Season 12, Episode Nine September 7, 2025

SPEAKER_02 0:00

This is The Listening Tube.

SPEAKER_00 0:08

Hello. Thank you for putting your ear to the listening tube. I'm your host, Bob Woodley. On this episode, I'll have a conversation with journalist and author Allison Scher. We'll talk about life before and after the COVID-19 pandemic and the social effects of the event. Spoiler alert, we're still living through it.

SPEAKER_02 0:33

But first, not the headlines.

SPEAKER_00 0:38

I like to consider myself somewhat of a wordsmith. I don't have an extremely large vocabulary, but I've found it's easier to communicate with people if you use the same words they use. But I did have to take supplementary vocabulary classes in broadcasting school. But the truth is, you don't need fancy words to get your point across. Just like you don't need profanities. But there are occasions when fancy words and profanities can come in handy. I recently heard on the radio that one of the leading English language dictionaries just added over 600 new words to the latest volume. There's a good chance I'm not familiar with any of them. Oh, while I'm thinking about it, I just saw a video of a tornado at the Mount Kilauea volcano in Hawaii. I propose we call that a Volcanado. You heard it here first.

SPEAKER_01 1:37

You can text the listening tube from the homepage. If he says something stupid.

SPEAKER_00 1:56

And they can communicate a lot of things, like fear and pain, joy and excitement. But words can also be used to exclude. When you use words other people don't use and can't define, you put up a verbal wall. Sure, you're still communicating, but what you're communicating is an invitation for someone to see themselves out of the conversation. With that in mind, an organization called Third Way published a list of words Democrat candidates should avoid. Words that might alienate potential voters. They even broke the words down into separate categories. There are forty-five of them. For as much as I would love to explore all forty-five of them with you here right now, I have a conversation with Alice and Cher to get to. But it is interesting that while the rest of the world is adding words to the dictionary, Democrats are being advised to downsize their descriptive terms. Anyway, the memo addressed to, quote, all who wish to stop Donald Trump and MAGA, unquote, asks, why the tortured language? Admittedly, I've made up a couple of words on the listening tube in the past. I don't remember them specifically, but the new word filled a need and was justified. Similar to Vulcanado. But we don't need a word like dialoguing when we already have words like talking and speaking and having a conversation. It's the opposite of othering, an act of which we already have terms like ignoring and excluding and even bullying. But I guess if you call it othering, it doesn't sound as bad. But the person being othered still feels just as bad. Just like the homeless don't have drier heads when it rains than do the unhoused. We already have a word for person who immigrated. It's immigrant. Why did the left make the word immigrant taboo to begin with? Why did we need a term like person who immigrated? There's nothing wrong with being an immigrant. If you asked Magda and Jeanette's old neighbors in Hungary whatever happened to Magda and Jeanette, and they spoke English, they would say Magda and Jeanette emigrated to America. Some of these terms are just meant to portray an ideology, a way for you to allow people to prejudge you. Words like birthing person and chest feeding and pregnant people only serve to set yourself apart from the norm. It's as if you want to be othered. But in this case, being othered would be a badge of honor. Not unlike belonging to the group of people who are labeled by the alphabet soup called LGBTQIA plus 2S, etc. The memo suggests staying away from using that group of letters from now on. It even has a sentence following the listing that says, Standing up to MAGA's cruel attacks on gay and transgender people requires creating empathy and building a broad coalition, not confusing or shaming people who could otherwise be allies. Am I the only one who finds LGBTQIA plus a way for the rest of us to other specific groups of people? And it's always the left who demands they point themselves out? They call it pride, but all it does is make you act out in a way that doesn't really accomplish anything, and at best alienates a lot of people who otherwise wouldn't give a damn about it. And no one's confused about any of it. The only thing that confuses me is why all of those distinctly different groups of people are all lumped together. If you include all of those lifestyles under one category, it implies that all gay people are obligated to support all transgender people and any other group of people who have different sexual preferences or doctrines about gender. I believe that's not the case, but it's not safe to say so because of the demands of the extreme left. Here are some words that didn't make the list Hitler, Nazi, authoritarian, dictator, king, or MAGA. I find it ironic that the party that pretends to defend freedom of speech is the party that is limiting the words they recommend their office seekers use. Words that they came up with, for the most part, or found a different way to use an existing word but give it new meaning based on the context. Back in the early 2000s, I was in a bar one night and there was a beautiful woman who was wearing a pair of jeans that would put Sidney Sweeney to shame. So much that some of us guys were still talking about her the following night. When she came up in the conversation, the bartender commented, Yeah, that woman had a fat ass. And I was like, uh that's not at all how I remember it. Then it had to be explained to me that the word fat, spelled P-H-A-T, means attractive or superior, not obese or overweight. But that's how important it is to speak to people using the words they understand. Simply changing a three-letter word to a four-letter word gave it the opposite meaning and cause me to imagine a giant butt on an otherwise beautifully proportioned woman.

SPEAKER_02 8:19

Let's go back through the listening tube for this week in history.

SPEAKER_00 8:25

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SPEAKER_02 8:41

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SPEAKER_00 8:54

My guest this week is journalist and author Alison Scher. Alison studies the human condition and writes extensively about it. She spent some time in the listening tube from her home in North Carolina. One thing I noticed in your bio, it said that you have a philosopher's heart. I'm a casual fan of philosophy, both ancient and modern. So I was curious as to what you meant by that.

SPEAKER_04 9:25

I'm always uh looking for deeper meanings and explanations for phenomena I experience and observe inside of the world in the human condition.

SPEAKER_00 9:37

And what parts of the human condition intrigue you the most?

SPEAKER_04 9:42

Oh, probably conflict, suffering, transcendence, and uh cultural evolution.

SPEAKER_00 9:54

Now you you are a writer and uh an author, a journalist. Are you a freelance journalist or or do you do you have a home base?

SPEAKER_04 10:04

I'm a freelance.

SPEAKER_00 10:05

You write about social issues quite a bit, correct? Like you and millions of Americans, I believe that we divide our lives by pre-COVID and post-COVID. At least I do, and I know a lot of other people who do as well. And you've looked closely at the societal effects of that whole pandemic era, if I'm not mistaken.

SPEAKER_04 10:34

Yes, this is the this is the topic of my new book, The Social Contagion.

SPEAKER_00 10:39

Right. Now, most of us already know our lives are different than they were before, but how deep do those changes really go?

SPEAKER_04 10:49

Hmm. Well, I think we all experienced all around the world a collective trauma, if you will, and the public health protocols that we had to collectively adhere to, and the almost like narrative warfare around the media portrayal of that collective trauma, I think has left people A with a more distrust in public institutions, and B, I think it really divided us against each other in ways that we're still navigating.

SPEAKER_00 11:34

Could you expand on some of those ways of which you speak?

SPEAKER_04 11:42

Well, I don't know how it was for you, but it felt like when we were all in quarantine and we couldn't leave our houses, a lot of us were going online to try to understand what was happening and also to get some social interaction. But the online world became almost like a war zone around people fighting to the way I see it is actually somewhat been somewhat benevolent, people trying to help the situation and people trying to convert other people towards their perceptions of the situation in order to save lives, right? To whatever like whatever they believed that would entail. Um, and there was definitely conflict in that, right? So I think that's what I noticed the most, and then watching people really spin out in radicalization of these narratives, which it seems like the media did intentionally on some level toward us. And for me, it's like finding my way back into like a center of being able to incorporate all the different viewpoints into my quest for truth.

SPEAKER_00 13:01

What did you learn about yourself, Alison?

SPEAKER_04 13:07

Well, I learned that I'm very susceptible to radical philosophies. Um I don't really have a brain that's pro this is a big chapter of my book, just like explaining why some people veer towards conspiracy theories to explain what's happening in the world and the power systems that govern the world. And what's interesting is they did a lot a longitudinal study on conspiracies, and they found that every single person believed in at least one conspiracy. Every single person in the in the study, which was like of the thousands of participants. So I think it's a natural human phenomena. But I I did notice my own biases more around what narratives I was drawn toward, and then through the process of writing my book, learning to incorporate other narratives into that perception to achieve almost like a neutrality. I call it a divine neutrality toward it all, and just understand why things went down the way they did, and maybe view the world as a more friendly place.

SPEAKER_00 14:20

Well, I have always viewed the world as a friendly place, uh, despite what the media tells us. Certainly, COVID made us communicate in different ways. And some would say it's fortunate that we had the technology to do so. But as a result, I think we became satisfied with having digital relationships with other human beings. And now a lot of people actually prefer it. I mean, people would rather text than talk on the telephone. I mean, even the phone is too much for some people. Did this transformation of how we communicate contribute to the political and social divisions we have now?

SPEAKER_04 15:04

Oh, totally. The social media has become a huge component of what I call the moral disintegration of our society and this almost like epistemological crisis we find ourselves in, where we're in this post-truth era of civilization where none of us actually know the truth. But we go online and we read all this information searching for the truth, but we end up in these echo chambers. And then we draw if those of us who feel like the need to exercise our First Amendment rights, we create platforms around sharing our version of the truth, and we kind of draw battle lines online. Uh, another thing that you're mentioning that came to mind is this idea of parasocial relationships. Have you heard of those?

SPEAKER_00 15:54

I haven't heard the phrase, no.

SPEAKER_04 15:56

So it's basically like when you follow someone online and you've never met them in person, but they are so open with their content that they share online that you feel a certain intimacy with them and you feel a certain closeness with them. And that is definitely something that's a more modern phenomenon. Like we're entering this age, especially with the AI, how people talk to Chat GPT as like their therapist, and it's like their secure attachment, their constant companion. And uh then, you know, robots coming in and fulfilling the role of girlfriend or boyfriend or wife or husband, whatever they will become. And yeah, we're in a new frontier of almost like digital intimacy.

SPEAKER_00 16:42

Certainly in the digital age, there's more of that, but I don't think it's new because I mean, I was a disc jockey for 20 years, and people, the listeners, you've never met them, but they they call you on the phone, they feel like they know you, they develop a relationship with you, whether it's real or imagined. I think that that kind of a relationship has been around a long time, but certainly uh the digital age has given it uh a lot more options, so to speak.

SPEAKER_04 17:19

Yeah, I mean, we're exposed to the complete variety of the of like human expression every single day if we choose to be, right? So it uh it's very interesting to see the types of things we gravitate towards, and that can be from a good place inside of us or a dark place inside of us, right? Because it's all there, the light and the dark online.

SPEAKER_00 17:43

Now you mentioned uh in your book some of the things that we went through uh during the the COVID pandemic, uh such as uh the Black Lives Matter movement, uh, artificial intelligence, uh, flag burning, rainbow crosswalks. Were those issues an effect of the pandemic or uh were were they gonna happen anyway?

SPEAKER_04 18:08

Oh, I think the pandemic like was such a pressure cooker for everyone, and the media kind of stoking the flames of outrage in myriad ways that I think they were that I think they were somewhat intertwined. I think those issues were always there, but this uh politicization of every aspect of human life I think was a product of the pandemic. And we can see now that it's over and we don't have these controls over us that it's subdued quite a bit. And Trump also, you know, is a huge uh player in creating that kind of response inside of people.

SPEAKER_00 18:49

Well, certainly politics does seem to have infiltrated itself into our everyday lives in many places where it never was before. And some people thrive on that, others uh couldn't care one way or the other, but regardless of whether or not you care, it still affects your everyday life because those around you often care more now than they did before. So when I asked what you learned about yourself, you said you you tried to come back to and find a middle ground. Is there a way that the rest of us could do that? Or have we already drawn these lines between us and are they are they going to stay where they are?

SPEAKER_03 19:31

You can all buy and read my book. That's the answer.

SPEAKER_00 19:35

Now, the book I will note is is called The Social Contagion. Uh, how did you come up with that title? And and what can we read into that title?

SPEAKER_04 19:46

So I was actually at like a dance party, and someone used the term, and she because we this was during the pandemic era, and they were saying, you know, these kind of radical philosophies, identity politics, like the whole gamut of what we saw, like extreme anti-vax sentiments, extreme letting like people who really wanted to listen to everything the government told you to do, the people who really wanted to rebel against everything the government told you to do, all the all the kinds of expressions that we witness of people reacting and clinging on to whatever ideology synced up to their psyche at that time. Um, she was like, it's like a social contagion.

SPEAKER_00 20:27

Personally, in fact, my wife and I are both considered during the pandemic critical. So we were never told to stay home. We were never required to stay home. We both continued to work every day as if we always had. And I often wondered what because of that, was the pandemic different for me than it was maybe for you? Because you said you were actually locked down, correct?

SPEAKER_04 20:58

Yeah, question for you: where were you during this time?

SPEAKER_00 21:01

I live in Pennsylvania, in Williamsburg, Pennsylvania.

SPEAKER_04 21:05

Yeah, um, there is definitely, I think I think I quarantined myself for like a month before I was like, I'm losing my mind, and I need social interaction. And like, and and then and then, you know, with my community here in North Carolina, people started disobeying and just like, because we need that, like we really need social interaction or we go insane. Uh, I write about that in the book as well. And that has to be examined when you're talking about what we saw happen during that time, almost the craziness, because we were like driven towards insanity through the isolation um and the bombardment of all these like conflicting, conflicting information, misinformation, propaganda campaigns, all the stuff that we were exposed to that just creates so much confusion. And when people are confused, they're they're disoriented, right? And they're So I think I think going on, kind of going against what you're saying or furthering it, is like I think we're still battling the confusion aspect. And I think there's a certain amount of almost like apathy that it has created inside of people against like civic engagement. Um, but for me, yeah, I think it was different for everyone depending on what the what the rules were and the guidelines are of your state, your country, your social circle, because there was a lot of like social shaming around people behaving certain ways in both directions, right? There's a lot of ostracization, whether you got the vaccine, whether you didn't get the vaccine, whether you wore a mask, or whether you chose not to wear a mask, right? No matter which way you went, there was going to be a group of people who thought that you were doing the wrong thing and putting people in harm's way.

SPEAKER_00 22:56

Now, personally, I hated the mask, but I hated it too. And some places where they made you wear it was just ridiculous. But I actually lost friends because I got the COVID shot. But I was following, you know, advice of, I don't know, my government, my medical professionals, whatever the case may be. But I I didn't really think like that I had the option of not getting it. But apparently there were a lot of people who didn't, even though they really weren't supposed to have the option either. Is that one of the places where you found we divide ourselves? Is those who got the shots and those who didn't?

SPEAKER_04 23:41

Yeah, definitely one of them. For sure, one of them. And I think, you know, we can look at the results of this past election to hypothesize where this where the nation's psyche actually was. Just the like RFK Jr. movement, right? That is like a big anti-vaccine sentiment movement, right? And now he's installed in office. So it seems like people were very, very skeptical of the vaccine. There was a lot of misinformation in many different ways around the vaccine. There was a lot of suppression of voices around injury. There was a lot of question over whether science is governed by politics or politics is governed by science. All these very existential questions came out over myriad factors that came up inside of the collective during that time. But for sure, this idea of the vaccine became a huge point of division.

SPEAKER_00 24:49

Now, I'm old. I grew up in the age of vaccines. You know, ever when in school it was kind of a a mark of pride that that big old strawberry-looking thing on your left arm that you got from from your from your grade school vaccinations. Has and and I know a lot of people had issues with the vaccines because it just seemed like they all all of a sudden sprang up and they didn't have a lot of faith in the in the research or the work that was put into creating them. But and and I explained it this way to a number of people. I said, Well, we've been working on vaccines for decades. It's like we already have the groundwork uh created for them. It's just a matter of finding the right formulas to battle what we want to battle. Am I wrong or right, or or have you not really looked into that at all?

SPEAKER_04 25:45

No, I looked into it considerably. Um a lot of people say the vaccine stopped the pandemic, right? And there's all, you know, a lot of right-wing people be like there were no COVID deaths, but I believe there, I believe, like worldwide, you know, I please fact fact check reached, I think almost seven million, seven million people died from what they were saying was COVID. And you know, the vaccine, that's when they started to open up when they started to get the vaccine out. I think the other aspect why people rejected the vaccine is because it included the mRNA technology, which people thought was like almost like a gene editing technology, and where we're seeing the future of medicine go, and science is moving into this almost like transhumanist uh philosophy around altering the human biology to optimize it in certain ways. And I think people feel a lot of hesitancy around that movement, and they viewed the vaccine as kind of like you buying into that, right? And then, of course, there's a ton of religious prophecy that people were projecting onto the vaccine as well, around like it being the mark of the beast. And my book talks a lot about that, like a lot of the I call it conspirituality, a lot of the doomsday religious narratives that people are projecting onto our current political situation. And a lot of people thought, like, you know, this vaccine could be like a kill shot. It turned out not to be, but I do have a friend who was severely injured by it, and I've interviewed him previously, and you know, hearing his story is quite harrowing of what he went through.

SPEAKER_00 27:44

What type of injury, if I may ask?

SPEAKER_04 27:46

As soon as he got it, he became paralyzed.

SPEAKER_00 27:49

Oh, wow, that's a serious injury.

SPEAKER_04 27:52

Yeah, and he developed like I think like 30 different other conditions, and he he he was so he was considered such a threat to the mainstream medical system that he couldn't find doctors who would treat him because it seems like people weren't allowed to speak of these injuries, right? Because there was a giant public health campaign to convince people to take it to stop the pandemic. So very interesting. Now these things are more outlier responses, but that that that that even happens to me made me realize medical freedom, the importance of medical freedom. Now, if you chose to take the vaccine, I think that's great. If you chose not to, I think that's great too. But just inherent in our constitutional rights should be medical freedom.

SPEAKER_00 28:42

Absolutely. I agree 100%. Did the the COVID pandemic affect the black community differently from the white community or other minority groups?

SPEAKER_04 28:56

Well, I'm white, so you know, I don't want to speak on behalf of black people as a whole, but I do think there was, you know, there was like eight months of racial protests that we also simultaneously endured. And questions around our, I almost want to call it like social contract and our and our country being white supremacist and even just Western civilization, the roots of white supremacy inside of it, definitely became like that. Became like something people were really talking about, and violent protests, media spinning things in all sorts of different ways, a lot of racial hatred happening, and a lot of white guilt, a lot of policy changes around diversity, equity, and inclusion. We saw that, which the Trump administration is kind of undoing right now, but we saw like these this huge movement towards racial justice, and then also with that, almost this new wave of identity politics that became like so extreme, that's what became known as the radical left. So we saw we saw a lot. I think we've seen the two parties really shift in like their platforms. Are we as divided since the pandemic? Yes.

SPEAKER_00 30:22

Are we as divided as the media portrays us?

SPEAKER_04 30:26

No, but I think that the that pain is there. And so if it gets stoked, like it was during the pandemic, and you're in this pressure cooker of losing your job, not being able to go anywhere, fighting with everyone online, like all not knowing if you're gonna like go outside and die because you're gonna catch this virus. Like, and and I would say I wouldn't be surprised if there was political motivation behind the timing of that, right? Because the left does rely on the black vote typically to win elections, and they really wanted Trump out of office. So it was very interesting to me that we were all like in our homes, but then like we can go to these uh racial protests with upwards of hundreds of thousands of people, and that's not a super spreader event, right? So I think the for anyone who is really paying attention, uh, there was a lot of it that felt politically motivated, and it felt almost like a crime against humanity to psychologically torture us in this way. But I I do think that all that pain is there. I think the pain of sexism is there, I think the pain of racial injustice is there. I think all of that's there and baked into our society. Now, is it as bad as it can be when we're activated in our pain and there's like movements around trying to correct it and the emotion behind that that's activated? Probably not. I think things grow when you focus on them, and we were really focusing on that pain, and so it kind of started to become part of our identity again. But to me, when your identity is wrapped around your pain, that's not necessarily the answer either.

SPEAKER_00 32:10

Well, you know, I I see black and white people mixed up all the time in social situations, and there doesn't seem to be any racism going on in those scenarios. In fact, the other day, I saw two pairs of people just walking down the sidewalk as I drove by, and each pair was one white person and one black person. I only noticed because we're conditioned to notice by the media. I think if the media wasn't always telling me there's all kinds of racism, I probably would not have even noticed that there was a black person and a white person walking together. How much of that is that racism is manufactured or implanted into our psyches when there is really no reason for it to be there? I guess I'm sure it's different depending upon where you live. Uh but certainly where I live, there are plenty of black people, plenty of white people, and I don't I don't see racism on a day-to-day basis like I'm told it exists.

SPEAKER_04 33:21

Yeah, well, you live in the north. I live in the south, but I live in a very white community, unfortunately. I I thrive in diversity, but I think it's definitely geographic, a lot of it. And I think that a lot of it is these like microaggressions that people talk about that you wouldn't understand unless you were a member of that community, of like what it's like. Yes, you see integration happening now, but I think there still are racialized biases towards like almost every single group that exists in society that we unconsciously carry. That's what I think. And but do I think it's as bad? No. No, but if we wanted to, if we wanted to feel really hurt about it, then I also think it's different for certain people, like certain people feel it more than others. And I can't tell you why or why not, but I think certain people feel it more than others, so it's almost individual basis, it's geographically based, so new like nuanced, right? And again, I don't want to speak for black people because it's hard to talk about this unless you were a member of that community with like any kind of true clarity.

SPEAKER_00 34:42

Do you find when you look at society that we're breaking ourselves up into smaller and smaller groups?

SPEAKER_04 34:54

Well, I'm not a big fan of the identity politics, even though I understand why it exists, and I think there's some good stuff there, but I think the expression that we saw of it during the pandemic is probably toxic. But yeah, I think there is an inherent tribalism inside of humanity that we haven't been able to overcome. And I think that these wars and these conflicts usually are amongst warring tribes, right? And and the urge to belong to something and to defend it is there, and people will latch onto whatever, you know, like ego-based concept they can in order to find that sense of belonging and then find purpose within the narrative of that tribe. Find like a frame of orienting to the world based on the mythos of that tribe. And people will do that in many different ways and over many different topics and philosophies.

SPEAKER_00 35:52

Is politics one of the few things that brings large groups of people together?

SPEAKER_04 36:02

For sure. Um, in the States, we're this idea that we have this two-party system, right? So you're in one party or another party, but the majority, I think 50% of the US is now independent, um, feels alienated by both parties.

SPEAKER_00 36:19

Did you say 50%?

SPEAKER_04 36:21

50% into independent.

SPEAKER_00 36:24

Well, now that that's news to me. I'm a registered independent. I didn't know there were that many of us.

SPEAKER_04 36:29

Oh, yeah, I'm a registered independent as well. But I think that people recognize the necessity of working inside of the political system in order to enact legislative change and cultural change, but it's just happens to be an incredibly broken and corrupt system. So does it unite people? Sure, it unites people over causes that they feel important to them with. But my own journey through activism, it feels almost like Sisyphus rolling a boulder up a mountain. You're like, I almost got to the top, and then it rolls back down just because the the corruption is so extreme that it's hard to, it's hard to like materialize one's own virtue inside of the system.

SPEAKER_00 37:19

Allison, I was wondering if you might like to tell us a little bit about your book and and what someone might hop hope to learn or gather from reading it.

SPEAKER_04 37:30

I wrote my book during the pandemic while I was in my quarantine and I was attempting to discern all the different things that were going on during that time. So you'll definitely see a, it's almost like a time capsule of the pandemic era and what we collectively went through. And it also looks towards radical philosophies that emerged during that time and political polarization, but from this almost like politically homeless independent center, where you're you're skeptical of both of them and looking towards uh how to like look at things through a more moderate lens that we were speaking of earlier. And it also just explains how media, misinformation, propaganda, our own psych psychological functionings radicalize us, how AI and these new technological developments are going to impact this aspect of human nature. So I wrote it kind of as a to also help under people understand how we got to the current political context that we're in right now, what needs to be done perhaps moving forward. But ultimately the book is a rallying cry for media reform more than anything else, and for people to take back their minds from the media machine. But for anyone who is a true seeker of knowledge, I always say you gotta watch. Like if you're really getting into one narrative super hard and it's starting to energize you, and you're starting to be like, I get it, it all makes sense now, and it's starting to make you hate another group of people, which a lot of the media will do. Like, hate is very popular, hate sells. Then you gotta go down a rabbit hole of the people who see things completely differently. Because inherently, even interpersonally, not even collectively, humans often find ourselves at that point where we're interpreting reality completely differently than the person right next to us. And that's kind of where it starts.

SPEAKER_00 39:32

Allison Share's latest book is called The Social Contagion. You can learn more about Allison and her dozen books on her website, AllisonShare.com. That's A-L-I-S-O-N-S-H-E-R.com. I enjoyed my conversation with Allison, and I hope you did too. Thank you to Allison for spending some time in the listening tube. The listening tube is written and produced by yours truly, copyright 2025. Thank you for putting your ear to the listening tube. Don't forget to check out the new website at thelistening tube.com. I'm your host, Bob Woodley, for Val at Infinitum.