Pain, Wisdom and Mercy
01:31:40 Share

How do you feel great on vacation? Like really good? Easy. You go to Aruba. You'll spend your time relaxing on cool white sand beaches and floating in healing blue water. You'll immerse yourself in natural wonder and find your center on an island where things move at your speed. You won't just feel great. You'll feel relaxed, renewed, and ready for life. That's the Aruba effect. Plan your trip at aruba.com.

I'm Barry Weiss and this is Honestly. I want you to think about all of the things that you worry about in a typical day. Traffic, running late, insecurity about how you look, the anger that gets stoked when you check social media apps, the day-in and day-out annoyances that you feel toward the people in your life, even people you love, your spouse leaving their socks on the floor. Maybe there's some drama at work that can feel so big in the moment.

And now I want you to think about the last time that you were in serious pain. Maybe it was a throbbing toothache. Maybe it was a cramp in your stomach that had you doubled over. Maybe it was a headache that made you hide from the light. Think about if that pain was suddenly back right now. And about how in that pain, all of those previous negative feelings and annoyances are revealed for what they really were all along. Nits. Frivolous. And beside the point.

Pain can be very clarifying. It can be humanizing. And as awful as it is, pain can be a powerful teacher. Today I'm speaking with the man who has earned my vote for the best columnist at the New York Times and who is here to talk about, among many things, the nature of pain, Ross Douthat.

Ross is a principled religious Catholic and an anti-Trump conservative who is also an undeniable member of the elite. So as you can imagine, he draws ire from across the political spectrum. But even those who disagree with his conclusions cannot deny they always learn something from his writing. Ross has more content in the first paragraph of one of his columns than you are likely to find in the entire style section of the New York Times.

Somehow he's managed to do all of this, write a weekly column, attempt to organize his fellow conservatives against Trump, travel the country and be a dad to four children while privately battling a debilitating and mysterious illness. As his new book, The Deep Places, explains, Ross was bit by a tick in the summer of 2015 and he became infected with chronic Lyme disease.

You don't need to suffer from chronic Lyme or even to have heard about it to relate and learn from Ross's book. Or maybe you do know about chronic Lyme and you're in the camp of people that believes that a chronic Lyme diagnosis is dubious at best. None of that will rob you of the wisdom that Ross bestows in this conversation and in his book, which is a deeply personal memoir chronicling pain, prayer, feelings of weakness, but also hope.

Our conversation is about pain, but we also cover populism, the lure of conspiracy thinking, the new right and left, and why they have traded places on some things like alternative medicine. And of course, the subject of Ross's last book, "Decadence." Stay with us.

Hey guys, Josh Hammer here, the host of America on Trial with Josh Hammer, a podcast for the First Podcast Network. Look, there are a lot of shows out there that are explaining the political news cycle, what's happening on the Hill, the this, the that.

There are no other shows that are cutting straight to the point when it comes to the unprecedented lawfare debilitating and affecting the 2024 presidential election. We do all of that every single day right here on America on Trial with Josh Hammer. Subscribe and download your episodes wherever you get your podcasts. It's America on Trial with Josh Hammer.

Ross, welcome to Honestly. It's great to be here, Barry. Thank you so much for having me. Ross, I think of you as kind of the poster boy for someone living what we'd call the life of the mind. I'm going to impose a fact check on that claim, but sure, for the sake of argument. You are professionally thoughtful for a living, and you are not exactly an outdoorsman.

And then in 2015, a tiny creature bites you in the neck and you're suddenly thrust from the world of the brain into the world of the body. You're thrust into a visceral, fleshy experience of living in constant pain. And so I want to start with the kind of knowledge that you think that you got from the body versus the kind of knowledge you were used to getting from the mind. Can you talk me through that transition?

I mean, you could say in a sense that I wanted an education in embodied, physicalized existence. And I got one that I hadn't bargained for, right? Because it is fair to say that I am not, you know, the captain of the outdoors, the prince of American farmland, the Wendell Berry harvesting my mushrooms in the woods and so on. But

Like a lot of people, I think, in our kinds of professions where you tend to live in big cities and spend a lot of your life staring into large screens, but more often tiny screens and a lot of time getting into sort of frenzied but disembodied arguments on the Internet.

I had the idea that there was a different way to live and that this way to live would involve moving out of Washington, D.C., where at that point I lived with my wife and two daughters and getting a place somewhere in the country. And I thought, why don't we buy a house with, you know, a bunch of acres of land, maybe some broken down fences, some stone walls,

get some chickens. This is not an uncommon fantasy. And in fact, once COVID-19 hit, there were a number of people who sort of, a larger number of people who just took this opportunity to start- To flee the cities and- Buy up real estate in small towns in Vermont and- Exactly. All of these things. So we were sort of

forerunners. You were at the vanguard. We were the vanguard, right? And so we sold our nice little row house in Washington, D.C., made a tidy profit because then as now the Washington, D.C. real estate market is ridiculous, and took that money and plowed it into a 1790s farmhouse in, you know, a sort of medium town, but the sort of rural part of a medium town in Connecticut. And

I expected to become the kind of person who was outside with my kids planting a vegetable garden. And instead, during the time that literally while we were in the process of moving, I became horribly, horribly sick. I had

Bizarre symptoms all over my body, phantom heart attacks, total insomnia. I lost 40 pounds in three months and no doctor could figure out what was going on. It was only when we got to Connecticut and started seeing doctors familiar with the actual Connecticut ecosystem that it became clear that I probably had some kind of tick-borne illness that I very probably acquired literally while we were doing the inspection of

on the house while I was wandering through the fields, you know, reveling in my new life as a landowner. Something crawled up and altered my existence in a way I did not expect. So walk me through this

reckoning, I guess would be a word, to suddenly going from taking your health for granted to living in pain. There was an initial sort of struck by lightning phase where I felt, you know, not normal, not myself for a few weeks, had some mild neck pain and headaches, and then suddenly had this kind of collapse into your whole body just isn't

isn't working and either is having pain moving through it and cropping up in random places or else feels all the time the way you might feel on like the next to last day of a flu when it's not unbearable, but you're just not at all yourself. You just don't work right. So that was sort of the mixture of things. And that all happened, you know, that was sort of a three-month descent, basically. And then...

Again, once I got to Connecticut and some nice doctors said, well, you know, this probably isn't all in your head, which is the main thing that the doctors in Washington, D.C. ended up saying. Actually, you should probably try taking some antibiotics. Then there was this kind of stabilization where I went from sleeping one hour a night

to four or five hours. I stopped going to the emergency room all the time. I stopped, you know, thinking that I was going to die basically on a regular basis.

And then there was this sort of brief expectation that, OK, having stabilized taking these drugs, now I will begin to improve and become my old self again. And that didn't happen. The sort of basic treatment for Lyme disease, which is, you know, just to take a strong dose of antibiotics for four to six weeks, it sort of stopped my descent but didn't help me improve. And so then at that point, two things happen. First, you start to enter into

the real medical borderlands. This is true of many, many chronic illnesses, but it's particularly true of Lyme disease. There's all this controversy about how to treat it, and you have to sort of simultaneously find doctors who can help you, but also figure out how to be your own doctor, while also living with this reality that, you know, again, having been a reasonably healthy person for most of my life, I had never encountered, which is that

you can wake up feeling terrible every day. And there's a lot of different reactions that people have to chronic illness. Some people, I think, feel like their very self is sort of extinguished. There's this sense of sort of your body is dissolving.

all the time. And for me, it was more of a prison feeling. It was like I knew myself was still there, my healthy self somewhere. I became more of like a mind-body dualist in the sort of, you know, Rene Descartes style, where it's like your mind is in there, God willing, your soul is in there, but the frame around it, the muscles and the joints, the encasement,

It's like the diving bell and the butterfly. Do you remember that movie? I do, yeah. I mean, it's better than the diving bell and the butterfly, right? In the sense that I could... You're not literally trapped and having to blink out English, but... But you're tortured. You're tortured. Your body is in whatever is happening and whether it's some combination of...

your immune system and whatever sort of resilient pathogen is in there triggering you. That combination is just sort of delivering

constantly varying form of the infliction of physical pain with the weird extra bit that it just changes with this kind of illness where it is every day. So one day you wake up and your spine feels like it's on fire. And the next day you wake up and your spine feels normal, but the pain is in your legs or your feet. And I would like to say that I sort of became some combination of a

you know, desert father from early Christianity and a Zen master and learn to, you know, learn to live with this with some equanimity. But that isn't really true. I learned how to do things that I had to do, which in my case meant writing newspaper columns and occasionally- And parenting. And parenting and reading books, reading books to my kids. And so I learned how to sort of function through pain. But-

But the actual sort of emotional and spiritual side of it was this feeling of constant desperation. You're begging God for help. And similarly, you spend endless amounts of time, or I did, on the Internet, you know, reading, researching with the idea you're always thinking about what can I do to make this better? What can I do to make this go away? Ross, are you in this kind of pain right now?

So now I'm no longer in the kind of pain that I was in for, let's say, the first two to two and a half years of the illness. What I tend to feel now is more like a kind of mild tingling wrongness in places that used to be inflamed and in pain. And that means that I feel sort of 90 to 95 percent normal again.

you know, about 75% of the time, if that makes any sense. So right now, sitting here having this conversation, I have a very faint, unpleasant feeling at the base of my spine. But if I got up and walked around and, you know, did things, I probably wouldn't notice that significantly. And it's only...

you know, every few days that I'll have, you know, something more substantial and it will usually last half an hour. And even then, it's just, I mean, I have gotten, I originally imagined writing about this only when I was fully better. And at a certain point, like,

Like many people with these kind of illnesses, you realize that the time horizon for that, it stretches so far and you can get closer and closer and closer to health without ever fully reaching it. And also you just get older and, you know, God knows what happens as you age, right? But I wouldn't be writing about it if I hadn't gained back that.

enough ground to say that I have achieved something real and meaningful and that my life has normalized in many different ways.

One of the things that comes up a lot with people that I know with chronic illness is that they're not believed, including by people who are meant to be sort of world-class doctors. And you experienced that. Talk to me about that frustration of not being believed and walking through the world bearing, well, as you described it, feeling like you're being physically tortured and that torture being invisible to the very people who are supposed to heal you.

Well, it's obviously incredibly frustrating. But the reality is that on the one hand, you have to sort of sympathize and or at least especially in hindsight, now that I'm better and less angry, because obviously you get very angry at various points when you're sick like this. You can see, you know, why the medical system is just it's it's not

well set up to deal with complexity and mystery. And you quickly learn in these situations that you maybe don't even want to tell the doctor everything that's happening to you. Why?

Because you want to seem like a reasonable person, right? And something I think powerful in medical training sets doctors up to consider patients to be very unreliable. For excellent reasons, medicine is set up to rely on what seem like more objective measures, which means above all blood tests, but other forms of testing as well. And so when that kind of testing comes back,

And the patient is sort of describing what sounds like a, you know, frankly, crazy seeming suite of symptoms. In certain ways, it's not surprising that the doctor's reaction is, well, this is, you know, this is something that is probably psychiatric at some level. It's not showing up in the physical realm that I understand.

I'm taught to look for things to show up. And so it's probably a disturbance of the mind, which is, you know, I mean, I think we've come a long way as a society and not just treating disturbances of the mind as not serious things, right? Mental illness is illness too. But incoming that distance probably,

doctors feel sort of more secure in certain ways and saying, okay, this is a mental problem. This person needs to see a psychiatric specialist of some kind. I'm not dismissing them by pushing them in that direction. I'm taking them seriously, but pushing them in the direction that they need to go.

And the problem with all of that is just that when you actually dig into the literature on chronic illness, and this is definitely true of Lyme disease, but it extends across things like chronic fatigue syndrome and fibromyalgia. And now in this year and a half, long haul COVID as well falls into this category. One, there's just a certain basic uncertainty about how infection and

an immune response relate to one another it's this incredibly complex and under understood topic two there are a lot of sort of secondary level markers that doctors who dig deeply into this subject end up looking for markers of inflammation and so on that you're not going to get tested for if you go to the emergency room and say you know i feel like i'm having a heart attack and

And third, there's just a big zone of ambiguity. Right. So in the case of Lyme disease, you know, the CDC has set up this testing protocol for Lyme disease that, you know, is sort of a two step process and you're trying to test for antibodies in the bloodstream. And it's set up to rule out as many false positives as possible.

But there's a lot of evidence that the way it's set up ends up ruling out a lot of false negatives and that a huge percentage of people who probably have Lyme disease, if they just take one or two tests,

they will get a negative test or an ambiguously negative test, right? So to simplify it a little bit, under CDC criteria, you're supposed to have five bands activate, indicating the presence of these different antibodies to have an official Lyme diagnosis. And so I would have one band activate, two bands activate, three bands activate.

And, you know, for doctors who treat a lot of Lyme patients, if you combine three bands activating with the symptoms I'm manifesting, I obviously have Lyme disease. But if you're a doctor at a hospital in Washington, D.C., who doesn't see a lot of Lyme patients,

You don't even see it. You just see it come back as a negative result. And I will say to their great credit, the two, I saw two psychiatrists in those first four to six months. And both of them, after listening, listening to me rant and rave for an hour. We're like, you're not crazy. We're like, yeah, they were like, you probably, the one in Connecticut said you probably have Lyme. And the one in DC didn't know what I had, but said you probably have a physical illness. And so, I mean, that to me spoke very well

of the psychiatric profession, because of course they were right. I want to come back to the world of medicine and what your experience and also what the experience that all of us have lived through for the past two years has revealed about

the brokenness of that establishment and many of those experts. But before we go there, I want to just stay for a minute on you and your experience of this and the dichotomy of having to be a polished, you know, public intellectual, public person, and yet also carrying around this intense, crippling pain in hiding. Like the experience of that to me would be

incredibly isolating. And I'm saying that just based on times where I've, you know, had minor depressions or depressive episodes and needing to kind of shine it on in public. And the disjointed feeling that you have between who you really are and who you're having to perform being. Tell me about the isolation or the loneliness of that experience. Yeah, I mean, I would say that there were ways in which the performative side of

Well, both the performative side of like, you know, being on Twitter arguing about Donald Trump or once I got a little bit better from my initial collapse, just even like traveling and giving talks like there's some kind of adrenaline rush that you get from that, that in a way supplies a kind of nice break from the physical, the physical experience you're having otherwise.

And the experience of writing...

I mean, this was in certain ways, you know, one of the odder things about being told early on, well, this is, you know, the result of stress and mental breakdown. And this is all in your head, which was that my mind was the only thing that seemed to work. Right. So I could still write a column. I couldn't do anything else at various points, but I could still sit down and produce 800 words. God help me on on American politics. Right. You know, you sort of push your mind inside the computer.

So I would say that the specific acts of being a professional, talking in public, tweeting in public, writing columns, could provide a kind of, if not solace, at least a kind of break from the everyday experience of writing.

agony, you might say. But then the flip side of that is then as soon as that wears off, as soon as you leave the talk and go back to your hotel room or sort of you're no longer engaged in the Twitter argument, you're just sort of surfing social media and seeing people, you know, post photos from their biking trip in the, you know, Sierra Nevada. And isn't it beautiful? And isn't life great? I'm on my bike. Everything's terrific. Like, you know, just sort of the normal the normal round of, you

stuff or in the world to sort of finish, you know, to finish your column and step outside the coffee shop and like be on a street surrounded by people who all seem healthy and you're not. Like that come down is really hard. That phrase, pushing your mind inside the computer and also what you're describing about sort of, you know, logging back online and seeing an engagement or a wedding or a baby and everyone's healthy and hiking up mountains. There

There was this passage from your book that I loved about this, and I wanted to read it to you. You write, It's commonplace observation by now that the Internet transforms the experience of human social life into a meeting of facades, a whirl of bright, shiny images of happiness and health that conceal the real embodied self. But chronic illness dramatically clarifies just how much of this world of surfaces and curated selves lies to its inhabitants, both to the healthy and to the sick.

It lies to the healthy about the likelihood that they will one day suffer. The reality that even in a prosperous modernity, the book of Ecclesiastes still applies. And it lies to the suffering, day after day, about how alone they really are. To be sick, you write, and professionally online, was an education in other people's hidden experiences.

What I saw on my computer screen, the thrum of political argumentation punctuated by bursts of happy news, the engagement photo, the new baby, the sunset scene from our vacation, some really great exciting new job, was a version of what the unhappy teenager sees in the superficial online version of her high school social life. What the divorced 50-something with terrible back pain sees in a culture whose entertainments assume a world in which everyone is forever 25.

And what the grief struck or addicted or depressed person sees in a world that has no capacity to integrate portraits of real suffering into its panoply of images. I love that because you have had a very specific, in some ways, Northeastern geographic experience, which is the experience of Lyme. But really what you experienced is this thing that all humans experience, which

Well, and it also made, I would say, an interesting contrast with what you're describing here.

The extent to which when I was in reality, right, like not online, but in sort of the social situations that we had to be in, which for me meant, you know, occasionally a green room when I was still doing TV or, you know, sort of talking to people at a reception after an event or just talking to the parents at our kids nursery school. Right. And in those environments,

I was not private about my suffering. The sort of reserve that I maintained on social media, I did not maintain at all in real life. And if you and I had hung out five years ago for some reason at a coffee shop in rural Connecticut, after about 10 minutes, I would have just started telling you everything that was wrong with me. And I did that to people I barely knew.

As long as I was seeing them in person, I would do that. And what happened then, not always, but quite often, was that you would get, you know, you would get their stories, right? And you would get a realization of, I mean, one, in the Northeast, just how many people have had really weird experiences with Lyme disease per se, right? Like that was sort of...

Weird revelation number one was this mystery illness that I had tons of other highly educated people in the Northeast corridor have also had weird experiences with that people don't talk about that much. Two, there's just sort of this general array of different forms of chronic suffering that people go through and more and more you go through it more and more as you go further on in life. And

My sort of in-person, my sort of emotional nakedness, I was often very emotionally naked to people I didn't know that well, tended to sort of prompt me.

people to be a little more naked with me, I think. And so I learned a lot more even, you know, just within our profession, right? I know a lot more about the specific sufferings of some prominent TV pundits, let's say, than I would have if I hadn't told them what was going on with me. And that but that, too, in certain ways makes online look

look that much worse, right? Because if you can have this kind of this feeling of solidarity from human contact in person, then the impulse to perform online looks that much worse. But

The flip side of this is that without the Internet, I would never have gotten better as at the pace I've gotten better. Right. Like the Internet give us and the Internet take us away. Vice versa. Right. But like social media made me feel miserable. But I would never have figured out or it would have taken me much longer to figure out some of the stranger and more aggressive things I tried in fighting the disease itself if there hadn't been all

both sort of online communities of sick people and just even like doctors, like there are Lyme doctors who, you know, in Seattle, Washington, who will post their recommended antibiotic combinations. And I could take that and go to my own doctor and say, well, maybe we should try this and these kind of things. So, you know, like all things in human affairs, the Internet has big problems, and yet there are gifts that come from it as well.

There was this sort of strange paradox that came to mind as I was reading your book. And that has to do with sort of, and this is going to maybe sound weird, but illness and trauma and even death.

allergies, having a kind of cache, especially in elite culture right now. You know, you see people putting PTSD in their Twitter bios or faking certain allergies or ailments because, you know, victimhood or trauma or illness is a kind of, you know, fast track to getting some kind of status in at least a particular elite part of our culture.

And at the same time, you know, I generally think of American culture as one that detests weakness, especially in men. And I was wondering how you experienced that. Like, did having Lyme or, you know, chronic illness and pain in general, you know, was there any part of that you felt was some kind of card that you had to play? Or was it mostly a sense of, you know, embarrassment?

It's a really complex topic, right? And I'm not sure about...

the answer. I felt like I did feel like at times that it was something that I should get extra credit for. Yeah. There was a part of me definitely that was like, if people knew, you know, the pain I was experiencing as I... And you're still writing the best damn columns in the paper besides. Well, that's very kind of you. But as let's, let's flip it around and say the pain I was in when I wrote that column that they hated.

Maybe they would give me a little more credit than they are right now, right? That like I'm operating from some kind of handicap for which I should get credit in online discourse. So in that sense, I guess I felt something in common with the impulse that I think is very strong in progressivism right now of sort of, you know, sort of

mental illness, especially as a kind of identity that becomes part of your public persona. Right. But that impulse then also sort of coexisted with, you know, which is maybe my conservative side or whatever, you know, just sort of the feeling of like, well, but in fact, there's no extra credit. Your argument is either good or it's bad. Right. Like, you know, you, you sort of the, the, to the extent that there is something that

worth, particularly worth hearing that comes out of an experience of suffering, it has to be about that suffering itself, right? So, you know, which is why I feel comfortable for better or worse, you know, we'll see what people think of the book, but I feel sort of comfortable making arguments that reference my own suffering if I'm talking about

the questions that are entangled with that suffering like what have i learned about chronic illness right like what what have i learned about sort of modern medicine these kind of things right but i don't expect my arguments about you know the child tax credit or u.s foreign policy right to stand or fall in any way on whatever i've learned from being sick for five for six years

And I really admire that. I guess what I'm getting at is, you know, in all of the times that you're called, you know, you're a privileged white Catholic, you know, cisgender, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. You know, what right does this guy have to have a column in the New York Times, given that he has the wrong views about anything? In the face of that kind of criticism, was there ever a temptation to say, I am in a kind of pain that would shake you trolls to your knees?

Like, was there ever a temptation to go there? Of course. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Without a doubt. Does that reaction live in deleted tweets or did that ever sort of come out? I don't think it ever came out. I wrote a few columns that I where I tried to take that impulse, which is somewhat toxic, and turn it into maybe something slightly more insightful and just sort of talk about like how

how universal suffering is even in a wealthy society like ours and how universal it is. And it can be even in upper middle class enclaves and so on. Right. And so there was this

piece that the, you know, famous semi pseudonymous writer Scott Alexander wrote that I quote in the book. Slate Star Codex. Slate Star Codex, now Astral Star Codex, your fellow substacker. And he wrote something and I used it in a column and I also used it in this book where he talked about, you know, being a psychiatrist, seeing patients in this incredibly privileged part of Northern California and

And how just sort of insane and varied these stories of absolute disastrous suffering could be. And how thus what that implies then is that we sort of in everyday life, we filter for suffering. Right. I think that was the term he used.

Because it really is hard to know how to deal with someone else's suffering, especially suffering that doesn't go away. So you sort of filter it out. But in filtering it out, you lose sight of some of the universalities of the human condition, which are such that even someone who is undoubtedly privileged like myself,

can, yeah, can sort of pass through something that it's been pretty, pretty bad, pretty, pretty bad, I think. Pretty terrible. And then there's, yeah, and then there's sort of the further politicized feeling of like, you know, you talk about microaggressions, but, you know, I'm in real physical pain. But those are, there's nothing...

What's to be gained from that, right? You can, yeah, there's nothing really good to be drawn out of that experience because, you know, who knows what the person who is complaining about microaggressions, right, may be actually experiencing some other kind of profound pain that they aren't talking about, right? Right. There is definitely a sense in which having a intensely physicalized form of suffering can alienate you from people who

complain of suffering in ways that are less physicalized. But that alienation is probably a big mistake. And really, it should just engender a kind of wide-ranging sympathy, even if in the heat of argument, it doesn't always immediately do that. More with Ross after this. Ross, for all of us who are lucky enough right now to live in what I've heard you call the kingdom of the healthy, the truth is that

one day we'll find ourselves on the other side of the divide in some version of the kingdom of the sick. And right now also, even if we are in the land of the healthy ourselves, we all know and love someone who's in the kingdom of the sick. So what can we do to steel ourselves right now for the pain that is coming? And what can we do to help those who we love who are in that kind of pain right now? So for the second, I mean, I think the basic thing

that you can do is take it seriously right and this is you know

I think people do take the suffering of their loved ones and friends seriously. But in the range of illnesses and problems that are of the kind that I'm writing about here, there is a strong tendency, in certain ways a very American tendency, but in certain ways just human nature, to look at people who suffer for long periods of time without being able to quite figure out why and assume

They like attention, right? That, you know, they, people who like being sick. I think, again, doctors, doctors see a certain kind of patient who they feel like is just likes going to doctors, right? Like that. Right. And especially, especially women. I mean, there's been all of these studies about how women are less believed about their pain and, you know. Women are, women are less believed. I,

I also think that women are more likely to ask for help and that that then creates this weird circular dynamic where women are more likely to ask for help. But then that means doctors see more women with mysterious problems and assume that mysterious problems are some kind of lady thing. Witchy lady thing. Exactly. Right. Which then so the cycle continues. And but yeah, absolutely. And look, I mean,

The human race is really varied and complicated. And undoubtedly, there are people out there who like attention, who like going to doctors, who are sort of hypochondriacs in the classic sense. But a large proportion of people suffering chronically over long periods of time are people who have problems that are on the fringes of our medical understanding and that

could be helped, but we haven't figured out how to help them. And they're not, they're looking for help. They're not looking for attention. They're looking for help. And just having that

Having that be your default, and again, maybe the person turns out to be, you know, the other kind and they really are looking for attention, but defaulting to the assumption that you take this seriously, I think is just a really good first step for thinking about how to help people. And then just sort of being present, right? Like that's the, you know, there are just huge limits to what you can do to help someone in these kind of situations. But sometimes, yeah,

just sort of being present in their life in some way, maybe just to absorb some of the, you know, the toxic emotions that they'd otherwise be dumping on, let's say, their wife. Not that I would ever have done that, of course, right? But like that can be helpful too. And then to the harder question, I mean, look, there's

When it comes to physical suffering, there are certain ways in which nothing can prepare you for it, right? Like, I don't think there's anything I could have learned that, you know, would have prepared me for what constant pain, constantly circling pain feels like. It's just something unto itself that you can try and describe, but you can't really understand fully until you live it. So what do you do to prepare for it? Well, you prepare, I think, in, you know, this is sort of what

philosophy and religion and literature have existed for in part for a long periods of time, right?

you prepare for sort of having a way of thinking about the universe and your own place within it that helps you bear through. And for me, as someone who is, you know, not deeply pious in spite of my reputation as a conservative Catholic, but at least, you know, sort of a practicing Catholic who has religious beliefs, I definitely found that

those helped, not in a way that proved or disproved the existence of God in any way, arguably in a way that sort of vindicates the kind of people who say, ah, religion's just a crutch. Like, yes, it is a crutch. And sometimes you need a crutch. Sometimes you need to have a sense of your life as having some kind of purpose that will redeem the experience you're in at the moment.

And I don't think, you know, Catholic belief is not the only way to have that. But having something like that before you reach the place that we will all reach eventually, I think, is really, really important. Well, let me jump in here because you had this amazing passage from the book. I want to read it. A crutch for weak minded people. That's how the noted philosopher Jesse the Body Ventura once described religion.

My pre-illness self, you write, would have disputed that description, but my sickened self would merely give it a tweak. Absolutely religion is a crutch, and it's not only useful for the weak of mind, but for anyone dealing with severe weakness. You had better believe that I leaned on my belief in a silent, invisible God more in those miserable months, that miserable summer, than on any hope or notion or idea in any prior portion of my life. And...

You know, I've always thought of you as a kind of intellectual Catholic. And that's kind of how you describe yourself in the book, that your faith was sort of abstract. And that is not the kind of prayer that you describe engaging in in this book. This is a person who is falling to his knees, begging God for help. You know, I think of you as writing these kind of high-minded takes about, you know, the Catholic Church and Catholic intellectual life.

I don't think of you as someone who is, you know, going to your local parish and laying in the nave of the church begging for mercy. And I wanted to ask you about that transformation in your own faith and whether, you know, as you sort of emerged out of the worst parts of the disease, if you've sort of been able to maintain that aspect of your own faith.

Well, I mean, there's part of that that you only have in the absolute crisis, right? The scriptural phrase, right, is that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. Emphasis on beginning, right? It's not, you know, it's not where you're supposed to end. But in that sense, like what I had, the faith that I had that got stronger, right?

over the course of this experience was that beginner's kind of faith. So you could say that I had faith, I got faith for the first time, really, for real. But the form that that faith took was being afraid of God, not like, like God, you know, because it's like, all right, you know, you believe in God and, and it's, it is a crutch, right? It is something you lean on

that this has a purpose, that this isn't happening for no reason. It isn't just sort of random. It's something that if you bear up and get through it without destroying your own life in some way, that that will be to your good and the good of other people. So you feel all of that. But also it's like, well, you know, I used to understand abstractly like that

God let bad things happen to people. But now I know on a, you know, intimate and personal and direct way that he absolutely does. Do you believe in a God that interjects in our lives that somehow wanted you to get chronically ill?

So you can do some theological hair splitting. I can put on my, you know, my pseudo intellectuals hat, Barry, and say, well, there's a distinction between what God wills for you and what he allows to happen. God's permissive will versus his intentional will or something like that. Right. That's, but no, I mean, basically the answer is yes. I think that God, um,

in his wisdom, saw fit to afflict me with a deadly disease. And that doesn't mean, you know, had there been some other set of choices that I had made in my life that had brought me to a different point, then maybe that affliction would not have been what was best for me at that moment. And I could have escaped it. Maybe if I'd been a better person in my 20s, my late 30s wouldn't have been such a hellscape.

But no, I mean, yeah, I think that I think that God, let's say that he allows things to happen in a way that from a human perspective is kind of indistinguishable from him making them happen. And, you know, and I mean, that that's, you know, I mean.

Judaism and Christianity differ somewhat on some of the questions around theodicy and suffering. But, you know, the fundamental story, the Old Testament is obviously full of God sending afflictions very directly. And the central drama of the New Testament is God, you know, sending his own son to be crucified. So I think that there is a common thread binding there.

Judaism and Christianity, which is that in some sense, suffering is part of God's plan. You say in the book, and this stayed with me, that the question of why bad things happen to good people, you know, there's a wonderful book by Rabbi Harold Kushner that

I've read, lots of people have read about that subject. I think it's literally has that title, Why Do Bad Things Happen to Good People? But you suggest in the book that that's the wrong question to ask. Why is that? Well, that's from the Christian perspective, right? The question is, why do good things happen to good people? Yeah.

If the path to redemption lies through the cross, then the better a person is, the more they're on the path to redemption, the more crosses you should expect them to be asked to carry. And obviously, human life is a lot more complicated than that. It's not just some kind of mathematical proof where you...

figure out, you know, how much suffering someone gets by how good or bad they are. Clearly, there's lots going on that we can't possibly understand. But yeah, I mean, I think if you start, if you take the New Testament as your point of departure, that question does actually reverse itself. And like all of the saints in my own religion have led lives that

are not Joel Osteen style prosperity gospel stories, right? It's like, you know, like Mother Teresa, right? Like to, you know, Mother Teresa has this incredible mystical revelation at the start of her life.

famous ministry that leads her to go to calcutta and become mother teresa uh right and but then for the rest of for some incredibly long portion of her life she experiences what christian mystics call like the dark night of the soul or the spiritual desert where she feels sort of cut off from abandoned by this god who gave her this initial revelation leading

to every other choice that she made in her life, right? So that's not physical suffering, that's spiritual suffering. But like, that's the norm for the people who are held up as icons in my faith tradition. And, you know, for Judaism, right? Like the book of Job does not end by saying, and then God came down in the whirlwind and said, actually, Job's suffering was redemptive in these ways, right? Like it doesn't, but it ends with,

God saying, there are things here that are beyond your understanding, and you have to deal with that because I'm God and you're not, right? So maybe in that sense, Christianity is more presumptuous. If the Jewish narrative ends with mystery, the Christian narrative claims to go slightly beyond it and say, actually, we can understand more of the mystery in light of what happened to Jesus. But both traditions, you're ending with the idea that

you know, you can be Job the righteous and... Every terrible thing can happen to you anyway. Every terrible thing can happen to you. And that expectation is sort of, in that sense, I think, has to be baked into both faiths. After the break, Ross on the state of our medical institutions and why everyone these days seems to be a conspiracy theorist. Please stay with us. So let's leave questions about...

God's providence and suffering behind and go a little bit, let's go back to the realm of the earthly if we can. One of the things that strikes me in your book is this kind of fine line between skepticism of the medical establishment and the way that that too much of that skepticism can allow someone to fall prey to conspiracies or snake oil salesmen.

You write of this of the CDC Lyme guidelines. It created not just two worldviews, but two cultures, two concentric circles of insiders and outsiders, the inner one confident and authoritative and buoyed by institutional support, the outer one more fluid and open-minded, but also necessarily more peculiar and paranoid, and sometimes, frankly, gonzo in its theories and experiments."

So in your own experience, you know, the circle of insiders is telling you one thing, which is you don't have Lyme disease. But the circle of outsiders, especially when you started to delve into these alternative treatments that you write about in your book, they knew that you did. And you tried everything. You tried the insiders. You tried the outsiders. You tried antibiotics. And then when it ended up working for you.

is this very strange contraption that I had never heard of that I suspect the medical establishment thinks is...

kind of crazy. Not kind of. Extremely. Yes, just crazy. Let's leave aside the kind of four years of trying all of these different antibiotic treatments. A, what ended up working for you? And B, what did that experience reveal to you about the problems maybe endemic in our medical establishment in this country?

So, well, the tricky thing is what ended up working for me was multiple things, right? Because at a certain point you realize that

at least in the treatment of this particular disease, and I'm not the only person at all who's had this experience, there's a sort of onion peeling quality where you are basically accepting that there's nothing you can take that will make the disease go away tomorrow. But if you take some certain combination of antibiotics, join to some other things, herbs, enzymes, all these kinds of things, you know,

do a lot, aim to do a lot of different things in your body, you can sort of peel off layers and get closer and closer to health over a period of months and years. But then what I found, right, is that, you know, so there's a list of things that can help with the peeling that can basically, you

kill or attack the bacteria when they are sort of available and exposed in your bloodstream. And some of those things are extremely conventional medical treatments, long list of antibiotics and related things. Some of them are, you know, sort of antimicrobial herbs and these kind of things. And

Yeah, this machine that I bought. And in fact, in my attic room where I record podcasts, it sits on the desk beside me right now, although I don't use it very much anymore. But it's a machine that basically is supposed to generate sound waves that shatter bacteria at a certain frequency in the same way that an opera singer's voice might shatter a glass at the right pitch.

And this is an idea that has, you know, there's you can if you dig around, you can find a couple of studies that provide a little bit of support for it. If you dig into the history of these machines, you'll find a lot of snake oil salesmen and what seems like unadulterated quackery. But basically, the evidence that they work is just testimonials, a large number of testimonials from people who have used them and found a benefit.

And when you're really sick, you maybe you don't. But I made sort of a list of things I wasn't sick enough or crazy enough to try early on. I mean, like what would fall into this category? Right. Well, yeah, like like, you know.

There's just a lot. There's a list of crazy seeming treatments that you encounter as soon as you start reading about what people do for chronic illness and especially Lyme disease. And the Rife machine, this machine was one of the things on that list at the start where I was like, OK, well. Yeah, I was going to say this. This seems up there with leeches. This is up there. Yeah. It's like I'm not whatever else I'm doing. I'm not doing that.

And then, you know, 18 months in, you have a different perspective and you become willing to try things you wouldn't have tried before. And so I tried this and I found that it worked in the sense that not in the sense that it made me better immediately, but in the sense that it basically seemed to have the same kind of effect as taking a strong dose of antibiotics when I had strong, strong symptoms. And I don't make any, you know, sort of

strong empirical claims for the machine in the book. I, you know, gesture to a couple a couple of data sources I've found that are sort of suggestive. But I don't think that, you know, sitting down in the world of double blind controlled trials, you would recommend that somebody use this. And yet nonetheless, it worked for me as it has seemingly worked for a large number of people. And that reality

Having that kind of experience, you know, it inevitably changes. It broadens your mind for better or worse about what might be real and true in the world. Yes. And then, you know, again, I don't without sort of

laying blame on the establishment or the CDC for not taking what seems like quackery seriously, you do come to realize just how much of the medical system we have now is designed to exclude the experimental sort of by definition. So how does that come to the fact that you are really helped along by

method that I think many of the blue chip doctors you went to would write off as crazy. How does that inform more broadly the way you think about medicine in this country, but also the way that the conversation about COVID unfolded in this country? Well, so it gives you sort of an automatic sympathy for

Well, here's what's strange, right? So when I was growing up in the Northeast, in pretty liberal parts of society, anything associated with alternative medicine, non-CDC approved treatment and so on was coded as left wing. It was what crunchy hippies did, right? They were the ones who didn't vaccinate their kids. They were the ones who were into alternative medicine and homeopathy and all these things.

And now, because of the complexities of partisan realignments and the Trump era and sort of the consolidation of a liberal consensus within elite institutions and the consolidation of certain kinds of populist paranoia on the right, a lot of these things are suddenly increasingly coded as right-wing. Certainly vaccine skepticism has gone from being a left-wing to a right-wing thing.

and when you have this kind of on the fringe experience as i did you just you automatically have more sympathy for everyone who's out there on the fringe like i am vaccinated for covid i think everyone should get vaccinated or almost everyone um but i definitely like feel like i have more sympathy and understanding for

vaccine skeptics than I ever would have five or six years ago. I certainly have more sympathy for people who, you know, get sick with COVID and want to take weird things, right? In fact, not only do I have that sympathy, when I got COVID at the start of the pandemic, I had some hydroxychloroquine in my drawer because I had been prescribed it as part of a Lyme treatment four years before. And did I take it? I took it, you know? So I am, I have sort of

And was ivermectin also happened to be in the drawer? I did not take ivermectin. Ivermectin was not yet at that point. Well, actually, I did have one doctor mention it to me, but it had not yet become a thing. And it's also different. I mean, I think there's a difference between taking ivermectin for COVID when vaccines are available and

when you should probably just get vaccinated versus taking something experimental when, you know, there isn't any other way to prevent yourself from, from getting sick. But so, right. So this, this is one point, right? So, okay, you have this, I have this deeper sympathy for what I used to think of as sort of left-wing alternative medicine world. And now is maybe sort of more right-wing alternative medicine world. But again,

You also have to figure out then how to prevent that sympathy from pulling you all the way into...

full spectrum rejectionism of the establishment. That is the whole thing I'm thinking about. And that is clearly really hard. Like people have experiences like mine, maybe more radical than mine, where the establishment fails them in some way. And it's very clear in our medical debates, in our politics, that having these kinds of experiences leads people to assume that anything the establishment says is wrong. And

It's a lie. And anything on the fringe is more trustworthy. Whereas the reality is just a mixture. The establishment is right that, you know, vaccines are good. If you get cancer, you should... If I was diagnosed with cancer tomorrow, I would be open to trying all kinds of things that I wouldn't have tried before I had this Lyme experience. But I'd also get chemotherapy, right? And like that...

maintaining that balance of saying, look, the establishment gets things right. It didn't, you know, it doesn't, it didn't come from nowhere, this way that we treat illnesses. It just has these limits. But you want to be, you want to go beyond the limits when you need to, when you obviously have to, as a

A lot of people with chronic illnesses have to. But you don't want to, in doing that, assume that anything that comes from the center, anything that comes from the CDC is just false, a lie, Bill Gates conspiring to put a microchip under your skin and so on.

This is something I've been thinking about a tremendous amount because a lot of the people who are skeptical of what you're calling the center, we could call it the establishment. The cathedral, I think. The cathedral. Exactly. Exactly. Oh, my God, you're going there. Well, point being, those people were six months to a year ahead of the whole lab leak conversation, saying it at a time where it was totally unacceptable to say. They were right about vitamin D. They were right about going outside more.

all of these things they were right about. And I think that rightness has made them maybe so skeptical that they are now sort of over-correcting and seeing exactly as you said, that anything that emanates from organizations like the CDC or from the mouth of someone like Tony Fauci is necessarily untrue and wrong. So given your own sort of, um,

I don't know, traversing of the borderland between the cathedral, let's say, and... I mean, I work for the Cathedral Berry, so, you know... But many of your ideas are more frontier ideas, right? How do you not fall down the rabbit hole into conspiratorial thinking? I mean, I'm... I was joking, but I'm actually quite seriously the fact that I work for the New York Times and live my life inside...

Not fully inside. Right. But like my professional worlds are the worlds of the liberalist, the liberal establishment. Right. I, you know, have taught classes at Yale. You know, all of these things. I think that probably means that unless there's some dramatic change in my life.

I will never go all the way to the to the to the fringe or the extreme, which, you know, maybe is a fault. Like maybe maybe the the extreme is is right completely. And I am too blind to see it. And certainly I have friends who are more populist than I am, more right wing than I am, are more eccentric than I am, who think that about me, right, that I'm sort of co-opted by by by working for The New York Times. I'm too anti Trump, these kind of things.

But if you think that like there is temptations and major pitfalls in turning your back on the establishment completely, then I think that working for an institution like like the one I work for living where I do, it's helpful in keeping you even in situations where you might have personal experiences that pull you all the way to the fringe.

I'm literally in a room surrounded by crystals right now.

I would hope so. And, you know, actually, I've known some people who used essential oils to treat Lyme disease and had really good results. So I shouldn't. This is the thing. I think the reason that this works perfectly for you is that you yourself actually in your mind and a lot of the ideas that you entertain are

You're not of the inside, but it's like you've managed to strike this perfect balance because you're making your career on the inside, even as I think maybe in your own life and in the things that you're curious about. They're very much of the outside. At the very least, I see my job. I write for an audience, you know, as you well know from having worked at The New York Times, the audience for The New York Times is an audience of people who

it's a varied audience, but people who think of themselves as, you know, people who listen to Anthony Fauci, right? Like, like that's, that's the, that's the audience of the New York Times. People who take liberal institutions and their knowledge production seriously. And since I write for those people, I, I can think of myself as sort of

an ambassador trying to bring to their perspective things that, you know, are not contained within that establishment as as it actually exists. So even something like this book falls in a way, maybe more so than I would have realized five or six years ago into that category of basically saying, you know, you have to understand the real limits of medical knowledge and the reasons why

people end up doing strange things and embracing strange ideas. But then, you know, you still have this weird feeling, right? Where I will encounter people on the internet who I have read saying what I now consider to be really smart things about Lyme disease, saying what I consider to be really crazy things about vaccines, right? And like, yes. And I think

To understand the world fully, you have to be able to say, I think that person is right about life and wrong about vaccines. Right. Right. But, you know, you see this on Twitter all the time. Right. And like people are judged by.

their dumbest opinion that's just a rule i'm sure it's true of me too whatever my dumbest opinions are that you know the columns that i've written that were totally wrong are the things that get that that get that get brought up but people often i will see two writers who i like both of the writers and i'll realize that they hate each other or think each other is stupid because of each one of them has said something that the other considers dumb on some issue right and that

Just this is true in medical debates. It's true in political debates. But like judging experts, writers, anyone who engages in public debate on the thing that they seem the most intelligent about.

is actually a much better way to go through the world. I've been thinking a lot lately about how conspiracies are really comforting. Like that confronting the fact that maybe an institution is crumbling to, you know, maybe you'd call it decadence or stagnation or, you know, bureaucratic failure or just pure chance, that somehow that's less emotionally satisfying than a conspiracy in which there's kind of

a very clean black and white way of telling a story with a clear villain or a clear hero. I'm curious about what you think is going on right now in the culture that makes conspiratorial thinking so attractive, including to so many smart people. Yeah. I mean, I, I, to sort of talk off my, my last book for a minute, which was about deck decadence, right? This idea that sort of Western society is defined as,

by this weird state in between growth and decline, right? This sort of feeling of sort of stagnation and frustration and futility, right? So a big part of that is this loss of faith in institutions that's then been accelerated by the internet in ways that, you know, I think we all see in front of us, but you can read a book like Martin Gurry's great book, The Revolt of the Public to get a sense of that, right? So like, all right, so people have lost faith in institutions, but out of that

loss of faith, there's still a desire to find order in the world. And

if you're coming, if you have this sense of sort of futility and paranoia, the order that you discern in the world is more likely to be malignant. And so there's this weird dynamic where people simultaneously believe that institutions are bankrupt and don't work anymore and so on. Everyone agrees on this. But then somehow in the heart of the institution that you fear the most, there is this effective conspiracy going on. Right. So you certainly saw this on the right where

People on the right looked at the sheer chaos that overtook the American establishment during the summer of 2020. And you and I both lived through that chaos in the form of certain events at the New York Times that were also mirrored in events all over the place, right? This was not just, this was not a Times thing. This was a, you know, the poetry magazine and, you know, the fashion industry and Hollywood. There was all of this sort of convulsion that was mirrored in events

street protest and statues being overturned and so on. Right. It was the great tear down. Yes. So people on the right, like the real right. Right. Not like Barry, not like Barry Weiss is right. But the real right who were sort of real outsiders to elite institutions look at all this and they say, oh, man, there's a revolution happening and these revolutionaries are in charge of

And, you know, if they can do this right, if they can get people fired and tear down statues and so on, I'm sure they can fix an election. So then the election happens and Joe Biden wins and it just becomes a

Not that there wasn't already voter fraud paranoia and so on on the right, but it just became really easy to believe that like there was this inner revolutionary party that had been responsible for the events of the summer and was also somehow responsible for, you know, changing all the voting laws and doing various ballot shenanigans and getting Joe Biden elected president. Whereas.

On the inside, and, you know, I mean, I'm a conservative, but I am inside these institutions. When you're inside these institutions, you're like, there's no inner party. There's no, nobody's in charge of, you know, the disturbances in the summer of 2020. Sure, there were some activist groups that sort of kicked off the protests and there were sort of particular people within institutions who saw opportunities to sort of, you know, go after other people. Like, oh, that's real. But there's no, like,

there's no central committee of wokeness that is planning all of this and making it happen. And in the same way, there was no central committee of American liberalism that was capable of running the kind of election-altering conspiracy that a lot of people on the right ended up

believing in. And that's true, even though even though there were people who bragged, you know, there's that Molly Ball Time magazine cover story where all these people said, oh, we were the we were the committee that saved the election. And then all the people on the right said, see, there was a committee to save the election. But no, that's all that's not real. And neither, though, is so in this moment on the center left, right, there's this sense of like, man, there's this this organized action on the right that

to make sure that next time Donald Trump can steal the election. And all of these people are, you know, all of these people in the Republican base are passing all these laws and states and working together to set us up for the coup in 2024. And, you know, something crazy may happen in 2024. And, you know, we may, you know, it's totally plausible that Donald Trump could inspire some kind of shenanigans that leads to some sort of mess on Capitol Hill in the vote count.

But nobody's planning that out right now on the right. Like Steve Bannon is not is not organizing this vast conspiracy.

Right. But I'm struck by what you said about, you know, there's no committee on wokeness, right? There's no edict that comes down from, I don't know, Ava DuVernay or Ibram Kendi. And sure, that's true. But what there is, is this very powerful consensus that almost seems to speak in the same talking points as if there was consensus.

a committee of wokeness handing them down. I mean, not to get you in trouble, but the January 6th riot at the Capitol, you know, within 24 hours, the language that was used to describe that universally inside all of the inside institutions was that that was an insurrection. Do you believe that what happened on January 6th was an insurrection? Oh, God. I mean, I usually call it a riot.

Mm hmm.

I don't but I don't usually use that term. I usually say riot. I guess what I'm saying is that if you're watching on the outside, right? Well, it's like it's like you can take a less charged example, right? It's just like like Latinx, right? A term like Latinx, like literally a vanishingly small number of Hispanic and Latino people use the term Latinx.

Not only that, but this has been pointed out many times within the elite media conversation that almost nobody uses this term. And it's very strange that we use this term. And yet that has not prevented a term like that from being sort of completely dominant in a particular stratum to the point where like if you read a book that is about something that has nothing to do with wokeness, but it just mentions Latinos twice in 402 pages,

They will be called Latinx. And you may know that the author of the book in question is not themselves particularly woke. It's just, in fact, it was probably their copy editor. It was their copy editor who changed it. And they were like, well, I'm not going to make a big deal about it. Right. Well, it's like it's I think of it as like the woke language system upgrade. Right. It's like, are you operating on, you know,

iPhone 13, iPhone 12. Have you added two-spirit to the LGBTQ acronym as Justin Trudeau did in an immortal tweet just two days ago? Well, one of the things that I'd be remiss if I didn't ask you about, given that, you know. But wait, before you do, but so do you, because this is, you know, we're being very agreeable to each other, but do you think, so you think there is more of a

Not like a single person behind the curtain, but you think that thinking of sort of wokeness in organized terms is more useful maybe than I do. Is that fair? I think insofar as I believe that this ideology has largely captured the sense-making institutions of American life, what we've been referring to as the inside, what others have referred to as the cathedral, and that those institutions act almost in a

unified way that yes, you could look at that and say it is organized to the extent that anything in American life could be called organized, as opposed to what's going on on the right, which feels scary and dark to me for a million other reasons, but just doesn't have any or nearly any institutional backing or institutional organization. So I mean, I think that

liberalism and the left are obviously much more powerful as forces of institutional power in American life. But I think you can see, like, if you are a, you know, Trump-fearing liberal, you can see versions of what you're describing happening with the language of insurrection or the language of, you know, the Latinx upgrade, right? That happens on the right, too. Like, it seems like there is sort of an organic shifting set of

pro-Trump talking points, right? Like, well, just something like in the impeachment, right? Yeah, but Ross, the CDC is calling women birthing people. Do you know what I mean? Like, what's the equivalent thing that would have that kind of power on the right? Well, I mean, I think the equivalent, they are, I mean, this is the problem. They aren't equivalent at all. That's why it's actually so challenging to,

compare them because what's happened what trumpism on the right is just a different kind of force than sort of you know new model woke progressivism on the left and they exert power in different ways they operate through different systems so it's just really i i don't know if you can draw perfect analogies but i mean from the left point of view the left says you know look barry weiss like

We're talking about like a sensible person on the left, right? They're like, yeah, I mean, all right. It's really – I agree. It's pretty stupid that the word birthing – that the word birthing person shows up in official medical documents. But –

On the right, Donald Trump is saying that the last election was a fraud and he's planning. And that is that is the meme. If the meme on the left is birthing person, the meme on the right is, you know, we're going to steal and meaning we're going to steal the election from you next time. And don't you think that's a much more serious threat than some, you know, article in JAMA that says crazy things about people with vaginas? Right. Like that's I mean, that's the that's the that's the liberal, the not that woke, you

but not anti-woke liberal argument about the current moment, I think. I totally agree. But then that means that you, in your focus on wokeness, and I, in my, you know, attempts to say actually Donald Trump is not Hitler, are both...

You know, we're fighting we're fighting brush fires that may be serious brush fires, but we're ignoring the huge blaze. Right. And worse than that, perhaps in ignoring it or not focusing entirely on the threat of Trump and Trumpism that we are.

sort of handmaidens for it, maybe unintentionally. Handmaidens in really nice Gilead-style outfits, perhaps. Exactly. One thing that I really wanted to ask you about, and actually this is a lovely transition into it, is one of the reasons that I feel that it's so important to stop the spread of the illiberal left is precisely because I believe that the backlash to it from the right

We'll make whatever we've now until now called the alt-right look like nothing. Meaning the idea that we are going to, under wokeness, re-racialize society, make everyone, including young children, fixate on their race, their gender, their sexual orientation, their class, especially their race is the most important part of who they are, and tell everyone

young white children, let's say, throughout the country, that their whiteness is not just the most important thing about them, but it's the thing that gives them incredible power. When I hear all of that, I think blood and soil, populist nationalist right, that it's going to be extremely dangerous, not just for the country, but I'm thinking personally now to me and my family.

And that's one of the reasons that I think, you know, certainly one of the biggest knocks against me is that I focus an inordinate amount on this. But I think one of the things that I haven't maybe fully articulated is that that's the reason why beyond just the danger of what it is now. And I think.

You know, I suspect that you're in some WhatsApp and signal groups like me where you're seeing things that have not yet broken through to the mainstream that look way more. I'm actually I'm actually in a disappointingly small number of like secret email groups. So I probably should be I probably should join more of them just yet just to see to see. But the point is, is that like a white identity politics is the obvious backlash to this. And it's already here.

And that's something that I've been wanting for a long time to ask you about. If you see that backlash coming and how you've been thinking about it. Yeah. And the answer is I'm not completely sure because I don't know how much...

I don't know how much trends in like elite internet discourse. I'm using elite, not maybe accurately here, but in sort of specialized, let's say specialized internet discourse, right? How do they map onto...

patterns in mass politics, right? So I feel like Donald Trump, for instance, in 2016 was more of a white identity politics candidate, actually, than he ended up being in 2020. And over the course of his presidency, in part because of some of the things that you're describing that happened with progressivism, the way progressivism evolved to become

more race conscious, also just sort of weirder, more arcane, more academic, like the language of Judith Butler sort of incorporating itself into normal people's conversation.

By the way, it goes to prove that elite tiny signal groups or elite conversations in random obscure academic departments do actually come to shape. Oh, yeah, yeah. They can take over. No, no, exactly. Everything that in 2003 seemed like, you know, extremely academic is now...

you know, extremely influential. And it's it it should give right. It should give everyone who ever dreamed of capturing an English department at, you know, at Oberlin hope that in capturing that English department, they can conquer the world someday. But but so what does that mean? Well, what what it means is that Trump's coalition in 2020 was in part composed of people most likely to be alienated by that who are not already voting Republican. And those people

people were mostly like Hispanic men. Yes. So and some African-American and Asian Asians, right, especially men, more men than women. But and so American the American coalition, American politics got deracialized relative to where it was in 2012 over the course of the Trump presidency. And

even as specialized right-wing discourse had more weird Nietzschean shit, if you will, injected into it, right? And what does that mean? I'm not sure what it means. I guess for right now, when I look at the right, I'm more worried about this sort of

the why I've written about like this idea, right, that Foucault, with his sort of deep skepticism of all institutions has gone from being like an important figure on the left to an important figure on the right. Right. So the right is now more sort of more relativist than the left. And I guess I worry more about that turn because I am not

actually a relativist, right? Like in this book that we were talking about before, the upshot of my book about Lyme disease is not that everything is a mystery and no one can ever know anything and everyone should just like, you know, follow the medical path that they feel best about. No, my message is like there are some problems out there that science doesn't know how to solve, but we actually could solve them. And similarly with like moral and political questions, I don't want to live in a world, you know, that's just about sort of who can use power.

Right. And but I worry more about that tendency on the right than I do about sort of overt like white nationalism as an ideology. And so in spite of the fact that I am more likely to downplay the dangers of Trump leading to leading to a constitutional crisis, like the mentality that leads to a constitutional crisis on the right, where it's just like everything's about power.

It doesn't matter if voter fraud is real or not. It's real in some ultimate sense. So we can use it as a reason to take power. Like I find that more threatening and dangerous to the country than I necessarily do like right wing anti-Semitism or right white nationalism. And that I could be wrong in

that priority. But that's sort of where the Trump years left me. I'm more worried about the right not believing in anything than I am about them believing in the supremacy of the Aryan race or something like that. And obviously, you can have both, right? Like the Nazis had their nihilism of lying propaganda and the passionate belief in Aryan racial superiority. I guess I just feel like right now this sort of

This relativism and quasi-nihilism on the right is more of a problem than a kind of ideological commitment to white identity politics. So you have this book, The Deep Places, which is just beautifully written. I read it in one sitting. But your previous book, of course, is called The Decadent Society. And it's a kind of warning about the moment that we're in, you know, and how we need to confront the real reality.

Maybe not even risk of decline, maybe the certainty of decline. And I guess that's what I want to ask you. How do we turn this ship around, Russ? So in a weird way, I think of this strange memoir about having a chronic illness as a kind of spiritual sequel to the decadent society. Because I think one way that you turn it around is...

you know, maybe you stop writing books that make sweeping generalizations about Western society and you pick a particular area where you think you can make a difference. And, you know, one of the features of decadence, right, is this idea of sort of stalemate and futility, that the problems we have

They aren't the worst problems in the world. They're like a chronic illness, right? They aren't killing us, but we can't get rid of them, right? So what do you do about that? Well, you don't try and solve every problem at once. You don't try and, you know, reroute all of civilization in one election cycle. You pick an area where you think you can make a difference and you try to be a problem solver. So I'm not –

claiming to present the cure for all chronic illness here, but I do think I have some specific thoughts about a specific problem in late modern Western life, a problem that afflicts a lot of people that we could deal with better than we do in a sort of non-decan and innovative way.

And I think that applies all over to pick up on our earlier conversation about how people criticize you, Barry Weiss. Right. I think a reasonable case for the Barry Weiss model of engagement is, you know, you are not well positioned to solve all the problems in the American Republican Party.

but maybe you are better positioned to do something constructive and offer something constructive to you know as a place a sounding board for critiques of liberal institutions that aren't getting aired sufficiently in you know mainstream publications or something and that's doesn't solve all the problems of the universe but it's something that you are well equipped to do and that i think you know

you know except for unless you're literally the pope or the president of the united states for most people even most sort of quote unquote elites that's a reasonable way to think about how to push back against decadence you're trying to pick a problem and solve it pick an institution and improve it pick a city and do your best to make it a good place to live hopefully

I've done that for some people with Lyme disease and chronic illness in this account. Or I've just gone completely around the bend and decadence has driven me insane. You know, anything, anything is possible. Ross, thank you so much for making the time. You're very welcome, Barry. Thank you so much for having me. It was a pleasure.

Thank you to Ross, and thank you as always for listening. For tips, see us at honestlypod.com. And for more stories, visit and subscribe over at barryweiss.substack.com. See you soon.