262 - If It Sounds Like a Quack - Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling

You Are Not So Smart

Science, Psychology, Brain, Business, Mental Health, Culture, Neuroscience, Mind, Health

4.6 • 1.8K Ratings

🗓️ 25 June 2023

⏱️ 50 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

At the peak of COVID-19, Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling set out to write a book about the widespread pushback against masks and vaccines as away to discuss the rise of the medical freedom movement in America. But after meeting a series of people within that movement his efforts took a sharp turn into the motivations, tribulations, and personal lives of the people who sell miracle cures and dietary supplements, skirting the law when they can, and heading to jail when they can't. The book is titled, If it Sounds Like a Quack, and it is a deep dive into the marketplace of snake oils and magical procedures sold by people who each claim to have found the one true cure for any and everything that could ever ail you.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to the You Are Not So Smart Podcast.
0:27.6	That was episode 262.
0:45.8	I guess I come from a place like my starting point is that all of us humans are deeply flawed.
0:53.5	We're just a step removed from swinging through the trees and our best efforts at distancing
1:01.3	ourselves from our kind of inherent, flawed, common sense, light nature is science.
1:17.0	That's Matthew Hungold's Headling, a journalist and author who became fascinated
1:22.4	with the world of alternative medicine, more specifically the kind of alternative medicine
1:28.1	that has no basis in science that isn't supported by the FDA or any other agency.
1:34.0	The sort of products that people sell and make pretty good money selling,
1:38.6	even though there is an enormous amount of evidence suggesting that they not only don't work,
1:44.6	they couldn't work. They are absolutely not supported by science.
1:50.8	And he takes a pretty empathetic view of this sort of thing, people who would search for these
1:56.5	kinds of cures and people who would sell these things legitimately believing that they're offering
2:01.4	something good to the world. And he became interested in all of this while pursuing an idea for a book
2:07.5	about something else, really, about the medical freedom movement. In the middle of the COVID pandemic,
2:13.5	when governments around the world began implementing mandates for masks and vaccines and so on,
2:20.0	Matt noticed there was a pretty significant pushback against those mandates, especially if they
2:25.8	were mandates. It was mandated behavior. And he thought maybe you could write a book about all that,
2:32.4	exploring the history of it, exploring what was happening right now.
2:36.7	The medical freedom movement had been quiet for years until we all witnessed a huge surge in
2:42.3	its popularity around 2020 when an estimated 66 million Americans refused to wear masks.
2:51.0	And then after we got the vaccine, about 62 million people refused to get vaccinated.
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