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- [00:00]
Will
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- [01:01]
Mike Pesca
I have a substack. Don't know if you know that sometimes on my sub stack I'll write an essay that I call the Peska Profundities portion of the substack. But really, every day I'll have five to seven items that if you fail to acknowledge them, you're going to be a worse person. Not just worse off, but not as interesting. Behind the times and a little slow on the uptake. This is called the Gist List. It is shot through with my aphorisms and observations. For instance, did you know that Texas was making Daylight Savings Time permanent? You would if you read the Gist list. Do you know that penguin poop cools the planet? You would if you read the Gist list. Did you know that if Trump's threats to Harvard go through their crew team, or I guess you could say their crew is going to be hit hard. A lot of Englishmen and women on the crew team. These are just some of the exciting items on the Gist list. Again, I would just hate for you to be an unoptimized, less than extremely interesting person. Go to Mike pesca.substack.com to get the written word. And now enjoy the spoken. It's Tuesday, August 12, 2025 from Peach Fish Productions. It's the Gist. I'm Mike Pe. Vladimir Putin will be coming to the U.S. to Alaska. Part of the U.S. not a lot of people know that President Trump will be meeting him and they will negotiate a peace deal. Wait you might need Vladimir Zelensky. Well, first of all, Trump's got a couple of peace deals under his belt. You know, I made fun of the Pakistan India peace deal, but that one's held. And Azerbaijan in Armenia signed a peace deal at the White House four days ago. It's held since then, so. So maybe we could have a peace deal with Ukraine and Russia. Actually amuses me, is that Donald Trump seems most intensely upset about one aspect of Vladimir Putin's men, his insistence on actually following the constitution. Why you got to follow the constitution? Because under the Ukrainian constitution, you can't give back land without a referendum. And Trump just clearly doesn't understand this.
- [03:20]
Samuel Parker
I was a little bothered by the fact that Zelensky was saying, well, I have to get constitutional approval. I mean, he's got approval to go into war and kill everybody, but he needs approval to do a land swap, because there'll be some land swapping going on. I know that through Russia and through conversations with everybody, to the good for the good of Ukraine. Good stuff, not bad stuff. Also some bad stuff for both. There's good and there's bad.
- [03:48]
Mike Pesca
Trump then went on to complain or point out geographically that Russia has occupied a big portion of Ukraine. Some very prime territory they've taken. Some very prime territory they've taken largely in real estate. We call it oceanfront property. That's the most valuable property. The president said, if you're on a lake or a river and ocean, it's always the best property, and went on to say, a lot of people don't know that Ukraine was largely a thousand miles of ocean. And that's gone. Other than one small area, Odessa. It's a small area Ukraine actually still controls from Odessa all the way down the Black Sea coast to Romania. It's over 100 miles. But, yes, the Crimea parts are, in fact, gone. I think a lot of people do know that, and I think that all this Alaska talk goes well. We will know that Donald Trump was a great peacemaker, especially if he could get past this unconscionable constitutional thing. On the show today, we will discuss a shooting that took place in Atlanta at the cdc, literally at the cdc. And the reason was things the CDC said and did about vaccines. Who's to blame? But first, you know, sometimes these wars, these shootings, all of this, the unconstitutionality of things gets me down, makes me upset, gets me angry. But we're told not to give in to our anger, to channel our anger, to perhaps suppress our anger. Oh, no, this is not what we should be doing, says Samuel Parker. There is a way to take a taxonomy of one's anger and do something productive with it. And this is the subject of his book, Good Anger How Rethinking Rage Can Change Our Lives. Samuel Parker, up next.
- [05:49]
Mandy
If you love chilling mysteries, unsolved cases.
- [05:52]
Mike Pesca
And a touch of mom style humor.
- [05:54]
Mandy
Moms and Mysteries is the podcast you've been searching for.
- [05:56]
Mike Pesca
Hey guys, I'm Mandy.
- [05:58]
Mandy
And I'm Melissa. Join us every Tuesday for Moms and Mysteries, your gateway to gripping, well researched true crime stories. Each week we deep dive into a variety of mind boggling cases as we shed light on everything from heists to whodunits. We're your go to podcast for mysteries with a motherly touch. Subscribe now to Moms and Mysteries wherever you get your podcast.
- [06:19]
Chris Gethard
Hi, I'm Chris Gethard and I'm very excited to tell you about Beautiful Anonymous, a podcast where I talk to random people on the phone. I tweet out a phone number, thousands of people try to call. You talk to one of them, they stay anonymous. I can't hang up. That's all the rules. I never know what's gonna happen. We get serious ones. I've talked with meth dealers on their way to prison. I've talked to people who survived mass shootings, crazy funny ones. I talked to a guy with a goose laugh, somebody who dresses up as a pirate on the weekends. I never know what's gonna happen. It's a great show. Subscribe today. Beautiful Anonymous.
- [06:51]
Mike Pesca
Anger as an emotion. Well, without it would we even be here, literally, societally, or beating our enemies? But you know, it's been anathemized in the modern world. And this makes sense. What does rage do if not kill a lot of people? Samuel Parker, who's a British journalist, got in touch with his rage and gets in touch with all of ours in the new book Good Anger How Rethinking Rage Can Change Our Lives. Hi Sam, welcome to the Gist.
- [07:21]
Samuel Parker
Hi Mike, thanks for having me.
- [07:23]
Mike Pesca
So I take your premise, which is that of all the emotions and we're told to get in touch with our emotions, there is one that we're told put off to the side. That's the scary one and it's anger. And you're saying it shouldn't be. Was this mostly through personal experience?
- [07:39]
Samuel Parker
It was. I watched the mental health revolution that took place over the last five years in the UK in terms of awareness, if not treatment, take place with great interest because we were talking about depression and anxiety and removing the stigma from those which was a great development. But we weren't talking about anger either on its own or the role it plays in depression and anxiety. And yet, at the same time in my life, the thing that really enabled me to finally break free of being a very anxious person was getting in touch with anger. So there was this strange disconnect between the public mental health conversation and my own experience. And that was sort of the beginning of the book. I thought, well, maybe I can find a way to put these two pieces together.
- [08:17]
Mike Pesca
How did your anxiety manifest?
- [08:19]
Samuel Parker
I had what was what's called generalized anxiety disorder. So every day for me since I was a child really was this sort of. Of thrum of dread. You know, I felt this unease at all times. And I started off in my young life medicating that with alcohol. As I grew and matured, realized that I needed to try and find other ways to manage it. And because I thought that the opposite of anxiety was relaxation, I tried everything that I could in the wellness space. So I tried to meditate and gratitude, journaling and deep plunge, you know, cold plunging and all that stuff. Um, nothing wrong with any of it. But for me, it didn't work.
- [08:55]
Mike Pesca
Well, if you journal at the same time as the cold punch the cages could get.
- [08:59]
Samuel Parker
Yeah, exactly. That. That was where I went wrong. Yeah. When I started to get in touch with anger, it was almost like it was on the opposite side of a set of scales from my anxiety. And what I learned through a combination of therapy and my own research was that often we have racket emotions for anger, and for lots of people, it's sadness. They might cry when they get angry. For, for me, it was anxiety. So actually I was holding onto a lot of anger whilst believing myself to be a person who wasn't angry. And that was manifesting as anxiety. So that was where I was going wrong.
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Mike Pesca
Yeah. Tell me about racket emotions.
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Samuel Parker
So racket emotion is when we learn usually in childhood, that a certain emotion is not acceptable or is dangerous for us to express. And so we develop a system of displaying another emotion in its place. So the classic one is the clown who's crying on the inside. Right. So someone who's sad and tries to make everyone laugh all the time when they feel their sadness as a way of pushing out of the room with anger. It's actually a classically female racket emotion to cry when you get angry. I interviewed lots of women who say they do this in the workplace and that causes them all kinds of frustrations and troubles. My racket emotion for anger was anxiety and so, you know, when we have the conversation about the, you know, the third of the people globally, 33% of people have an anxiety disorder. Many people suffer with depression, unexpressed anger, and inability to express anger is a major component of that for, for many, many people. But it's not really part of the public understanding of these conditions yet.
- [10:31]
Mike Pesca
Right. And there's a lot in the book about the gendered aspect of anger, but it does strike me that there has been this chronicled, documented rise in anxiety and it gets blamed on a lot of things and I think some of them must be valid. You know, the inundation of stimulus just with all these interconnected phones and computers in our pockets and all the troubles of the world are now pressed down upon us. But it also, from reading your book and talking to you, does strike me that at this, around the same time that anxiety went up, anger began to be seen as illegitimate, something to tamp down. And so, you know, the book does get to the idea of good anger, but there is a racket emotion, a seesaw, a push and pull of these things. And would you say that an underexplored reason why generations, younger generations or just society as a whole are showing up as so anxious is that the anti anger messaging has worked?
- [11:39]
Samuel Parker
Yeah, I think so. And yeah, I think a really important distinction to make at the top of a conversation about anger is that it's distinct from aggression and violence. Right. And they often get conflated.
- [11:49]
Mike Pesca
Well, ideally it is, and that's the, that's a problem that it's not always or one triggers the other.
- [11:56]
Samuel Parker
True, but anger is an emotion. Aggression and violence is a behavioral choice and it's important to separate them. And so, you know, anger, when anger gets demonized, often what people are really demonizing or what they're considering, you know, a taboo is, is aggressive and violent behavior. And that's very important. But for most people, their anger issue isn't actually anger out, isn't actually being overwhelmed and becoming aggressive and confrontational. Far more people in the world keep it in and they suppress it and they repress it and they deny it. And I do think that's a major component in why young people are feeling anxious in the mental health conversation. You know, it's become, it's okay, it's okay not to be okay. Right. That's a phrase we hear a lot in the UK in the mental health conversation. And really what that means is it's okay to be depressed and it's okay to be anxious. This is a massive bit of progress from even my parents generation.
- [12:48]
Mike Pesca
Yeah.
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Samuel Parker
But we haven't had that same sort of up to date conversation about anger as we have the other emotions and the part that anger plays in depression and anxiety.
- [12:58]
Mike Pesca
Yeah. And in the United States we have similar conversations, but we kind of reject the UK's health funding and their conception of this. So we have the expression, it's okay not to be Ukraine. Damn it, I screwed up the joke. Damn it.
- [13:16]
Samuel Parker
I got it, I got it.
- [13:18]
Mike Pesca
So we have the expression it's okay not to be uk. Now you laugh. Yes, now you laugh as if I said it for. Okay, wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute. Aggression and violence is a choice. We'd like for it to be, but with so many other actions that stem from emotions, the message, and I think the expertise is trying to tell us not that we are beholden to our emotions, but that it's a natural outgrowth and the thing that we're thinking of, like you just talked about self medicating. Right. I think the cutting edge of understanding either addiction or just use and dependency is we shouldn't say that reaching for the bottle or pills or whatever, self, medication is a choice. Right. It's more advanced and exalted to think of it as a national natural outgrowth for what we're experiencing. Yet with anger we say, you said that it is a choice, that violence is a choice. I mean, it does seem more intertwined than simply saying, oh, anger is fine, but once you've decided or once you find yourself swinging a fist, well, that's activating an entirely different part of the brain. It seems very intertwined to me.
- [14:39]
Samuel Parker
Here's another way to think of it. I think aggression and violence are a rejection of anger. It's saying that you can't tolerate what the anger is pointing you towards, which is that you've been made to feel vulnerable, that it's been made, you've been made to feel afraid. It's pointing you towards an unmet need that you have a wound that you have that you haven't healed. So when we get aggressive and violence really we're pushing anger out of the, out of the way and we're just reacting. So they are related, but they are distinct. And I think actually having a more open conversation about anger and what it's for as a society is only going to take us to a place where less people react in that way. But already, I would say, you know, most people, when they get angry, they don't swing a fist. Right. You're only really Going to do that if you're. If you're absolutely backed into a corner, and maybe in a tiny percentage of scenarios, it is appropriate to swing a fist because you're under physical attack or something like that. It's a very, very unusual behavior for most people. And that's why I would say it was a choice. Because when you look at 95% of or more of examples of people getting angry, it's not a choice that they make.
- [15:41]
Mike Pesca
Yeah, right. That's true. It probably. Oh, it definitely was a thousand years ago and 500 years ago, and that's for a few reasons, but it's also because in those societies, the fruits of your rage and anger and violence might benefit you more than they do. In our society, the downside is so much greater. So that's good societally, but I don't know if it changes the wiring of emotions.
- [16:09]
Samuel Parker
Yeah, I think that's a. That's a fair point. But, you know, anger has been demonized from the very beginning. I mean, people, you know, the Stoics, Seneca wrote an entire book on why anger is a monster that we need to overcome and it should be banished from the human experience. So people have been trying to repress anger and get it out of the way for a very long time. It was one of the seven deadly sins. You know, this idea of it being sinful and inherently dangerous is very baked into our culture. And, you know, but at the same time, once upon a time, sadness was also on that list. Right. And look at how far we've come with discussing that and thinking about it.
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Mike Pesca
Yeah. And it was one of the eight evil thoughts.
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Samuel Parker
Right, the evil thoughts.
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Mike Pesca
What were the other evil thoughts?
- [16:50]
Samuel Parker
The top of my head, I can't remember. But most of them came to be on the seven deadly sins. So it was gluttony and sloth and.
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Mike Pesca
Yeah, I wonder which one didn't make the cut. That would be a great discussion to have been.
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Samuel Parker
It was sadness that fell off.
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Mike Pesca
Sadness fell off.
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Samuel Parker
Yes. Yes. Huh? Yeah. It took a few hundred years, but it fell away.
- [17:11]
Mike Pesca
Why.
- [17:12]
Samuel Parker
Why was sadness.
- [17:13]
Mike Pesca
One scene is so. Okay, the way these lists get constituted. I mean, no, we don't know who puts quill to papyrus, but they're expressing something about society and what is societally useful and what is not. So why was there a time when sadness. Maybe it has something to do with the horrors of the world, but why was there a time when sadness was absolutely something that was looked at only pejoratively? And then it got a bit rehabilitated.
- [17:43]
Samuel Parker
So it was linked to inertia and actually these lists. So Vagus Ponticus, who was the hermit Monk who in AD375, wrote down the evil thoughts. He was actually writing for other monks, so he wasn't actually writing for the general population. It was only as history developed and Christianity really took hold that this list became. It was the first attempt at a sort of codified moral ethics for Christianity. In time, the Ten Commandments overtook that. But for hundreds and hundreds of years, the seven deadly sins were the sort of checklist, the moral checklist. And eventually that went from monks and then the most learned people in society through the Middle Ages, and then it started to be. To percolate through general society. And it became something that, you know, you would hear in the pulpit when preachers started speaking in sort of local languages rather than Latin all the time. So that was kind of the trajectory of it. Somewhere along the way, I think it was Gregory the Great who. Who shrunk the list down from 8 to 7, and so sadness fell off. But, you know, you can look at the other seven deadly sin, the other six sins, and see the way that they have been at least partially rehabilitated. Right. We don't really think of lust as sinful as long as everybody is, you know, as long as everybody is signed up for it and consented. Do what you want with lust. You know, envy is.
- [19:03]
Mike Pesca
I mean, without it, we wouldn't be here.
- [19:05]
Samuel Parker
Right, Exactly. Right. You know, envy is kind of the engine room of social media in a lot of ways, you know, so we've come to an accommodation with all of the seven deadly sins, apart from, really, anger.
- [19:16]
Mike Pesca
I would say envy is the only deadly sin that is not pleasurable, they say.
- [19:20]
Samuel Parker
Yeah, that's interesting. Certainly true.
- [19:24]
Mike Pesca
I do think, you know, it's hard to. Emotions are fundamental to the human condition, so it's hard to separate ourselves from our milieu, our time, our technology, our society. It very much seems to me that anger was more useful when we went to war more and when we had to go to war and when xenophobia was even more warranted. So now that it's not, and now that there's a. What I'm getting at is there's a real economic angle to this now that placidity and a lack of violence and aggression are the things that can get the individual the most resources. Anger to some extent, became a vestigial organ, but other. But unlike the appendix, there is still a use for it, you're saying.
- [20:17]
Samuel Parker
Yeah, absolutely. Because, you know, look, anger is always alerting you to a change you need to make in your life. Right? Something is not right. A boundary has been violated. There is an unmet need. Somebody at work is attacking you, your partner isn't understanding you. Like, when you get angry, it's because it's. There's useful information in it, always. And not only that, but there's a great, great degree of energy. It's the most energizing emotion that we have. Now when I come back to that thing of violence being a choice, you know, if you reframe anger to yourself as a source of energy with which you can go and do whatever you want with it, then it can start to become really useful. I'll give you an example. If you're in a work context and a colleague makes you angry because they've disrespected you, and it's normally always a feeling of like, this person doesn't respect my position or whatever in an office, and you get angry about that, now you can go on slack and you can slag that person off. Sorry, that was a Britishism. You can, you can criticize that person in private with a, with a, with a peer and lose half a morning of productivity to that, or you can take that energy and you can turn it into a fuck you energy. Sorry for swearing. And, you know, go after a piece of work or a project or a report or something that's going to outshine them. You know, you can funnel that energy into doing something that's going to get you ahead. So I don't believe that it's this sort of like outdated, barbaric emotion. I actually think it's a very useful, quite sophisticated emotion. It's very linguistic, it's very social. And when we listen to it, when we learn to listen to it calmly and use the information that it tells us about ourselves, not just the other person, and use the energy that it gives us to go and do something useful, then suddenly anger is a good emotion, not a bad one. And that's kind of what the book is about. It's about how can we update our, our perspective on it.
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Mike Pesca
But the book's a lot of things. One of them is a societal critique. So I think I'm. When I read it and when I'm listening to you, it seems that the critique is bound up with another kind of critique where I don't want to overstate it, but the cartoon version of this is something like the feminization of society. There were probably impulses to treat anger as only bad, as something to be suppressed.
- [22:34]
Samuel Parker
Right.
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Mike Pesca
For reasons that fit or for reasons that played into an agenda of the people doing that defining, don't you think?
- [22:42]
Samuel Parker
Yes, I agree. And I think again, going back to the workplace, something that H R departments, when they came in and the general trajectory of workplace culture, I would argue of the last 50 years or so, part of that trajectory has been trying to remove workplace bullying. This was a problem for people for a long time. Obnoxious people at work, aggressive people at work, they would always get ahead. Now that's still obviously the case at a lot of places. I'm not saying that's being solved or anything like that, but there have been big efforts made to change that culture. When you look at why people. If you look into the quiet quitting phenomenon, which has come up in recent years and drill into the data around why people say they're quiet quitting now, it's not actually about remuneration or them feeling that their company doesn't, you know, care about them or anything like that. The majority of it is feeling under challenged. They don't feel like they're being developed. Now I would trace this back to the fact that we've lost the ability to have difficult conversations at work. Challenging conversations, direct feedback. Bosses are afraid to do it in case they're a bad boss or they get into trouble, peers to peers don't want to do it, and so on. Again, this isn't true in every industry or every workplace, but in every workplace I've worked at, this has been an issue. So I do think in some cases there's been an overcorrection and part of the conversation we need to have about anger now and neutralizing it as a topic and becoming better at admitting to it and talking about it and all the rest of it is to address some of these over corrections that we've made.
- [24:14]
Mike Pesca
Yeah, the full scale rejection of anger dovetails with the idea of safety ism that Jonathan Haidt and others have written about.
- [24:22]
Samuel Parker
About.
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Mike Pesca
Yeah, yeah. And so then there's the phrase and your conception of good anger, which is clever, I think. And you know this, you're a writer. It's one of those phrases that stands out like, you know, cold fire. Just because when phrases are contradictions, they strike us as, oh, that's weird. What do you mean by that? So you know this, right. It has that appeal. But tell me what you mean by this. And maybe if you think that this phrase, if people understand it and took it forward, how it could, how it would work.
- [24:57]
Samuel Parker
So I'd summarize it by saying good anger is something that people generally find very difficult to do, which is when we experience the feeling without fear or shame, listen to it calmly, act on it wisely in a way that makes our lives better.
- [25:12]
Mike Pesca
So to interrupt, is this different from the Stoics who you said you criticized a little bit for writing this whole book against anger?
- [25:20]
Samuel Parker
So, yes. I mean, Seneca wasn't quite saying that. Actually, the closest approximation was before that, Aristotle. Aristotle said, anybody can become angry that's easy. To be angry with the right person, the right degree at the right time for the right purpose in the right way, that's not easy. So really, if you want a definition of good anger, you can go right back to Aristotle, who was much more balanced on the topic of whether anger is good or bad than certainly Seneca was. I can't speak to the rest of the Stoics. So yeah, it's about learning to use the information and the energy of anger in a way that makes your life better, not worse. It's finding the through line between anger out and anger in. Anger out is a problem that we've been used to talking about as a culture for a very long time. There are many courses and books and things for people with anger out issues. Anger in, I think, is a much bigger problem that we don't talk about because it tends to be a problem for the individual rather than society. But many people are suffering because they don't have the ability to express anger. That people pleasers, that conflict avoiders, they keep the peace at the expense of their own. And so helping people find the through line between those two extremes, I think is where we need to be.
- [26:29]
Mike Pesca
Give me a tangible example of how your life has changed since you started adopting this framework.
- [26:35]
Samuel Parker
Well, paradoxically, I feel a lot more peaceful. I feel a lot more generosity of spirit towards other people. I feel less judgmental of others. I'm a big believer in the concept of the shadow. You know, that if we, if we sort of deny part of ourselves, we project it onto others. I think this is a massive problem in society. And so since I've started being comfortable with my own anger and talking about it and expressing it, I have less negative interpretations of other people. So it's made my life better in that sense. I already mentioned the alleviation of anxiety. That's been a life changing thing for me, but it really did.
- [27:11]
Mike Pesca
It did. This is sort of a cognitive behavioral therapy or you had a concept, you philosophized your way out of anxiety?
- [27:19]
Samuel Parker
No, I talked about anger for you know, I engaged with the things from my past and present that I was angry about that I wasn't admitting and I wasn't aware of. And I got used to expressing it. And then eventually when I got used to expressing it and feeling it and identifying it myself, I got used to acting on it in a way that was proportional and helpful. And I still get it wrong lots of the time. It's difficult to do, but the more I've gone down that path, the less anxious and the happier I felt.
- [27:45]
Mike Pesca
So I know you write about wellness in general and I think that you also are pretty good at discerning what is, what is bonafide and what is maybe in the realm of the guru. I don't know if you have another emotion that in you or the next book, but what's a big, let's call it, wellness trend that you think if not is doing more harm than good, has a lot of problems associated with it.
- [28:18]
Samuel Parker
I would say maybe therapy. Speak.
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Mike Pesca
Speak. Okay, this is good.
- [28:22]
Samuel Parker
Yeah. And therapeutic language, which has sort of, you know, entered the sort of public discourse. And something I've observed is that particularly young people will go down a little bit of the path towards therapy or, you know, figuring out what's wrong with them, let's say emotionally, and they learn the language and the sort of performance of that and they kind of stop there, they get the diagnosis and they think, okay, job done, now I can go and talk about it with the world and so on. Actually, anyone who's been a long time therapy knows that repetition and coming back to the same issues time and time again so that it truly kind of leads to changes with how you see yourself in the world takes a very, very long time. So there's a short term, short termism and there's a, there's a therapy language issue that is sort of become part of the wellness space that I think isn't really helpful.
- [29:13]
Mike Pesca
Yeah, I see that too. There are a couple aspects of it. One is everything is traumatic and so that's an exaggeration. And we begin to, you know, you have to be resilient. And if your very words are indicating that things are so terrible, you're not going to be resilient. The other thing is very much fits in with what you're talking about. Anger, it tends to sand the rough edges that can actually be useful.
- [29:38]
Samuel Parker
Yeah, I agree with that. There's a guy I talk about in the book called John Wellwood who was a therapist who was really interested in how what was then a new influx of mysticism from the East. Meditation and yoga and so on could work alongside Western psychotherapy as a sort of, as a package. And he took, he coined the term spiritual bypassing, which is basically he saw a bunch of hippies trying to, you know, shortcut their way to nirvana with meditation, but they hadn't actually done any kind of like hard work on themselves and their issues. And so he kind of despaired of this. I think now we're in a period of wellness bypassing where lots of people jump straight to the online performance of, you know, the meditation or the, the, the sort of therapy language or, you know, the. I mean, how many times have I got to watch a podcast and see a millionaire tell another millionaire that cold plunges is the way to good mental health? You know, when we know it's journaling. Yeah, when we know it's journaling. Exactly.
- [30:38]
Mike Pesca
So, yeah, it's a podcast if not a journaling of the air.
- [30:41]
Samuel Parker
Yes, well, good point. But yeah, I think, you know, that I spoke to a misinformation expert for the book that didn't actually make it into the book in the end. But you know, he was talking about how the wellness space and the online health space is by far and away the area of. The biggest area of misinformation that he sees on, on tick tock and so on. And it's a problem that seems to have no solution, really. It's quite terrifying.
- [31:12]
Mike Pesca
If it makes you mad, that's fine. Honor that emotion, Sam.
- [31:16]
Samuel Parker
Exactly.
- [31:16]
Mike Pesca
Sam Parker is the author of Good Anger, How Rethinking Rage Can Change Our Lives. Fiery conversation. I know we almost came to blows, but I think we're better off for it.
- [31:26]
Samuel Parker
I agree.
- [31:27]
Mike Pesca
Thank you, Sam.
- [31:29]
Samuel Parker
Thanks.
- [31:40]
Mike Pesca
On Friday, a disturbed 30 year old Patrick Joseph White hauled five firearms to the CDC in Atlanta and opened fire. Five hundred rounds later, windows were shattered, employees ducked under their desks and a local police officer was killed, as was the gunman, by his own hand. It was revealed today White was driven mad, literally by his own thoughts on the CDC and Covid. The CDC is the world's premier health organization. And without its expertise, leadership and ingenuity, it's plausible to make the case that tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands more Americans would be dead today from coronavirus. It is also true that public health officials made mistakes. And one mistake was contained in this quote in the Washington Post. A veteran official asking for anonymity said there is a direct line from the vilification of the CDC during COVID in the deliberate lies and mis disinformation that continues today, he wrote. Ms. Slash. Disinformation. That was echoed in a quote from a former CDC official, Ali Khan, now at the University of Nebraska Medical center, and therefore not under orders for the CDC to comment. Here's what he told npr.
- [32:56]
Samuel Parker
The responsibility for this lies not just for the shooter, but those who have been spreading disinformation and misinformation against public health.
- [33:04]
Mike Pesca
That is wrong. Or perhaps I should say I disagree, as expressions of certainty are among my critiques. First of all, as a general rule, no one forces a shooter to shoot at which we would stop thinking. So shooters often have mental illness. Maybe not as defined by the law, but as defined by psychiatry. And as I usually say, these shooters have easy access to guns in America. However, in this case, that doesn't go far enough. White lived in Kennesaw, Georgia, which literally requires every homeowner to own a gun. Newscasters from far and wide periodically find this fact a newsworthy curiosity.
- [33:46]
Samuel Parker
As the debate over guns in Washington.
- [33:48]
Mike Pesca
Continues, there's one place where technically the.
- [33:51]
Samuel Parker
Law says a gun is a requirement. Welcome to Kennesaw.
- [33:54]
Mike Pesca
We love everybody. Kennesaw, Georgia, where, quote, every head of.
- [33:59]
Samuel Parker
Household residing in the city limits is required to maintain a firearm.
- [34:03]
Mike Pesca
The law isn't enforced, but it is a law. Though White acted illegally and illogically, to say the least, he was not well informed about the CDC's role in stopping the spread of COVID Does that mean he was the subject of disinformation? Very well. Could be. A lot of claims were made by people who knew them to be untrue, yet still made the claims. Then there were the types of claims made by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. Current head of HHS, who ordered the flags flown at half staff that were inaccurate. Yet I can't assess Kennedy's mindset in making the claims. So this does all add up to the shooter being likely, very likely, as revealed by his actions. Mentally ill, but also misinformed. But you know how the vast, vast, vast majority of misinformed Americans reacted to the information that was attempting to misinform them. They thought about it. They maybe rethought their positions. They maybe evaluated the claims. They quite possibly rejected the claims that constituted misinformation. Basically, they engaged in the role of the citizen and the thinker in evaluating truth claims. Because when it comes to misinformation, it just means things that aren't true. And around Covid, there were a lot of things that were said that weren't true. The following statements all count as Covid misinformation. You're not going to get Covid if you get these vaccinations. That was said by Joe Biden in a July 2021 CNN town hall. Vaccinated people do not carry the virus. That piece of misinformation was said by CDC Director Rochelle Walensky in March of 2021 on MSNBC. And Anthony Fauci in May of 21 on NBC said, when you get vaccinated, you become a dead end to the virus. The cdc, or at least the broader public health community, but also specifically the cdc, got a lot wrong. They got the six foot distancing rule wrong. Or at least there was no real justification at all for 6ft over 4 or 3ft. They got fomites wrong. Transmission via surfaces. That's why we were all wiping in the early stages of COVID They got the outdoor transmission risk wrong. Up through vaccination they were conflating outdoor and indoor transmission risk. They got their emphasis on droplet transmission wrong. There was ample evidence for airborne transmission by spring and summer of 2020, but the CDC guidance still lagged and the agency only explicitly acknowledged aerosols as a significant route of transmission in late 2020 and updated their guidance in 2021. I interviewed Carl Zimmer all about this. So okay, that was wrong, of course, a lot of wrong information about how dangerous the virus was when it wasn't and how it wasn't tested when it was, and how it wouldn't work when it did. So yeah, the information was not always correct, but that of course doesn't mean you should shoot anyone over it. Which is exactly my point. There is not a direct line between misinformation and shooting people. There needn't be. And those responsible for misinforming do not bear the responsibilities of a murderer. Otherwise we'd all be murderers. I got Covid information wrong. I like. I presume many in the CDC were trying to do the best I could. Unlike many in the cdc, I didn't have political calculations as well and I tried not to dig in quite so far as they did at times. He also didn't create and help disseminate a miracle cure that saved millions of people's lives. So they did a lot better on Covid than I do. But I do have to say, when we start talking about and treating the presence of misinformation as culpability in crime and murder, it is a dangerous, dangerous standard. Engaging in disinformation, that's a little different. That is a misdeed. But it's also not akin to murder, especially because what you and I might call disinformation, the disinformer in question might legitimately plead that it is their earnest, if incorrect, belief. The responsible party in all of this was the shooter. His milieu of mandatory gun ownership did not cause him to kill a police officer and terrorize scientists, but it certainly didn't reduce the temperature. It didn't create norms that he would have to violate in order to carry out his evil deeds. The statements of top administration officials before they were in office also did not help to lower the temperature. Here now is a quote by Russell Vogt, who is currently head of the Office of Management and Budget. This was before he got that job, when he was working as an activist and a private citizen and one of the authors, main Authors of Project 2025.
- [39:14]
Russell Vogt
We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected. We want when they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains. We want their funding to be shut down so that the EPA can't do all of the rules against our energy industry because they have no bandwidth financially to do so. We want to put them in trauma.
- [39:39]
Mike Pesca
Russell Vote, to be clear, did not put a gun in anyone's hands, did not necessarily put a thought in anyone's head. That responsibility, I'll say again and again and again, lies with Patrick Joseph White alone. But I do have to say maybe you're feeling this too, that if Vote takes a little heat today, feels, how should I say, feels a little trauma, it wouldn't be an unfathomable injustice. But I also wouldn't suggest that my vilifying him makes me responsible for something that someone else might do. We're all responsible for ourselves. But it is also the case that some of us quite clearly are irresponsible when it comes to putting false statements out into the world and when it comes to taking care of the safety of others. And that's it for today's show. Cory War is the Gist producer. Ashley Khan is our production coordinator. Kathleen Sykes is a composer of the gist list. Mike Pasca, substack.com Philip Swissgood helps with so many of our substack and social media initiatives. And they're stirring the cauldron. The straw that stirs the drink is Michelle Pesca, um, Peru gpru Do Peru. And thanks for listening.
- [41:10]
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