'm going to go do finance or whatever. And now I've decided religion's not true, but you took it upon yourself to put yourself out there in a very, especially very heated time for the issue and a very heated issue. And throw your reputation in a very vulnerable way. What do you think accounted for that? I don't know if it was any specific experience, but I grew up in Pakistan, like somewhat, we were better off there, like, I go into a nice school, I had nice things. And I came to the United States and we had nothing all of a sudden because my parents came when they were older, they didn't speak very good English, their skills were not transferable. Of course, without understanding the language or the social atmosphere, you really have a tough time getting back to the same place that you were when you started from. And so I was catapulted into, because it wasn't poverty, but it was definitely lower income America and starting to see how people lived. The first kind of campaign, I guess, of injustice that I took on internally was class-based, you know, because I remember seeing my neighbors, I remember seeing how the kind of invisible ways that they were getting tripped up and how unfair it seemed that my friends who had a lot of money were deaf and not necessarily more ability or anything else or more talent in eight scale or even intelligence, but that they were definitely going to do better because they were set up in all these important ways. So I think it became kind of a social justice warrior, but in terms of class. And I remember wanting to become a lawyer and work with these lower income people and immigrants and all this. And it was really important to me to be somebody who made a change in the world. And my atheism only increased that feeling because then it was like, oh, there's only ever this life. So if we don't have justice here, we're not going to have it anywhere else. There's no like heaven to make it all better and to make your sufferings here meaningful. So we have to try and make things better here. Oh, wow, that's so interesting. So like there's no second act. So is that why you like didn't go to law school, for instance? You just like, I have one chance I'm going to do this. I mean, you could still go to law school. It's the podcasting thing. It was just, I don't know if I have like so much of a plan in life as in, you know, in any given moment, a different conception, not entirely different, but maybe a different conception of what's the lever that I can pull that will make the big, what's the one lever that I can pull that will make the biggest difference. And there was a point where that was law school. And then there was a point where it's, okay, no, I can start this nonprofit organization and I can make a big difference here. And now it's a podcast. Definitely. I mean, we're different makers. That's why we're doing this. We're heroes. Really? Are we heroes? I think so. Yes. Yeah. Martyrs. I consider myself a martyr from doing this. Did you see him in Prince Harry's memoir? There's a passage where he was doing something and he said, and then someone used the word hero to describe me. No. And I would have none of it. No. You read Prince Harry's memoir? No, no, no, I just saw an excerpt. I thought to myself, what a disingenuous, if you really had none of it, you wouldn't have put it in your fucking memoir. But I need to tell you. It's like, I give anonymous. Yeah. I would like it. I'm an anonymous donor. People have said about you. You cherry picked this one and said, oh, but I would have none of it. But you have to put it in your book. Hey folks, Coleman here. If you're like me, then scrolling through the day's news headlines can leave you feeling like the world is tipping towards disaster and chaos while somehow simultaneously freezing, flooding, and on fire. It's a lot to take in. But consider this. If the constant barrage of bad news is disproportionately shaping the way you see the world, what if we're all not paying attention to what's going right? That's why you should check out the podcast, What Could Go Right, which is a brand new acclaimed weekly news podcast from the Progress Network. Each episode, Zachary Carabell and Emma Varvalucas dive into the biggest news stories and most pressing topics of our time from climate change to politics and make the case for a brighter future. And they do this with stellar guests like happiness expert and Harvard professor Arthur C. Brooks and best-selling author and historian, Rucker Breggman. Take it from me. These conversations will empower you or at the very least talk you off the ledge. And if you're looking for a great place to start, I highly recommend What Could Go Right's must listen interview with Tyler Cowan, who is my favorite economist and runs my favorite blog, marginal revolution. So whether you need a pick me up or you're an optimist looking for new solutions, check out What Could Go Right, wherever you listen to podcasts. Bowie, Dylan, Marley. You've heard the names and maybe you've heard their songs, but what about the stories behind the records that make Titans of music like these so universally loved and important? I'm comedian Josh Adam Myers, host of The 500, and I have always been curious about all the breakups, the partying, the sex, the death, everything that went into making this incredible art. Plus, a few years ago, I realized I was listening to the same albums over and over. So I decided to go through Rolling Stone magazine's 500 Greatest Albums to expand my horizons and dig up some of the classics that I thought I knew more about. Each week, I have an incredible line of comedians, actors, and musicians as guests talking about why they love a particular record and how the music has impacted their lives. I've talked to Judd Apatow, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Sonic use Kim Gordon, Kim Fail from Soundgarden to join me as I work my way from 500 down to 1. Two episodes of The 500 come out every Wednesday. Listen now, wherever you get your podcasts. Anyway, what's your origin story? You know, so I really think it comes down to this hyper awareness of bakery and affectation. And I sort of was hyper aware of virtue signaling before there was a term for it. So my family is very interesting, actually. So I come from a family of musicians and my father was a trombone player, actually. Wow. Jazz or classical? Yeah. Jazz. Yeah, nice. There's not a lot of classical trombone, I guess. I mean, there's not... The Symphony Orchestra. Great symphony. Yes. When did the trombone actually come into existence? It was originally called the sack butt. Don't laugh. The sack butt. Yes, the sack butt, which is a German word. I said don't laugh. It's the history of my instrument, Sarah. I can't believe I didn't take off. That should be the name of your podcast, the sack butt with Coleman his. And it was a... I want to say the 17th or 18th century. Oh, okay. So it's an old instrument. I think it's older than the trumpet. It's such a simple instrument. Yes. It's much older than the saxophone. And even a little bit. The saxophone is pretty new. Yes. But you still... I mean, yeah, trombone is in every symphony. Okay. Most symphony orchestra. Because it's not like a Baroque instrument though, for instance. I think what era would the Baroque ever be? Well, the Baroque would be, I mean, like Bach. I'm out of my house. I mean, there were brass instruments in that time, but you don't see... Yeah. Maybe the trombone was just sort of configured... Obviously, it must have been configured differently. Yeah, I don't know if it was relevant in that time. Right. So I was an oboist anyway. I see. Okay. And there's Baroque obo, which is its own slightly different version. Anyway, but... Beautiful instrument. What's that? Well, beautiful instrument. I think. Thanks. It's not the bassoon, by the way. One played well. One played well. Yes. One of my very early pieces that I published when I was in my 20s was this essay called Music Is My Bag. And it was about the kind of culture of band people and like school-astic musicians. And the way, like, in my day, there would always be the kid that had like the scarf, the piano key scarf, like the black and white, piano key scarf. And you would like walk into the band room and the kid would always be playing Billie Joel on the piano, like the beginning of Angry Young Man. Like there were just... This was of in my time. So... But actually, this does speak to your question because I, for a variety of reasons, was totally obsessed with the space between like what actually existed and what people were pretending existed. And like what people actually were and what they were sort of trying to be. So not my dad so much. I mean, my dad was a very eccentric person, very contrarian, very critical, which just was totally unfiltered. Like we would be going to... There was this French restaurant that he loved to go to and in New York. And there was often a piano player, like a guy playing piano in the restaurant. And one time we went there and it was a different guy. It was a substitute piano player. And we were walking out of the restaurant and my father literally goes up to the guy and he's like, you're just not a very good player. Where's the other... Where's Ralph? Because like, I don't know what you're doing here. Like my father would routinely behave that way. Did you realize Larry David? Was he autistic or was it? Yes. I'm sure he was like a fairly high functioning autistic. But he was so insanely almost savant-like about music. He was an orchestrator and he was a arranger. And so he was incredibly good technician and could hear anything. Like we'd sit down and read a musical score and actually be able to hear it in his head. So he had this like kind of weird quirky eccentric but like very deep kind of aesthetic life. And my mother on the other hand, so my parents had met there from Southern Illinois, which is like really, that is sack butt USA. Okay. And they were very conscious. My mother especially was very conscious of striving and getting out of that kind of cultural sphere. And she sort of attached myself, attached, wow, that was a Freudian slip. Attached herself, not myself, to my father who was using like academic channels to try to ascend. So he had been, he actually ran the jazz band at the University of Texas when I was a kid. And that's kind of a famously good band. Yeah. And he was like, made no friends and didn't get tenure because he couldn't play. He couldn't get along with everybody. He couldn't play with others. But my mother was just, then we moved to New Jersey and she was just absolutely obsessed with coming across as if we were incredibly sophisticated, wealthier than we were. We were not at all. I mean, my father, he flunked out of academia and then with no job whatsoever, we like got a moving truck and drove to New Jersey so he could like somehow make it as a musician in New York. It was extremely ambiguous. And my mother just was like really put on a lot of errors. And so as her children, our job was to sort of go along with it. And so I think that there was just, I'm very aware of myself as a teenager of like pretending as if like acting like a child. Like I wasn't even a child. I was playing the role of a child. I wasn't a teenager, but I was performing. I sound like Judith Butler. I performed adolescence. So a lot of it, I think that a lot of my, where I ended up landing was I'm just constantly observing people's behavior and thinking that they're phony, which I think is actually, I'm not right about it all the time. Like most people probably are just being themselves. By the time the kind of extreme social justice virtue signaling rolled around, I was so massively allergic to it that I couldn't help but speak out about it. But the fact is that, I mean, I've been, I've been a professional writer for 30 years and I've been writing about this stuff and observing this stuff for decades. Like nothing has really changed. But what's interesting is that like when I started off as a writer, I was saying all the things that I say now, but it was praised back then and you were writing for mainstream magazines and editors loved you and that was the job. And now it's the opposite of it. Like now all those publications that embrace me for saying these things, I'm persona non grata. So you have like, who's the main character of Ketchan and the Rye? Oh, holding Caufield. Everybody's a phony. Yeah. You have a little holding Caufield. Yeah. And although he, that kind of, I feel like that character, it's, Salinger is making fun of that kind of person. Like there is a phoniness to Holden's awareness of phoniness. So it's a blurry line, right? Like there's people who are deliberately putting on airs and they have to be one like manipulated of enough, socially intelligent enough to notice that there's a way, proper way to behave that's going to elevate me to this next level and willing to be kind of dishonest enough to sort of put it on. So there's that, that like pure phony, maybe a narcissist, you know, like those kinds of people like who are very manipulative, like socially social sociopath at some point. Yeah. Right. So there's that. And then there's like all these shades of grain between where people pick up, you know, as we were talking about, like where people pick up ideas from the air, you know, they absorb them through their skin and then begin to behave in ways that are not, you know, them, like quote unquote them, like who they really are without even recognizing that's what's happening. I think that's what's so bizarre and creepy about like the present moment. Yeah. I became a writer because I wanted to say what I actually thought. It was an offense. It was an expression of authenticity. That was the absolute essence of the job and the only reason that it interested me. And so it's just maddening and extraordinary that we've come to this point where it's like the opposite of the job in a lot of people's minds. And that it speaks to like a moral like correctness, like to be the kind of person who is good enough to see things for what they are and then say, no, here's how they should be in a, you know, in this perfect social justice world. I find it, I don't know. Like it's just, it's frightening. It's disheartening to me because I'm a very like, I'm a sincere person because I'm autistic, not because I'm like, like a good, like a good, like a sick. You said you weren't. I'm autistic-ish. You keep changing your- No, no, no, no, no, no, because it's a spectrum. I know, but I said the other day on the podcast, do you think you're autistic and you said, no. Not in a way that a psychologist would be like, yeah, she's autistic. But there's autistic traits I found. I read up a lot about this. I think I have some autistic traits too. I'm not, this is, I'm not. I was just, I remember someone DM'd me on Twitter and said, I think you're autistic. I'm very autistic. I think you're autistic. Are you autistic? I'm like, take this test. Uh-huh. Can I take the test? On online test? Yeah. Which- Like multiple choice. Yeah. I don't remember. There's some long tests and I came out to be roughly like as close as you could get without being classified that way. That's perfect. That's a sweet spot. I guess. Yeah. I think so. Because I have no trouble. I also just, I have no trouble with the things autistic people typically have trouble with, like, reading faces. I have no trouble understanding what someone's feeling and all of that. I've never found that to be difficult. I occasionally have trouble with that. I feel like I occasionally have trouble intuiting other people's mindsets. You know, and sometimes I struggle with that. And I have to have somebody explain to me like what's actually going on. But mostly I can get, but like what would be an example? Did someone has to explain to you what's going on? No, no, I mean, in specific scenarios, like let's say big dramas going on among friends, you know, and people are fighting and I don't understand what's going on. Why are they fighting? Why are they behaving this way? And then my husband would like kindly explain to me like what's going on. A man's playing to you. Yeah, because it's not always 100% intuitive. But you know, I really related to what I heard Robin Hanson. Have you, do you know who he is? Yeah, absolutely. He's like the elephant in the brain guy. He wrote this book. Oh, great, great book. Yeah. Great book. That's you would like as a hatred of phoniness. It's basically a deep exploration of phoniness in every aspect of. Yeah, it's like human phoniness. Like, yeah, it's a very rigorous. Yeah. So it, it, he is somebody who's like kind of on the spectrum. I don't know if he identifies that way, but he definitely is definitely. I am not surprised. And he, he was, I remember hearing him talking somewhere and he was saying that, you know, as somebody who thinks a little differently, he would go into this like social world and social situations and not really understand why people were behaving the way they were behaving. Like, clearly there's another element. Like, there's another, there's something else. There's invisible strings that are, you know, that he cannot perceive at all because of his like difference, like the, you know, neuro atypicality. And that kind of made him a really interesting, like social, like theorist and like somebody who would go into this social psychology because it's invisible to you. You have to find a reason and an explanation. And so his like very explicit reasons are very different than the reasons we give ourselves when we do certain things. No, that's right. I mean, if you're like very not autistic and very effortlessly tapped into social norms, you have no reason to create an explicit model of what social norms are. Whereas if you're very autistic, like, maybe, I don't want to say that Robin Hanson is for sure, but someone like him, then you, you will become extremely curious and want to discover the nature of social norms. Right. That's all you do. Like physicists want to discover the laws of the universe. And if you're very smart, you can actually come up with an outsider's perspective on the social world in a way that is extremely interesting. So I don't think that I've ever really suffered like that problem, but I think whatever aspect of autism like can get you to really fixate on logical consistency and not taking certain shibles for granted, I think I have some. And that's why maybe some autistic people relate to me, but I've never had the social well in this space. Yeah, totally. But what you just described, this very principle, it flies in the face of the standpoint epistemology. Right. So like, I think you're absolutely right that you as an out, if you are an outsider looking at a phenomenon, you are able to diagnose various aspects of it. You can see it more clearly. And yet we have this whole school of thought that says you're not allowed to speak to anything unless you are part of the group that you are speaking about. So ask, you know, what ask trans people about trans and stop right there? I mean, is that not sort of like we should only ask cancer patients about how to die about how to treat cancer? I'm not comparing trans to cancer. That's I'm not. But like it's just seems it's we're in this bizarre moment where there's an there's like a sort of there's an obsession with being an outsider. And yet you're not allowed to comment about anything if you are an outsider. No, it's fascinating. I think one analogy of a friend made to me that always stuck with me was that people who grew up during the Great Depression and really lived that poverty and unemployment and crisis. Often later in life, they would just keep their money in mattresses to their own detriment. Yeah, losing money to inflation and etc. My grandparents generation, absolutely. So it's like their lived experience of being living that actually gave them a distorted view of what they should be doing later in life, right? Because and that goes to your point of yes, the lived experience of being in a group, it can give you way more like tangible knowledge of like what what it is to be in that group. But if you are unable to kind of apply an external lens, you may also be missing a lot. A limiting belief. Yeah, so you get to really learn about stuff like you want to incorporate the external smart view and the internal lived view. I feel like you should bring back like old school like anthropology, you know. Like going to a place. But like for like hiding the bushes and take notes in a notebook. Yeah, going to Williamsbury like doing ethnographic interviews of the hipsters. The hipsters believe that if you. Oh, I thought you meant colonial Williamsburg. But yes, they should. They should rename Williamsburg, Brooklyn, colonial Williamsburg. Yeah, because I mean, so there is like to steal man, I guess the the opposition. There is something about being in a particular environment that exposes you to information that otherwise would be less visible, you know. So it's not not invisible, but obviously less visible. So I get that, you know, I totally get that. And I have I run into that a lot when I talk about class issues because there's now I'm in this social environment where like, I don't know anybody who, you know, qualifies as like a lower income American, you know, or and they're like extremely highly educated people like at the tippy top of American society. And sometimes when we talk about specific like economic issues or class based issues, there are whole like realms that are invisible to them that they don't see because they're not they're not familiar with these people. They don't see that their day to day lives and you know, they the kinds of the kinds of things that they deal with. And it comes across and it shows, you know, like even when we were having the conversation what a couple of weeks ago about why, you know, like poor people having kids and like which people not even had that we had that conversation. I had I that led me to having another conversation with somebody else about about the same thing. And she was just like, well, I don't, you know, poor people like, you know, how can they afford more kids? Like there's all this like time that has to go into it. And I was like, but poor people have tons of time. And she was like, what do you mean? And I was like, you can't when you're actually actually poor, you have nothing you can do on a Saturday besides like the free stuff. Like go to the park, like your family, you know, you go to the park, you go to a free museum, you go to the public pool that's free. You know, you go to the library. That's it. You know, me, my friends, we go to vineyards, we go to whatever new restaurant and try it out. Like there's a lot of there are options on a Saturday that somebody who was like low income like really legitimately doesn't have, you wouldn't know that until you were really like as an anthropologist, like becoming one of them, becoming a native, you know, living their life truly. But having said all that, I think it is important to have that anthropologist that has like that distance, emotional distance, especially that distance from like the symbolic meanings that a culture develops over time and accepts. And you don't know those symbolic meanings. You don't those cultural meanings. You haven't adopted them. You can create new ones. Yeah, absolutely. That's why I mean, I remember one of the early blog posts that I wrote sort of before I really started writing for Quillat years ago was explaining affirmative action to a Martian, because I just thought it was it's an interesting and useful exercise to explain something to a fictional being that has zero social context and takes nothing for granted except for logic. And it's also hilarious. It's like a it's just like a very funny premise to do in any situation. And maybe at some level, like the sweet spot is to be someone that is from within a culture, but has just enough of the autistic mode of thinking that they can adopt the external view because then you sort of get a bit of the benefit of both worlds. You get like, I know, I know enough about this culture from having lived in it for 20 years, but I can also step back and observe it as if from afar. At least that's that may account for like you with Islam and me with American political blackness in some way may account for our success as observers and critics. On the friendly a theist podcast, we know religious extremism infects every major pillar of society politics. You can't just say we're the forward party of religion. Where do you think the bigotry is coming from? Women's rights. The claim to be pro life is kind of a talk about the like the women LGBTQ equality. Go to a drag queen story. You don't need her camera. American history. That is not what God wants us to do. It's the guy who posed in front of a Confederate flag when he was running for office. Science education. That's like a science museum saying, oh creationists, yeah, we'll have the evolution section. At the same time, our society seems to be getting less religious. How does that make any sense? I'm Hemant Meht. And I'm Jessica Blinke-Grife. Every week on the friendly a theist podcast, we dig into the latest news stories involving faith and culture to give you context and help you make sense of them. And give you permission to be angry about it. Whether you're a proud heretic or someone with religious doubts. Or believers curious about what the other side has to say. We're here for all of you. The friendly a theist podcast. Find us wherever you get your favorite shows. Do you ever think about just how much of people's worldviews are shaped just by their own particular experience? I feel like the majority of arguments I get into with people, it's because they're objecting to something that somebody said because it doesn't align with their very personal experience. And I'm totally guilty of this too. But it's impossible to get around. We've talked about the having kids. We've talked about like, you know, should you is it are people not having big families because of X, Y, or Z? And then the amount of people who write to me and I'm sure to you and say, well, that's not true because I have this or my that's the anecdotal evidence is so overwhelming to many people. But I think I'm guilty of it too. Like I make all sorts of sweeping generalizations about people's social lives or, you know, how they want to live. It helps to be able to like, I think the way that you can call out of that, the one or not entirely, but maybe maybe there's a path out is to look at the numbers of the things, you know, look at how people actually behave, which is like think like an economist, you know, like think like an economist. And what does that tell you? Like how do people actually behave? That kind of like behavioralist, you know, economic analysis is very, very fascinating to me. And it's also bizarre because it makes you feel uncomfortable almost because it makes you think like, I don't know my own mind, you know, I have my own reasons for why I do things and turns out like someone else can predict that I will behave the opposite as to what I think that I will behave the same way. This is Robin Hanson's book. I mean, that book, The Elephant in the Brain, I can't recommend enough because in some sense, it is a deeply cynical analysis of human behavior, but it's also accurate in some way because the basic insight of that book is that we are very good at lying to ourselves. And the reason we are this way is because it's evolutionary, evolutionarily advantageous for animals like ourselves to believe our own bullshit in certain ways. So obviously what really got our ancestors genes into the next situation was being high social status, marrying a mate with great genes and also social standing and all the right and all the rest. And almost by definition, our psychology is oriented towards doing this for ourselves. But that's a very selfish motive. So our prefrontal cortex basically acts like a press secretary for the actual operation of our brain, which is like the rest of the White House and the decisions that get made for self-interested reasons. And then the press secretary, which is your prefrontal cortex, tells your mouth what to say about why you're doing this, right? Everything has a selfless motive. Everything is because I'm just such a great guy and I want to do good in the world. Meanwhile, you can tease out certain differences. Well, if that were true, you'd behave this way, but you're actually behaving as if you were kind of a more self-interested actor. And that's true to a degree that is pretty upsetting and like I said, could be seen as cynical, but it's nevertheless the case. We're all kind of being a press secretary for ourselves. And again, it's best if you actually believe your own bullshit because most of, I think most people are not like great liars, so it's much better if you're able to convincingly give your story about why you're doing what you're doing. And even, do you guys know about these split brain experiments? Yeah. I have to say, though, this is the wild. Okay, so this is another way to see this. So they used to do this procedure on patients where they would split the corpus colossum, which is what connects the left brain and the right brain. They would do this, I think, to not schizophrenia, seizures, seizures. There was some kind of disorder that could be made better if you... Okay, this wasn't like an experiment on humans. No, no. Okay. It would be solved by this surgery. That's right. As we know, I think, is it the left brain that governs speech or is the right brain that governs speech? I think right is speech. Right, governs speech. Right, governs speech. Okay, so let's just say for the sake of it, it doesn't matter, actually. I think it's reverse, but yeah, okay. Yeah, go ahead. I think the left is like math. Yeah, the right is... The right is speech. Because I don't have any left brain at all. In a very crude way of, yeah, I think that's... Okay, so let's just say the right governs speech and the left governs other things. And also, the left governs the right eye and the right governs the left eye. In most of us, this doesn't matter because the two halves of our brains are connected. They can share information. But if you've had that split, then information coming into your right eye actually only goes to your left brain and does not go to your right brain. So people have been able to do experiments where they show these patients with split brain information in only one side of their brain. And so basically, what would happen in these experiments is they would show one half of the brain. And the half of the brain that can't speak, they would show it some image or some piece of information or give it some direction like get up and go to the bathroom, right? And then the person would get up and go to the bathroom. And the experimenter would ask, why are you going to the bathroom? And the other side of the brain, which was not told to go to the bathroom, would come up with some bullshit reason about why I just got up. That's amazing. It's creepy. It's totally beliefs, right? And this is only because you essentially have two people now in the brain. And one of them is coming up with convincing explanations all the time of what the other one is doing. And meanwhile, the person feels like he is saying true things. Now, I mean, so far as I know, none of these people felt bewildered by their own behavior. They just felt like they felt pretty normal. And the extent to which this is that we are able to do this all the time is like something else is deciding for you to do something. And you're coming up with a reason, a post hoc explanation of your behavior afterwards, that always paints you as being a coherent and kind and generous and relatable person. It's a very dark and skeptical and somewhat cynical view of human beings, but I think there's an element of truth to it, no doubt. So a more positive perspective of the same thing, instead of viewing it as necessarily selfish, which I think what Robin Hanson does, which it is. It is selfish. It's also just like pro-social, right? Because in order to survive, we can't, it's not just, we're not just engaging with the universe, but we're, you know, each other, we're engaging with each other and each other, like our social environment, that's our best bet for survival, for like a whole host of things. So it's important to always be, you know, vibing with the group alongside seeing objective reality. So, you know, I think there's so much of these, you know, like class and, you know, like signaling and all this stuff. It's just pro-social behavior has gone wrong, you know, like gone, like it become too deranged. Well, it's been taken out of a natural environment. It's been funneled into distorting technology, right? That's a lot of it. So what do you mean by that? Expand on that. What do you mean? So like pro-social behavior distorted by tech. And getting along to go along or even recognizing like, so we monitor, say we monitor our social environment all the time. And we're, this is mostly a good thing, you know, and we see what other people think. We hear the different opinions and we like take all those different opinions and figure out what we think about it, what we think about it or what the correct thing to think might be. And most of the time other people are not stupid in a normal environment. They're like, there's zebra there, there's a, you know, lion there. Like that's probably, that's a good thing to pay attention to. That's a good thing to know. And it's good to pick up that information from your social environment and to constantly be monitoring. But now we have Facebook, which introduces a level of like social monitoring that is insane. It's not helpful. It's actually harmful because we are hearing the nitty gritty political opinions of everybody around us. And we are conforming ourselves to those opinions. Yeah. And you're not even reacting to reality. You're reacting to a simulacrum of reality. And it's just like a hall of mirrors and it just more and more degrees removed. Even worse, like you're reacting to a slice of reality that's been algorithmically chosen to like engage to maximize your engagement, which could mean pissing you off the most or confirming what you deeply believe the most. So it's like a deeply biased sample of reality that you're being fed every day. So yeah, so there's a crazy, there's something about technology in particular that's, that's deranging our like social instincts in a way that is departing from objective reality. In a kind of a frightening way, I think the gender issue is a good example of all that, but we won't touch it. But it's, you know, it's a frightening thing. At some point we're going to have to hit reality again, right? At some point we're going to get, we're going to go too far and it's going to become a problem. Do you think, or is it just going to go worse and worse? I mean, when it comes to like the, like the gender stuff, what you're starting to see in the UK, in other countries, where they're starting to push back clinicians or starting to Europe, yeah, they're starting to be like, there are actually, this is not this, this like transition is not something it's an experimental process. We don't know what we're dealing with on the other end of the medical issues involved, the psychological issues involved, so we don't know exactly how effective it is. So they're starting to come back into reality after, only after reality made itself, you know, it presented itself in a form that could not be argued with or like hushed away, you know, because you had piles and piles of young people who are like, I know, but I wonder if, even if on the clinical level, this kind of treatment ceases to be, or at least is not as common, there's still going to be a whole theoretical landscape and people are going to dig in even harder, right? It's like, okay, well, maybe I can't get puberty blockers or cross-text hormones, but that means I'm going to, this is going to be even more constructed. Like, I'm going to take this. Well, what do you mean it's going to be more destructive? Okay, so if transition, if I can't transition because the clinic doesn't offer that anymore, I'm still going to identify as transgender, but I'm going to like dig in all the harder and say like, I identify, yes, I identify with this, my theoretical self concept, I'm going to impose that upon the world even harder. So I feel like it could go either way to the extent that institutions depart from like, it cannot be checked by reality. Those institute, especially humanities, like the aspects of academia, whole fields in academia, that are that there's no check and no point does it have to be, does it have to measure itself against the building is not going to fall down because the humanities department decides that something is real versus something else. Yeah. This is, I think, one of my favorite writers is Thomas Sowell, listeners to my podcast will not be surprised. One of his books is called Intellectuals in Society. And I think one of the undervalued insights from that book and others have made it as well. I think Paul Johnson has made this insight too, is that intellectuals and commentators, people like us don't really pay a personal price for false predictions or for false statements. No, we're not going to kill anybody. Yeah, probably. Whereas any average food cart owner on the street in New York, a person of much lower status than any of us who in some sense is valued less by society, pays an extreme price for being wrong about what people want to eat and for changes in the market and for changes in prices, pays an immediate and swift price for error. Whereas, intellectuals. Why is somebody, if their food is not fresh, if they make an error in judgment about what they can serve, they could kill somebody? That's right. Whereas the incentives, in some sense, I think incentives are more important than intelligence in terms of getting things right and getting things wrong. Like if you told me I was going to get punched in the face by Conor McGregor every time I got a fact wrong about the world, I mean, I could be much dumber than I am and probably get things right even a higher percentage of the time just because of how deeply I would be emotionally tied to getting things right. But intellectuals, basically the incentive structure is connected to gaining status and that has only a very tenuous connection to saying what is true. I actually wrote about this on myself stack. Like this almost exact same thing. When it came to the topic I was focusing on was lab leak and how suddenly it's become an okay thing to think. But it veered off into a discussion of the reliability of public intellectuals or just like the idea of a public intellectual. I mean, you are performing to some degree. You can't just say things that are perfectly true. You are incentivized to say things that feel true, that fit in into the framework of your audience and what they expect or maybe you push the envelope a little bit. You're edgy. But you can't be too edgy. There's a line that you can't go too far south of because if you do then you're a quack. You're not respectable anymore and suddenly your opinions don't matter. I think that we saw that with covid and it was really frustrating to see people who were just discussing hey, this is a possibility. The lab leak is a possibility and for them to be labeled as quacks. And I was one of those people. I remember I was trying to have these kinds of conversations with my friends. Oh, well you were allowed to talk about lab leak for like three weeks. Yeah. And then all of a sudden, it was Tom Cotton. Tom Cotton talked about it as a realistic possibility. If you look back to what he said, it was like totally reasonable. You know, completely in line with like reality actually. But when he said it, he was like a fascist and racist. Well, in Trump said it. And it was, yeah. And so it became untouchable because the wrong people held that opinion. And if you held it, you signaled that you were deranged. You know, you were quacks. You had lower yourself. This deranged is me because it's like the most, this is, this is Occam's razor. Is it not? I'm sorry. It totally is. I think it's being, it's now being, I heard the energy department, which I'm not sure why they haven't. Yeah, but that's just the energy department. Who cares? Well, it's an arm of the government. I know, I know, but then. But this is the first real like validation at that level. I know. Whereas a year ago, I talked about this on my podcast. I think I gave it like a 70 or 80 percent percent chance of being true like about a year ago. And I would get some comments. Oh, it's a shame Coleman. You've gone down the conspiracy. I've gone down the route. I had all my spots. I had all my spots. I had a lot of spots. I'm a two years ago. And it was a people were like, Oh my God, you're crazy. You're crazy. What are you? You're all lurched to the right. I find it amazing when people still say they think, Oh, oh, of 60 percent probability. Like how about 99.9 percent? I mean, but what do I know? They'll say what they will say now because you can always justify your stance, like look back and say, well, back then it wasn't so clear back then it was crazy. Now we know so much more. What a change. Something changed. I wonder about that. I mean, to be honest, I didn't give it any thought until I read that book viral by Madam Ridley. I mean, a chance. She's I had her on my podcast. Yes. It's been out for over a year. It's been out for a while now. And ever since then I've given it a much higher than 50 percent chance of being true. And I think, you know, as time goes on, it probably just becomes more and more likely. But you know, I'm not I shouldn't spout off because I don't really know too much about a virus. I don't understand the people who say it doesn't matter. That's the other thing. That's a lot of people said that. That's a lot of people said that. I remember I got that from the because when I when I presented Marshall the evidence, they'll be like, it doesn't actually it doesn't matter. You know what matters? Like people are dying from COVID. Absolutely. Like and then don't you want to understand where it came from? So you understand what it is that that's just my goal. Also to prevent this from happening in the future, right? Like if it came from wildlife to human directly, that prescribes one whole path of reforms towards preventing the next pandemic, given that so many seem to come from, you know, bats and China and so forth. But if it came from a lab that was doing gain of function research, partly funded by us. By us. That's the thing is it's not a xenophobic point. If you want to hate on the on the US government, this is your your baby. Go like that. Yeah, it's a none. It doesn't require conspiracy thinking to see that Fauci actually vocally defended in print as either New York Times or Washington Post, I forget in the in the early 2010s, vocally defended in print, gain a function research from other virologists who said, look, this is too dangerous. We should not be intentionally engineering viruses to to be more. Fauci said, no, no, no, no, no, you don't understand. This is crucial vital research. I know it seems dangerous, but we have to fund it and do it. You can't use that word. You can't say Fauci. You can't say gain of function. You can't say gain of function at a at a dinner party recently. And they looked at me like, like, Oh, what do you on Fox News? That's the only place I've heard that term used. What's going to be next? Gonna deny the Holocaust or to conflate that the lab leak is the same thing as a deliberate lab. That's right. Why would they leak it? No, who thinks it? They leak it in a non-country. No, that's bananas. Yeah, that's bananas. But it was a very interesting slide of hand to just say, Oh, you're saying that why would they? So what you're saying is, yeah. It also it makes a serious point about the safety of labs. So when I was at, when I was in college, I was dating a girl who worked in a BSL3 lab. BSL3 is like the security system for labs. And a lot of the research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology was like three at the highest, but like even a lot of it actually was done lower. The state of the BSL3 lab at Columbia was such that the girl I was dating just like, let me in there to like show to like show me around. And it was like, that's a good move. Couldn't have done anything. It was like, she showed me like the rat, the lab, the mice they worked with. Let me. She must have really liked you. You're on or nothing. No, you're on. No, no, no. Like total free for all. That's a BSL3 Columbia University like serious biomedical research happening there. And like things spill out of these places. They're like workplaces, right? It's like human errors. It's only as secure as the boss of this particular place, you know, wants it to be. And it's only as secure as how sleep deprived the worker is that day. And it's amazing that these things weren't taken sufficiently into account by the people who really argued for gain of function research. It really matters. I think it was, I mean, there was a lot of politics just like swirls around in a way and becomes like very feverish. That's one of the things that I think is new. That is like technology driven. And then I feel like the narrative of what I'm supposed to think, the correct thing to think moves very, very fast. Faster than I think that the average person who is not terminally online like us can keep up. They think they wouldn't know that now you can't say gain of function. You could have said it, you know, five months ago, but you can't say it now. Can you utter it now? I think non online people live in a kind of a different world and they're way, way far behind in terms of what the correct thing to think is. And that's just another way that we're seeing this weird bifurcation of this kind of elites social space and like elite people who think in a very particular way. We're speaking to each other in these hyper, like hyper connected, like fast, fast, fast ways. And then you have everybody else who has to go to a job who can't be on Twitter all day, being like what is literally what is going on. It's so easy in this space to have a political actor that can take advantage of the situation. In what way? You know, like to have a smart Trump, you know, imagine if Trump had somebody who had the low Trump has cunning, you know, he has intuitively understands something about like a common man, you know, like some, like, oh yeah, on some animal level, some primal level, but he's just disorganized. I mean, our saving grace was it was complete chaotic dysfunction and disorganization. Yeah, kind of like animal cunning was met with like an actual like competence person at the top you can have a very scary individual that can win over a lot of people that Steve Bannon that, yeah, well, who can win over a lot of people? And then they, you know, this sort of chattering class wouldn't even know what to do. You know, we wouldn't even know how to speak to these people, how to come down to their level, how to understand their like the world that they're living in, you know, because we've just we're so, so separated. Yeah, no, I think the, the elite definitely failed the Trump test and the media failed the Trump test in my view, especially towards the beginning. Basically a big part of my entry into thinking about politics was that I was as blindsided as almost everyone I know when Trump won deeply blind. I was so blindsided, in fact, that me and my friend who is half Mexican, we cooked a Mexican dinner on the night that night of the election to celebrate Trump's loss before it happened. Of course. That's how deluded and arrogant we were, right? Anyway, so Trump Trump wins. My model of reality is broken because I could see how a Romney could beat an Obama. I could see how a McCain, it could, it could beat Clinton. I could not see for the life of me how any critical mass of people could find Trump attractive. So I made a horrible prediction. And I think like, well, like any, any good rational person, I realized my model of reality must be very flawed to make a prediction this bad. There must be things I'm missing. And the only explanation on offer from left media was there is a sudden unexplained rise in white supremacy and racism between 2012 when we elected Barack Hussein Obama for the second term and 2016 when we elected Trump. Well, because of Obama, it was a white lashing. A white lashing that took several years to somehow didn't manifest in his second term. Did he didn't get trounced in his second term? It somehow waited like- The dormancy. The dormancy. The dormancy for eight years and then suddenly came up out of nowhere. And not only that, some of the same counties that went for Obama twice are going for Trump, some of the same voters that Obama won over are now going for Trump. So the explanation is a sudden massive spike in white supremacy. That seemed to me to be very implausible. Or misogyny, massive misogyny against Hillary Clinton. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So that seemed to me to be not plausible. And I became curious, like what is it that I'm missing? And I think the biggest thing I was missing was the degree to which people hate elites and the degree to which elites don't make an effort to understand what is outside of their bubble. Right. We all live in bubbles. And that's okay. I don't think it can actually be avoided. No one can live a statistically random life encountering a representative sample of the world. You had nobody- Insane making. Could live that way. It's fine. But if you're in a position of power, whether that is in the mainstream media or in government, you have a responsibility I think to take an interest in understanding the ways in which the walls of your bubble may be distorting, the screen of your bubble may be distorting the outside world. And elites have perpetually make such a little effort to do this. And I think that as you say, it creates an opportunity for politicians that understand that divide very well and very intuitively to get support way out of proportion to actually how good they are. Or even somebody, like a politician that comes from the elite who understands that the elite are only speaking to each other and for each other. We're trying to impress each other as much as possible and get on top of the social ladder or prestige ladder of our very elitist occupation, whatever. And then if you have somebody from within the circle who understands this is what's going on here, I understand how this works. So I also understand what buttons to push to get them going. I think George W. Bush was like that a little bit. I mean, his evangelical side, he was an absolute elite. Right? I mean, could not be more elite than the Bush family. But he had a kind of populist flavor to him because he was like with the average person like and he was also talking about God a lot in Jesus. And at that time, that was very populist kind of sensibility. And now you have politicians saying Latinx, like that's a real thing. Yeah, that in particular, a lot of people make fun of it as like this extreme, like it's this extreme thing you're not taking. You know, when you point out the Latinx usage and how it's increased, yes, it's not picking. But there are also interesting reasons to believe that good reasons to believe that such an extreme case, such an extreme departure from reality illustrates something really important about what's going on. You know, like almost like where there's smoke or there's fire, but it's almost like there's fire, you know, in this tiny place, like something is going on. There are people are whispering in their ears. I mean, Joe Biden just has people whispering in his ear, oh, talk to Dylan Mulvaney. This is stunning and brave. Say Latinx. That's terrifying. It's terrifying that they then there's just like, okay. Yeah. And there's no check on it. There's no literally no adults in the room. And then that's what happens with these campaigns is I mean, I remember with the Latinx issue because I'm half Puerto Rican and I have a lot of family that I spent a lot of time with as a kid in the Bronx that we're working class when I got to and I was almost fluent at Spanish when I was probably 11 or 12 years old and I've kind of receded a bit since then. But when I got to Columbia and suddenly people saying Latinx, I thought that was hilarious because I could just imagine how funny that would be to my Puerto Rican extended family and how seriously kids seem to be taking it as if that's what the Hispanic community is asking to be called. And so that just seemed very emblematic to me of the different, you know, everyone going to work for the Biden administration, for example, is likely coming disproportionately from places like Columbia where such things are taken seriously and alleged to be the desires of the community in question, right? It's always presented as if this is a bottom up demand for recognition and respect from the Latino community in America to be called this way. They are done with the gender binary of their beautiful language that goes back that's immaticulously and fully gendered and beautifully gendered for hundreds or thousands of years. So and people fall for this stuff. I mean, in that particular case, I wasn't going to fall for it because I had a real life connection to that community. So it's easier to not fall for the bullshit in that sense. But on the other hand, there's lots of other Hispanic kids at Columbia that had a real life connection and had as many aunts and uncles who would laugh at that word as I did. But nevertheless, really took it seriously too. So it in some. But using they went back home and use that word with their like Latin family. Probably in that obnoxious way. Because it's a way of striving because it's also class striving. That's right. It's a social. It's a social signifier. It's a class signifier. So I'm sure they went back to their parents and were insufferable. Yeah. Yeah. That's right. The way that you come back from your junior year abroad with a foreign accent, you know, it's an affect. Yeah. I think that the kinds of people who like absorb these kinds of norms, they would never articulate it that way. But these are obviously the values and worldview and viewpoints and signifiers of elite level whites. So you know what I mean? But specifically it's white supremacy. It's a white elite, you know, and I think that's one of the more interesting developments of our political era to see like educated liberal whites turned so like so into the Democratic Party and become this like very powerful base within the Democratic Party. They're going to run the Democratic Party. There's no, I mean, they are running the Democratic Party. And what will that do to what used to be an important, you know, layer of, you know, Democratic politics, which was like class and issues of class unions and grassroots movements. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I've a couple of friends that never tire of pointing out that when Biden won the reelection from Trump, he didn't get rid of any of the tax breaks and tax cuts that that people were crying bloody murder about when Trump implemented them. And Chuck Schumer didn't change the salt tax for New Yorkers and like all this stuff. None of it happened because it's actually not necessarily the Democratic Party is no longer the party of the working class. It's the party of the college educated, college educated, and my normal. You know, like it's there's if you if you're talking about debt relief, there's debt that's held by marginalized quote unquote people. And then there's debt that's held by people who tend to do better off. And which do they choose? Which do they obsess over? Which do they talk about all the time and campaign about all the time because they know that that's their base and that's who that's who's worth pandering to. And the interesting thing is, is that it's actually a very powerful base. Like this is money, you know, like these are the people with money and they're going to blast the airwaves with this, you know, like the with the ideology that they share and the values that they share. And it's going to be strange. Yeah, strange indeed. Any of the topics we should hit before we get out of here. Zero seconds left. Uh oh. Yeah, I think we're I think we we covered a lot. We didn't talk about gender. I do want to it's interesting because you have like that, like biracial background. I wanted to ask you who you like which side do you identify as biracial? Like what's or is there like a prominent like there's some? Yeah, interesting. I guess so like as a kid pre awareness of politics or culture, I would say I'm half black half Puerto Rican in no particular order. I spent probably like as a young kid, I spent more time with the Puerto Rican half of my family. And as a teenager, I spend more time with the black half of my family. Overall, it's probably comparable. And I just felt like I had that like split identity. Like it was a clear difference in my mind. Like everyone spoke Spanish on one side and everyone was American, black American on the other side is like culturally very different. But I felt like I was in both. I did notice as I got older that more and more. And I think this is like as a result of social feedback because like identity can be part partly the what you put out there but partly what you're getting back is that I got back that I was black, like just black. So I think I started subconsciously being more likely to just check the black box at certain points. And I may have also been getting feedback that to be black is really to be a huge to have a huge advantage in some ways when you're applying to colleges, for example. So does that answer the question? It's interesting. It's not quite biracial. I was thinking about like our vice president and how she's black. She's like also Indian, South Asian. And the latter half of her identity is just like invisible. It's never discussed. Yeah. And part of it might be that she kind of looks, she looks black-ish more black than Indian, I would say. Yeah, I would agree with that. This store looks very Indian, which is interesting. Oh, is that right? Yeah. Oh, interesting. Do you know she was in the same economics club as my father in college? Interesting. They both went to Howard and there's a graduate picture of their club as like eight people. It's like a tiny club. My dad and girl. Were they friends? No, they weren't. That's interesting. Yeah, it is. Cool. Well, when she's president, maybe you'll have an in. Maybe. I don't think she's ever going to be president. No, no. Oh my God. It's like the Hillary pop. She's much worse than Hillary, I think, in terms of her gaffes and her inability to string a coherent sense together sometimes. Yeah. Hillary has a gravitas at the end of the day that, uh, connella, she's giggly. I mean, it's nervous laughter. Yes, yes. That's right. Hillary could be really true. And that was the lowest points of her public appearances was when she would try to be like, like her son, but she knows. For tending to be silly. That's right. And it was clearly a pretense. Yes. And that's what wrote people the wrong way. Kamala, she just seems like genuinely nervous and kind of unprepared and not suited to the task a little bit. She was perfectly suited to her previous task. This is the thing is I don't understand why people want this job. I always thought this about Obama. Well, because it puts you in line. Oh, you mean device presidents? Yeah. Like the presidency was, I felt was like beneath him with Obama. Like he should have been on the Supreme Court. It's not it's the being the president or the vice president. It's not like a job for an intellectual. It's a job for somebody who is a performer and is a horse trader, like a politician, like Bill Clinton. And I feel like the elites, that's another thing is we want people who look like us and think like us to be in leadership positions. Like we loved Obama because it was like a walking NPR interview who also happened to be black. Oh, Obama. She really was. Yeah. And I think it's a lifetime talent in the sense that he is exactly what elite Americans want to elect. But he also has genuinely no air of condescension towards non elites and towards the working class. He's like a unicorn in being able to genuinely appeal to the elite and to the non elite. Like if you saw that speech, he gave a couple months ago where he talks about social security and how people have the chapped hands to show that they've earned their social security, gave me goosebumps. But it also really appealed to people who have injuries because they've worked, they work jobs with their bodies their whole lives. And he is somehow able to walk that line and appeal to both in a way that almost no politician. But he was a great candidate. I'm not sure he was such a great politician. He was a perfect candidate. What do you mean as opposed to a governor? Yeah. I don't think that he really, I always felt like he wasn't actually interested in the job. Like he was put forth because he was such an irresistible candidate. But no, I always felt that the job he was wasted on him. There was just, I think a lot of people could see a little bit of themselves in Obama. You know, there was a, there was a part of the country that couldn't at all. But I think maybe that this was part of his skill at creating a kind of person that everyone can see something about themselves in him. For me, I liked that he was like this third culture kid. Even though he pretended not to be, he was a very, I'm black, but he, people who basically they grow, there's the idea that you'd grow up in multiple cultures, immigrant kids of like two cultures, or you live in like another country or you move around a lot. But he grew up in like all kinds of different places and was exposed to a lot of different kinds of living and lifestyles and values. And so those are like third culture people that don't have this, that cosmopolitan kind of culture kind of, but they don't really have a whole set of anything. And I felt that intuitively about Obama, even though he did make a point to emphasize his blackness. He started talking with the black cadence, it was cringe, don't you think? I don't know. I was 12 years old at the time. I didn't think it was cringe, but I don't think my phony detectors are quite as sensitive as yours. I just, it's like, dude, you don't talk like this. I felt that he was emphasizing it. I don't know if I felt it was phony because there is an extent to which you do speak differently. Like the code switching thing is real. Like I do speak differently with my mother than I do with you, you know, the kind of inflection, I, you know, it's just the common thing. So maybe. Yeah, I want you to talk. Yeah, please talk that way to me now. Really. You aren't speaking the word use for you. Yeah. We probably have to stop actually. Yeah, we're getting a knock. Okay. Okay. Oh, this is fun. Yeah. Cool. Cool. Well, thank you for coming to my show and you're welcome for coming on yours. Yeah, this is, whose show is it anyway? Well, that's the audience decide. There we go. Well, all of them say who won. Yeah, who won? Who won? There we go. This whole time. All right. Yeah. All right. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks for listening to this episode of Conversations with Coleman. If you enjoyed it, be sure to follow me on social media and subscribe to my podcast to stay up to date on all my latest content. If you really want to support me, consider becoming a member of Coleman unfiltered for exclusive access to subscriber only content. Thanks again for listening and see you next time. Hi, do you know someone who has never listened to a podcast? It might sound bananas to you and me, but those people are out there. If we want the podcast industry to grow, we need more listeners. That's why this April, Tink Media is launching Adopt a Listener Month. We're asking you to find someone who says podcasts are my thing and give them a thoughtful recommendation to change their mind, something that will get them hooked. Go to tinkmedia.co.com slash Adopt to sign up, find resources and learn how you can get involved.