#47: Butler Did It (Bret Weinstein & Heather Heying DarkHorse Livestream)
In this 47th in a series of live discussions with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying (both PhDs in Biology), we discuss the state of the world though an evolutionary lens. Find more from us on Bret’s website (https://bretweinstein.net) or Heather’s website (http://heatherheying.com). Become a member of the DarkHorse LiveStreams, and get access to an additional Q&A livestream every month. Join at Heather's Patreon.Like this content? Subscribe to the channel, like this video, follow us ...
Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse Podcast live stream our 47th, if I'm not mistaken.
You are not mistaken, this time it is Prime.
It is Prime, and you know what I discovered?
No.
It is September.
This totally caught me by surprise, but it appears not only to be September, but we are now deeply into September.
Yeah, don't get used to it.
Really?
Oh my god, you know something I don't?
I do.
I have a calendar.
Oh, crap.
Alright, I've got to get a calendar.
I should put that on my to-do list, I guess.
Alright, well, we have a lot to talk about.
It's been a week since our last podcast, am I correct?
It's been a week.
It has been a week.
All right.
So, we are back.
I'm trying to recall, you and I had a discussion about where to start.
We are starting with... You wanted to start with Unity.
Unity.
Ah, right.
Unity.
Yes.
All right, folks.
So, there is an update with respect to Unity, which those of you who have been attending our campfires will know about, but the rest of you should know.
So, the Unity 2020 plan involved a proposal to draft candidates to elect to the White House.
It came with a pair of fail-safes to prevent it from spoiling the election.
One of those fail-safes was if, as the election approached, we did not have a viable path to victory, we would pull the plug on the plan so that it couldn't spoil the election.
And we have arrived at the decision that this is that moment.
Now were there to be some sort of an emergency that would cause the electorate to wake up to the danger that we are in all of a sudden and to go groping for a better plan than the major parties have delivered us, the plan could be rebooted.
But that is not our expectation.
So let me tell you a little bit about what this does and doesn't mean.
It means that we are not going to attempt to draft our ticket.
But, what we have recognized in the process of working on Unity 2020 is that the plan is part of a larger movement, and the movement is one that stands against the things that have corrupted our governmental structure, and the need for it is as great or greater than it was when we started it.
The movement is going to continue.
We are going to look to the long term and attempt to figure out how it is that we can rescue our republic from the death spiral that its political class has inflicted upon it.
So that's where we stand with Unity 2020.
Not the best news, but not... Hopeless.
Not an end.
Well, let me say, I'm not even... It's not the best news.
The best news would have been that... Come January 2021, we are welcoming a unity ticket to the White House.
And it looks like, God, all the color metaphors you can imagine.
A light at the end of the tunnel, blue skies overhead, all of this.
I mean, as we said in our founding document, imagine that a pair of courageous, capable patriots were ascending to be sworn in.
What kind of sigh of relief would the country collectively breathe?
And so that was always the objective.
On the other hand, I would point out that, you know, you and I have talked a lot in the context of education and in the context of other phenomena about the importance of a prototyping mindset.
That's right.
Everything good that is complex arises through an iterated process of discovery.
I should look up whether or not Edison in fact said that at the point that he had succeeded, he had discovered a thousand ways not to make a light bulb or something to that effect.
But the point is, we discovered a tremendous amount in this process about what needs to take place in order to fix the corruption that has disrupted governments.
And there is a tremendous amount of goodwill and pressure and force in the physics sense of the term behind this.
It was apparent that there is, as you and I and many others have long suspected, a real visceral, intellectual, and emotional desire to see a fix.
And that fix might well look like this.
Yeah, it really lacked one thing, which was exponential growth, which, you know, in some sense is the thing.
On the other hand, what it did do was surface the underlying belief structure of a great many patriots.
And so, you know, does it set the stage for us to do something in the future that could in fact recapture the White House or other structures on behalf of the people?
I think it revealed the path there.
And so, you know, personally, I feel imperiled to know that what is very likely to happen is, you know, we are going to get the duopolies version A or B, right?
That's a very frightening prospect.
And I wish we I wish somebody had figured out a way out of that mess didn't happen So, okay, that's frightening on the other hand.
I'm not the least bit disappointed at what happened here I think we beat expectations by a lot, right?
We ran a successful ranked-choice vote We had high-level discussions with lots of people both, you know on our campfires and behind the scenes And so we did discover that the niche in question exists and the question is what do you do with it?
So, we will see going forward, but if you have been following Unity 2020, please know that what has changed is the Unity 2020 plan itself.
The Unity movement still exists and is as dedicated as ever to the prospect of fixing our system.
Perhaps something like, Unity 2020 is dead, long live Unity.
I like that.
I wouldn't say dead.
Unity 2020 is dead.
This was about a particular moment in time.
This was about a particular presidential election appending the 2020 to it.
So just like the king is dead, long live the king refers to two different instantiations of the king.
Unity 2020 is presumably not the name of the movement going forward because it pinpoints the origin date and it's a forward looking movement.
Right, yeah.
My concern was not with the Unity 2020 part, it's with dead, because the prototype mindset, you know, is it dead?
But it doesn't matter, it's a semantic question.
I think the formulation is right.
There are multiple lenses with which to approach something, and I obviously agree with the prototype lens, but using a phrase from history doesn't render the prototype lens inoperable.
Right, except that you have neglected the fact that history is itself a tool of oppression, and therefore we must... You know that's cheating.
I'm kidding.
I know.
It was only a joke.
All right, so that's the Unity 2020 update.
The Unity movement continues.
We're trying to model this, right?
Like, when people pull that shit on you, that's cheating.
Stop.
Right, and the way you really stop them is the eyebrows, the double-raised eyebrow thing.
That's a shot across the bow.
So, all right.
Maybe a slight eye roll and a slack jaw.
Oh yeah, the eye roll and the up-to-the-right thing.
Man, yeah, that's a warning.
Okay, so next topic was I wanted to talk about the technical difficulties.
And again, you all probably don't care very much about the technical.
Yeah, we don't.
You're not interested in talking about technical difficulties.
No.
This is in service of understanding how to make sense in the world.
Right.
So let me, before you start, we want to talk a little bit about this sort of How to take a problem that we happen to have experienced and apply a careful scientific approach to it in order to try to make sense of the world.
Segwaying from there into how is it that so many of us are having a hard time making sense of What is being provided to us and what it looks like the other side is saying about who we are.
That is to say, to what degree are the reflections being shown back at us actually accurate?
And then I want to talk a little bit about the downstream effects of some of the, you know, batshit nonsense coming out of gender theory.
Cool.
I wish it wasn't called batshit nonsense, but I get it.
Yeah.
So, I need a prop for this.
Can you hand me the cat?
Yeah.
Oh, absolutely.
Always.
Alright.
Here we go.
The cat?
Right.
Now the cat... This be Fairfax?
Right.
The cat is a complex system.
Yes, it is.
And this is a complex system with so much complexity that it's very difficult to sort out what's going on that drives it and causes it to behave the way that it does.
Something like the apparatus we use to do podcasting is a complex system that is so many orders of magnitude less complex that it actually lends itself to scientific problem-solving more simply, right?
It's not going to require years of study to figure out how it works and to troubleshoot it.
Okay, you know that I'm going to want to put an asterisk here and say, you know, as an animal behaviorist, I constantly aspire to try to understand the complex system that is the cat.
You and me both.
On the other hand, we both know that we are a million miles, collectively, scientifically, from understanding how a single cell in that animal works, right?
And that animal is composed of at least hundreds of billions of cells.
So, in any case, there is so much mystery left in that complex system that it is still orders of magnitude short.
Even if we can skip to something like the behavior of the animal and say, actually, we know an awful lot about why it does what it does.
And then there's All right.
you know, the residual, the mystery that's still left, which is the part that you and I find the most fascinating.
But all right, back to this mini complex system that is our podcast apparatus.
Those who were paying attention around livestream number 45, I believe, will remember that we were inundated by smoke and that the cameras were all dropping out somewhat regularly.
No matter what camera angle Zach put on us, the signal would drop out and you would see rainbow color bars indicating the absence of signal.
And as I said last time, we did a ton of troubleshooting to figure out what might be going on.
It was all three cameras, two other cameras did it.
Ultimately we discovered that it was many devices in the house that put out signal over HDMI and nothing that was uninvolved in HDMI.
This led us to the question of was there some kind of radiation that might be affecting The system and somebody, one of our viewers, suggested it could possibly be radon, which would make sense because we had the windows closed due to the smoke here in Portland.
And radon, which is the product of radioactive decay of isotopes in the soil, the radon is produced by that decay.
Larger, heavier elements break down.
Radon is one of the products.
It's a gas.
It floats up from your crawl space.
And if your house is well sealed, it can be trapped.
And if the levels rise to a high enough degree, it can interfere, you know, with your cells for one thing.
It can cause mutations and things.
So somebody suggested maybe our windows being tightly closed during the smoke period had caused radon to build up.
We have a radon problem.
I tested that hypothesis.
I got a radon detector.
I've let it run for a week.
We have low levels of radon.
So that's not it.
So that, again, leaves us with this mystery.
As often with careful scientific investigations, you are left with some relief that you haven't been poisoned within your home in this case, and some disappointment that you have not apparently come on the hypothesis that is likely to be true.
Right.
Not that.
Falsified.
So, hypothesis, it's radon buildup and that would be consistent with the windows being closed.
Prediction, if you test for radon you will find high levels of it.
Falsified, no we don't find high levels of radon.
Well, as we did last time, one prediction of that hypothesis is, but it's not an exclusive prediction of this hypothesis, is once you open your windows, the problems will be resolved.
The problems were resolved once you opened the windows, so that was coincident with the hypothesis that it was Radon being trapped in the house, but it is also a prediction of other hypotheses.
So it's not a strong prediction.
On account of being a prediction that follows from multiple hypotheses.
The problem is the multiple hypotheses are pretty exotic, right?
So it does seem clear we have some kind of interference.
It's some kind of interference that seems to register on HDMI and nothing else, which is interesting.
A lot of searching reveals nothing of that nature.
I don't find anything that there's lots of talk online about various kinds of electromagnetic interference.
But HDMI does not seem particularly prone.
Also, people noticed that there was a regular periodicity to the failures of our cameras, which led many in our audience who were technically savvy to propose that it had something to do with a mismatch of frame rates between our computer and our cameras, which didn't make a lot of sense because nothing had changed on that front.
And if one camera had gotten out of whack, it wouldn't have been on the others.
So it would have had to been the computer.
And if we swapped in a different computer, it didn't happen.
So there were a lot of reasons to think that hypothesis was wrong.
It is, I think, possible, and maybe one of our technically savvy viewers will know, it is possible that radiation of some kind could disrupt the timekeeping of the HDMI process, which could result in a frame rate mismatch that would then go away when whatever the radiation or interference disappeared from the system.
So that would match the pattern.
If it were true that electromagnetic interference Could disrupt or radiation either one could disrupt the timekeeping then at the point that that Interference is gone the timekeeping would go back to normal.
So just once again to lay out What changed so you and Zack did a tremendous amount of troubleshooting inside with the system with the you know?
Man-made parts of the system and nothing seemed to address the issue we were in you know smoke lockdown for 10 to 12 days depending on how you count and On Friday of last week, eight days ago, the rains came, the air cleared, we opened the windows.
So really two big things.
It was all of a system, but two big things changed at once.
Not only did the air quality in our house become much better because we were able to open the windows, but the air quality in our entire environment improved.
And, you know, often those will be coincident with one another, but they explicitly happened within 24 hours of one another.
Right.
And as that happened, all of the problems that we've been having disappeared.
Every single one.
And so I would remind people, we tried two other cameras that only gave us an HDMI output Different brand two different models.
They all showed this flaw.
So it was something very general and the fact of the end of the smoke the beginning of the rains and the opening of the windows all being exactly consistent in time and Being consistent with the end of our problems is very conspicuous.
In fact, I think it's Highly likely that whatever it was about the the rains triggered all those other behaviors and one of them fixed our problems So what's your new hypothesis?
Well, I don't want to say your new hypothesis, because this is... You generated this hypothesis.
Your new hypothesis does not mean, although it is often understood to mean in journalism and common parlance, your preferred hypothesis, the thing you think to be true, the thing you want to be true.
In this case, it is, I think, neither.
Yep.
Right?
So there's three things.
You generated it.
You think it's true.
You want it to be true.
Often people will have a hypothesis of which all three of those things are true, and frankly the scientific method is the way of getting rid of the bias around, I really want this to be true.
The scientific method doesn't care if you generated it, or if you think it's true, it shouldn't.
But the bias that the scientific method, the careful application of the scientific method is supposed to remove, Is anything that you might be doing unconsciously or consciously in order to get a result that you think is true or that you favor being true.
Right.
And so to put a finer point on this, you can generate and in fact it is good practice when you are studying scientifically to generate every conceivable hypothesis that could explain an observation.
And that means that you hold, if we're going to say these are your hypotheses because you generated them all.
The point is you don't hold one as the one you're rooting for or expecting, though you may be.
That's also possible.
But in this case, we are left with a hypothesis that I find possible.
Whether or not I think it's likely, we'll have to talk a little bit more in detail, and I certainly don't want it to be true.
But here it is.
The hypothesis is that there was radiation that was trapped in our forests.
Now at some level, that's automatically true.
We already know that this will be true.
Because from any event that has released radiation, when the weather carries the particles from that event, Over some landscape and then it rains.
We know that rain carries these particles to the ground, right?
So after a meltdown, for example, the rains nuclear nuclear meltdown you have, you know particles released you have winds carry them somewhere which is you know often quite arbitrary and then rains which cause a very concentrated danger at the moment that the particles are carried to the ground and concentrated but the hypothesis here is that radiation is Possibly from something like Fukushima, which we do know blew to the Pacific Northwest.
That's one of the places that it landed in particular.
Most people will recognize the word Fukushima, but perhaps not have a two-sentence description on it.
2011 meltdown following a tsunami.
Triple meltdown.
So the Fukushima Daiichi complex has six reactors and seven fuel pools.
Spent fuel pools are where the reactor cores that have been spent go and they for so nuclear fuel is loaded into these things.
Nuclear fuel is a A purified radioactive material, mostly uranium, although one of the reactors at Fukushima was loaded with what's called mixed oxide fuel, MOX.
MOX fuel contains plutonium from weapons that have been decommissioned, so it's basically a process of using that.
So one of the reactors was loaded with that.
But the thing that is hard to intuit is that the use of the uranium, the enriched uranium in the reactors, causes the production of a whole slew of isotopes that weren't in it to begin with, right?
Including lots of really crazy bad stuff like very long-lived plutonium isotopes with very long half-lives.
And some very short-lived stuff too, right?
It produces iodine.
I think it's 152 that has a half.
Iodine's tiny.
It's not gonna be, no.
Never mind.
It's one of the iodine isotopes, and it has an eight-day half-life, which means that it degrades very quickly.
But it's actually the intermediate-sized elements that are most concerning, right?
So you're going to get there, but iodine is so small and has such a short half-life that it is, you know, nine years later, it is mostly not around and concerning as a result of the Fukushima meltdown.
Uranium, plutonium, etc.
are still around, but probably did not cross the Pacific Ocean, at least in any sort of large amounts, whereas it's those intermediate-sized atoms like strontium and cesium which would have basically traveled on particulate matter, attached themselves, crossed, dropped themselves in the Pacific Northwest.
Why?
As a friend of ours whom I was teaching with many years ago once said to me, once described the Pacific Northwest as the windshield of the continent, the windshield of North America.
It's a perfect description.
And you know... Hey Jack, if you're out there, hi from the Dark Horse Podcast.
Yeah, it's such an apt description and it really does... It helps us understand so much about our climate, our weather, our biota, to some degree even our culture, certainly pre-Columbian cultures here, but I digress.
So, the windshield of the continent collects all of this weather that's been blowing over the Pacific and nine years ago that weather included a lot of radioactive strontium and cesium that then got dropped in rainfall into our forests.
So, strontium and cesium are both Also, front of mind, because they each mimic an element that we use physiologically.
So, if you eat something that has radioactive strontium in it, it's very likely, I believe, strontium goes to bones and lodges itself there, and cesium goes to muscle.
So, these are biotically dangerous because we metabolize them and build them into our But I mean, iodine is obviously very biologically dangerous as well for thyroid function.
Thyroid reasons, exactly.
But you can replace, so this is the reason actually, you can replace, if you know that you might be at risk of being dosed by radioactive iodine, you can take non-radioactive iodine, effectively fill up your bucket, your iodine bucket, and leave the radioactive iodine no place to bind to in your thyroid.
Exactly.
But you can't buy bottles of non-radioactive strontium and cesium the way you can buy bottles of non-radioactive iodine.
Well, it doesn't really work that way because the thyroid is functioning differently, so building into bone is a long-term process that you're constantly doing.
Cesium and strontium.
Oh, and also there's another way that these things could get into our forests, right?
Which is actually, again... These things again being radioactive isotopes of strontium and cesium.
That's what these things mean.
Yeah, radioactive isotopes of cesium and strontium could get into our forests in the following way.
They don't even have to come here by wind.
They could wash off the shores of Japan, right?
Because a lot of the stuff landed in Japan as well.
They could wash off the shores of Japan and into the Pacific.
They could find themselves incorporated into fish, right?
Especially tuna were tested at the time and were very likely to be containing radioactive isotopes from Fukushima.
Also salmon.
And the thing is, Salmon have this, obviously, ecological habit of reproducing in these freshwater watersheds throughout the Pacific Northwest, right?
In addition to... Right.
But, you know, populations... Salmon ecology is fascinating.
We should spend a couple of episodes probably talking about salmon at some point.
But even though there is some actual overlap in species of Oncorhynchus, which is the genus of Pacific salmon we're talking about, There aren't, it would be, we have a lot to say about what happens when salmon get lost and how they found new populations, but getting lost from Japan and ending up at the Pacific Northwest, no individual salmon is going to get that lost and survive the journey.
I don't think it's a matter of lost.
So the salmon typically spend something like four years at sea, and I believe we know that many salmon that come from our watersheds do range as far as Japan and then come back.
Okay, I don't know this to be true.
We will soon find out when all of the ichthyology types contact us.
But, in any case, the reason I mention it is that it is actually, it's counterintuitive but true that the riparian zones, that is to say the forest adjacent to these watersheds are... Riparian zones specifically being forests adjacent to streams and rivers, fast moving water as opposed to, you know, watershed is just the whole area.
Right, but it's a watershed, so it doesn't matter.
The fact is, you've got these streams and rivers in which salmon move up, and they actually change the ecology of these forests because they do materially alter what nutrients are available.
They die in large numbers.
This is a big animal.
They die in large numbers.
Bears and other things drag their carcasses into the forest some distance, and then whatever it is that was in those animals makes its way into the soil and then into the trees.
This was one of the real successes, I think, of ecology from the 90s and early aughts was this concept of marine-derived nutrients in terrestrial forests.
Terrestrial forests is redundant.
I guess kelp forests.
I'm not talking about kelp forests.
I'm talking about marine-derived nutrients in what all of us think of when we think of forests.
It happens exactly as you just described and specifically nitrogen was tracked.
Nitrogen was tracked because everything decays at a certain rate and the fact of nitrogen that had been in the oceans now being visible, being findable and trackable in furs and in dug furs in the Pacific Northwest and in bears and in other things that end up not only
Eating the salmon directly, as bears do in some cases, but being effectively downstream of the effects of the corpses of the salmon that decay and move their marine-derived nutrients, including nitrogen, into the soil, into the foliage, browsed by deer.
So this nitrogen that was in the middle of the Pacific Ocean not too long ago is now living in some deer in Idaho, and we actually have a decent sense of how that happened.
Yes, and it's an amazing story, right?
So you can imagine, you know, if the nitrogen were color-coded and you were looking down on a map, there's some big pulse in the fall as some, you know, salmon species returns to a given river, and then it moves out into the immediately adjacent space as these dead carcasses get washed around and stuff like that.
It gets moved farther by big animals like bears that might drag the stuff farther than that.
Um, you know, the bear shits in the woods.
Yes, they do.
And, uh, you know, flies might carry a little bit, you know, a little bit farther afield.
So you can imagine these nutrients moving out of these rivers, right?
And that this is a process that actually is an equilibrium that replenishes the nutrients that are lost from all of the stuff that washed downstream and into the oceans.
All right.
Beautiful.
So, there is all of that.
There is all of that.
And then there's 2011, triple meltdown.
Less beautiful.
So much less beautiful.
Triple meltdown at Fukushima, dumps a lot of stuff into the ocean, and a lot of stuff blows in the atmosphere due to the particular weather in the days following that blew into the Pacific Northwest, right?
So here's the hypothesis.
Hold on, and it is known, is it known that?
I thought you would also say that it was known that there was particulate matter including radiation from Fukushima that did blow into the Pacific Northwest in the weeks thereafter.
Oh yeah.
That was known, right?
Absolutely known.
And at some point, crazily and not reported on enough, data actually stopped being collected.
Oh, on things like fish.
But this was, we know this to be true, is this right?
Yes, we know this to be true.
We know this to be true, and if I recall correctly, the methodology involved the air filters of automobiles which trapped... In Japan?
Or in the Pacific Northwest?
In the Pacific Northwest, that trapped radioactive particles.
And so if you could get a filter from somebody's car that they had driven during those weeks, and then you, you know, I think the methodology involved laying it down on a piece of photographic paper that was sensitive, then the little disintegrations, the nuclear disintegrations that happen would result in a black spot on the film, right?
And you compare that to the filters of cars that had not been driven during those weeks.
Right.
And the fact is it varies based on very local weather patterns.
You know, it rains here.
It doesn't rain there.
You get a pulse.
The air clears over there.
And so the cars aren't inhaling it.
So the particular weather matters a lot.
But okay, what we know... It's just fascinating that the methodology involved effectively looking at the respiratory structures of cars.
Right, the respiratory, and it's exactly what's going on, right?
So, and you know, right down to the point, why does a car breathe, right?
A car is breathing in oxygen in order to fuel combustion, which is what causes it to go.
And we could say the exact same thing about you.
The difference is your combustion isn't fire.
It's a chemical combustion without flame, but nonetheless, same damn process.
That's, you know, respiration is gas exchange.
Gas exchange.
So in animals it looks one way, in plants it looks almost the opposite, in cars it looks a bit different yet, but it's all a kind of respiration.
It's gas exchange.
And, you know, at the molecular level, when you burn fuel in your car, you're burning You're burning carbon bonds that were forged in an ancient peat bog in general.
Or the body of an ancient dinosaur.
Right, something.
Peat bogs generate a lot more, so most of the gasoline in your car comes from a peat bog that got buried and, you know, turned into crude oil over time.
But anyway, photosynthesis captured the energy from the sun, loaded it into these bonds between Carbon molecules.
It was then underground for millions of years.
Somebody drills it, refines it, puts it in your car, and you release the energy from the sun that was trapped in these molecules through combustion just the same way if you eat a carrot.
You then internally release the energy that was stored by the carrot plant in the carbon bonds to fuel motion and other things that require energy.
It's a lot less energy that you require and that you're releasing from the carrot.
Right, but when I was teaching I loved to talk about my fusion-powered bicycle, because my bicycle actually is fusion-powered, as is yours, because basically the point is it's fusion in the sun that releases the energy that gets captured by the carrot or the stock of wheat or the cow, ultimately.
And then, you know, you release it and so it's fusion energy.
Yeah.
Sun to grass to cow to your plate to you to fueling your bicycle.
To fueling my bicycle.
Powering my bicycle.
Okay, so we are now far afield from the tech failure and the hypothesis.
No, it's good.
But the hypothesis is radioactive material It doesn't have to be from Fukushima, it could be from an earlier event like weapons tests.
But we know there to have been a pulse in 2011.
We know that there was a pulse from Fukushima, right.
Whatever pulses it was, then drifted, rains dropped stuff onto the ground, which we also know happened.
It happened in particular places and not other places, right?
You would have to go back and look at the exact weather pattern to know where it landed and where it didn't.
A fire that then burns the plants that will have incorporated these radioactive isotopes would then release that radiation into the air.
So I think you just skipped one piece that will be obvious to many but not to everyone, which is that a pulse that comes our way, that drops to the ground, is then pulled up by the roots of plants because it becomes part of the soil, because it's tiny, it's atomic isotopes that are bonded to little pieces of dust that are themselves incorporated Into the root systems, because that is not the breathing.
The breathing is through the leaves, but the eating is, in some ways, not the sugars, which is through the leaves, but is through the roots.
The micronutrients are pulled up through the roots.
Micronutrients will be pulled up through the roots, incorporated into the plants.
You could detect it in the plants, and I'm sure people have done that work occasionally.
Yeah, we should have looked into that.
I'm sure they have.
And in fact, parallel piece of information, just so people understand what these systems are like.
I remember Nalini, who is actually a remarkable scientist in her own right, married to Jack, who was the source of the beautiful quote about this being the windshield of the continent.
Yeah, this is Nalini Nadkarni and Jack Longino.
So Nalini, who was an expert on mosses.
Yeah, and forced canopies in general.
Talked about the event, the Mount St.
Helens eruption, which had trapped a layer of ash in the mosses that persist to this day in our trees and has effects.
So if you go into the canopy of trees and you find patches of moss that are old enough, you've effectively got this layer of ash.
And it turns out, I think I learned this from Nalini, that the ash got incorporated Downstream in time?
trees and the grit is actually causes chainsaw blades to wear faster here.
If you're cutting trees that were downstream of that event.
Downstream in time?
No, that got ash on them.
Downstream in ash.
Yes.
And so ash fell really hard in Olympia, in Seattle, in Portland, in the Portland more than Seattle.
Yeah, and so that ash fell in all of these forests and somehow the grit is causing chainsaw blades to...
But anyway, an aside.
So here's the hypothesis.
The hypothesis is something, maybe Fukushima, released nuclear radiation in the form of all of these isotopes that are created in the heart of a reactor.
Could also be true from a weapon.
The material fell here as a result of weather having it blown this direction and rain having caused it to fall to the ground, gets incorporated into the trees, a fire event releases this stuff, it will have then been floating in the air in these macroscopic smoke particles that were making it so hard to see and to breathe.
I don't think the concentrations of those things would have been high in our house because we sealed off our house and we had a filter pulling the smoke particles out of the air at a high rate.
So there would have been little bursts.
So pure atomic radiation, like at the elemental level, would not be trapped by a HEPA filter.
It would be too small.
But the particulate matter that would have been released in the form of smoke through fire would have been trapped by a HEPA filter.
So let's be clear about this.
Radiation won't be trapped in any circumstance.
And an atom, a radioactive atom, won't be trapped because it's too small.
Right.
Right?
And so we talked on our last podcast about radon, which is a gas which wouldn't be trapped at all by a filter.
Right?
But a particle, a radioactive particle, that is in wood or leaves that then gets liberated into the air as ash, that's now in a macroscopic particle and that will get trapped by by a filter.
So my guess is we didn't have high rates of that stuff in the house and despite the fact that the air outside was absolutely choking, we actually did not have terrible respiratory issues in the house during that time, which suggests that our air was pretty clean.
But there's a question about the radiation, the ambient radiation.
Could the ambient radiation Cause, first of all, some radiation will get through things like walls and windows and some won't.
So the question is, would there be ambient radiation that would be capable of disrupting our podcast system in here that would have almost immediately ceased or immediately ceased as soon as the rains pulled the particles out of the air and washed them into the streams and things.
That is a hypothesis.
How would you test it?
Well, one thing you could do is, and this is in theory doable, it becomes less practical every day.
There are cars that were driven during that time.
We drove both of our vehicles during that time, though not very much.
Those cars will have pulled in a sample of what was in the atmosphere and it will decay at whatever rate the particular isotopes decay at, whatever their half-life is.
So that would be detectable.
And cars that were here but not driven during that time won't have trapped an appreciable amount of it.
And so you could test it in that way.
Yeah, and despite the admittedly very patchy, presumably patchy distribution of radioactive isotopes in the forests of the Pacific Northwest, and this hypothesis hinges on the idea that at least some of the forest, I mean there's such a giant swath of forest that burned, that at least some of those forests would have been high density of radioactive isotopes.
But, you know, carefully in a controlled fashion taking a couple of adjoining trees from each of these places and burning them into a container and measuring the radioactivity in that burn or, you know, just burning them into a filter and then doing exactly the same thing.
So it would not be testing what happened, but it would be a decent way of mimicking what happened.
That doesn't depend on doing it right now.
You know, it doesn't depend on collecting data that are aging every day because the fires are in the past.
And in fact, now that you mention it, there's a very good method that you could deploy here, which is you could take a round from a tree, right?
You could buck a tree.
You can take a tree that was near the fires but not in them.
There's gotta be plenty of that.
Right?
Yeah.
Cut it down.
Take a round, and now you have tree rings which will tell you how long ago a deposit was laid down.
Yes.
So you could figure out actually if there is appreciable radiation, where it came from, where's the pulse.
So anyway, that would be very interesting.
Yeah.
No, and there are a lot of fallen and snag trees that are at risk of falling in the coming rains and causing mudslides that are then more dangerous because they bring down trees as well.
So there will be lots of such material available for such analysis should someone have simply the time and the resources to do it.
We don't have the technology to do such analysis.
Right.
I will say the nice thing about the methodology that you point to is that the ability to test this doesn't degrade.
Exactly.
I mean, to the degree that there are snags and fallen trees right now that might be beginning to be cleaned up so as to render the probably coming mudslides less dangerous, they might get disappeared a little bit, but there's plenty of stuff to buck up and do this analysis on.
But even if you didn't, you could test it.
So with my method of the air filters in the cars, you can't do this.
The farther we get from the fire event, the less likely it is to work because cars that were idle will have been driven.
You'll pollute the data.
But the trees that weren't burned, the ones adjacent to these areas that did burn, just simply retain their level of radiation, which will decay at its natural rate.
I do like the idea of polluting the pollution data.
Polluting it with noise.
Exactly.
Yeah.
Okay, so let's just say, a reminder, I am not saying that I believe that this is what happened to our system.
The truth is I don't know what I believe happened to our system.
The reason that I am more likely to believe this hypothesis than probably anybody listening to this podcast who is tracking this is that I know that Zach and I falsified just about everything that was more likely than this and several times over, right?
The number of things that we were able to eliminate by just simply swapping in a different piece of equipment or testing, you know, something there rather than here, We falsified virtually everything.
We were left with, it has to be some kind of interference, and we do not have a source of interference that makes any sense, nor do we have a source of interference that should have gone away at the point that the rains came and the smoke changed things.
Nor had you guys made changes to the system in advance of the problem's beginning.
Nothing.
And nor did we change anything back at the point that they were fixed.
It was insensitive to, for example, humidifying the room.
So we falsified static electricity.
So we falsified so many hypotheses.
It was almost insensitive to applying tinfoil hats.
Right, exactly.
Which, frankly, we discovered later needed to be grounded.
They would have been much more likely to work.
And it makes for a better visual, too.
A grounded tinfoil hat is just even better.
Totally.
It's not as good as a basted tinfoil hat.
Basted!
All right.
So that's it.
This is Hypothesis, Predictions.
Would love to see a test.
Would also love to hear from people who know more about these topics than we do.
I have contacted one expert who I'm hoping will respond and tell us whether this is plausible or not.
But anyway, people in our audience may know, too.
All right.
I feel good about that.
What's next?
It's a little bit of a strange segue, actually, because it goes back into the explicitly political.
What we just did is exactly the kind of thing that would emerge organically in our classrooms.
That wouldn't have been a topic that I would likely have prepared content on, but it might well have emerged.
Those sorts of conversations That describe in real time how it is that you would go about trying to figure out if something is true by using the scientific method and your own background knowledge and trying to figure out what else you would need to know in order to assess.
This is the thing that we do and that we bring towards all of the questions that we try to address in life.
I was remembering You know, we did an event, a live event back when live events happened in November of last year, maybe, here in Portland.
And I'm just not gonna remember any of the particulars.
There was a screening of a very short documentary that had Nadine Strossen.
The former president of the ACLU, and apologies to the organization that put it on and the host, I can't remember anything.
I know that we were on stage with Katie Herzog, who's awesome, the former journalist with The Stranger, now co-host of the Blocked and Reported podcast with Jesse Singel.
And our host said to us, presumably there's other things you'd like to be talking about than cancel culture and wokeness and post-modernism and all of the stuff that we have spent a lot of time talking about in this podcast and that we were talking about that evening.
And we said, yes, actually, we're working on this book.
It's about using an evolutionary lens to understand Modernity.
And yes, there are so many things that we'd rather be talking about.
But of course, it's also true that you can use an evolutionary lens to understand the modern craziness.
So that's all a little bit of a disclaimer to say that, A, I want to talk a little bit about the modern craziness with Judith Butler and gender theory and such.
But first, I've become really so worried.
I didn't think it was possible to be more worried about the state of political discourse and, you know, what looks like end of empire level actions on all sides.
And what I'm seeing now though is scaring me more because it looks like people on both sides, and you can define sides a lot of ways, but for the moment let's just call it left and right, and the sort of not just the woke left but almost all of the Dems, not all of us to the degree that we're still Democrats,
But almost all the Dems see or are willing to go along with the story that Trump and the far right and white nationalists and all are going to usher in an authoritarian fascistic era, right?
Like that is the analysis that you see and hear in WaPo and New York Times and CNN and MSNBC and all this.
And similarly, many on the right are convinced that intersectionality and postmodernism and utopian and communist fantasies of a perfect I don't know, unicorn-filled future, will usher in an authoritarian fascistic era.
And it's really, it's the same language.
So I found myself a couple of times this week reading, you know, an analysis of, for instance, a horrifying true tale from, yes, Nazi Germany.
And in one case, it arrived at, see, this is what's coming if you vote for Trump.
In another case, it arrived at, see, this is what's coming if you vote for Biden.
And they weren't exactly the same stories, but they were effectively the same stories.
I don't think anyone now knows what they look like to the other.
I think we are being fed not just untruths about the other, but we are seeing ourselves reflected in a way that doesn't even remind us of ourselves very often.
And this is a term that I guess Daniel Schmachtenberger has used a lot, but the decline of sensemaking, the inability to do sensemaking when we used to know how to do it from some combination of first principles and trust in particular authorities.
And, you know, there was a newspaper of record and it did hold itself to account and all of these things.
Without any of those, what we're left with is first principles.
And even that, given that aside from what you can actually see and feel and hear with your own senses, what do you trust?
Like, how do you even know the basic things that are true?
And therein we land at male is female, and two plus two is five, and all of this nonsense that really does suggest that we're at the end of the ability to determine what's real and what's not.
Yeah, it's the... I don't know, is the wheels coming off the apple cart a mixed metaphor, or do I have it right?
So, a couple things I would say is, one, you know, in biology Homeostasis, right, the ability to continue on for a creature or a cell or anything, is the result of the maintenance of conditions between certain bounds, right?
So for us, endotherms, so-called warm-blooded creatures, Our temperature is maintained within a very narrow scope, and all of our enzymes function on the assumption of that temperature.
If your temperature goes up too high, then the point is, well, your enzymes are just molecules, and their shape will actually change based on how warm and chaotic the environment is.
So your temperature is not arbitrarily chosen, it's actually tightly matched to the enzymes in question.
And for those of us who are endotherms, which has evolved twice, more depending on how you count, but twice on earth in the form of mammals and birds, separate evolutions of endothermy, that temperature is created and maintained internally.
We can't look outside of us to maintain our own heat.
And obviously we do Feel warm in the sun and feel cold in the cold, but it is our bodies that are doing the homeostatic work.
And, you know, whereas if you're if you're if you're a lizard, you have a much wider range of possibilities.
And, you know, at some level, I don't know if this is where you were going, but It almost feels like people are playing around with the homeostatic levers of society to such a degree that they're imagining that, like, we're a lizard, it'll be fine.
It's like, no, you know what?
We can't function within that kind of range.
Our society is an endothermic society, not an ectothermic one, and we need certain bounds to exist within which homeostasis is possible, outside of which all bets are off.
All systems start to go haywire and they will act in unpredictable ways.
We know this with things like climate, we know this with things like policing, like both of them.
Totally different systems, but you pull the levers too far and you can't predict what comes next accurately.
So this is more or less what I was going to say, is what we effectively are seeing are two sides that are advocating to pull the lever in their direction.
And the point is the purpose of that lever is about homeostasis, right?
And to the extent that the body becomes convinced that You know, warmer is better.
It's on the verge of collapse, right?
It's no better to be convinced that colder is better, right?
The point is you want to maintain temperature in the functional range and the attack that you point to on the very ability to detect what is even true is evidence of a system that is in the process of unhooking the very things on which homeostasis is based.
Yeah, and just to extend the metaphor, I think the people on the left who are protesting, let's just talk about the good faith protesters, which I think includes a lot of confused people, but the good faith people on the left who are demanding change now, demanding change Um, due to what they see as a, you know, systemically racist society that by some estimations hasn't changed since Selma, Alabama, which is obviously wrong.
Um, but you know, they, they see something that I and many others would argue and can compellingly argue from data isn't true, but they see that thing and say, if this is true and we say it is true, then we need change now because this is unconscionable and cannot stand.
And so they are effectively acting as the fever.
They're acting as the fever, as the we're going to raise the temperature on the system so that we can free ourselves of this infection that has been the case in Western society from time immemorial and then we can go back but how dare you want homeostasis at a time like this.
And then there are others of us who say A lot of what you're saying is based on bad data and bad analysis.
That does not suggest that there is no racism and that there isn't a lot of correction to be done.
Your framing of demographics, of identity, be it race or sex or gender, whatever the hell it is, as the thing that needs to be fixed right now, that's dangerous.
That is dangerous because we were moving in the right direction.
We 100% were moving in the right direction.
People on the left and the right with a Exception of a few crackpots at the edges of both extremes.
We're becoming more welcoming and embracing and inclusive and actually honoring all of the diversity that humans are.
And we need that in order to actually address the giant sociopolitical AI algorithm, climate, energy, you know, all of these other, you know, and, you know, ecosystem destruction, these actual issues that are real existential threats.
And how dare they turn identity into an existential threat?
Like, this actually really matters.
How dare they?
Yeah, it sidelines every other critical process.
And to your point about... I don't like the term end of empire, because I would like to think that as much as we have behaved in an imperial fashion at times, that we aspire to something better.
Better than empire.
Yeah, just as there is obviously a lot of racism in the history of the country, including its founding, but we aspire to something better.
But nonetheless, the end of whatever it is, the end of Republic, right, that we may be seeing is, I would argue, the result of this process which, you know, at one point one of the people I've become friends with from my Patreon discussions posed the question, is there an analogy to senescence, that is the process of growing feeble and inefficient with age that happens to bodies, Is there an analogy for civilization?
And what I told him, and I think I did a little video on it, was that it was more than an analogy.
That there was in fact the exact same process.
And my argument was, for reasons I won't go into here, the reason that we grow feeble and inefficient with age is that we are complex creatures with a relatively small instruction set.
That means that instruction set contains instructions that do many things.
One instruction does many things.
When that's true, there will be things that are good for you early in life, and they're bad for you late in life, and they will get collected by selection.
They will be favored because it's very likely that you will get the benefit of the early stuff, and you won't live long enough to suffer from the late stuff.
And even if you do, most of your reproduction will be done anyway, so it counts less.
So selection is constantly accumulating things that are good for us early and bad for us late.
Now here's the problem.
Our political and economic system does the same goddamn thing, right?
If you come up with some new process, right?
Social media or internal combustion engines, and it empowers your society.
Haber-Bosch process.
Right, Haber-Bosch process, right.
Suddenly, boom!
Everything's great!
We can do stuff we couldn't do before.
We can grow crops on soil we couldn't grow them on before.
We can go places faster without breathing hard.
All this good stuff emerges from it, right?
And then the point is, okay, Later on, the costs of these things done at some scale that the people who invented them could not have imagined become evident and you can't do anything about them.
Why?
Because once they have become so ungodly profitable, you can't tell them no.
You can't turn them off.
And at the beginning of anything.
It would be taken as such extraordinary arrogance to imagine that it would become a world-dominating force.
The Haber-Bosch process, which allowed for the fixation of nitrogen into synthetically produced fertilizers and thus expanded agriculture orders of magnitude more than it had been possible, the originator of the internal combustion engine, the originator of social media, and in those last two cases there's more than two people, but you know, whatever those early people were, If they had started thinking about, well, what do we have to put into place to make sure that this doesn't force the end of the world?
What do we have to put in place to make sure that there will be controls on it so that the naturally evolving processes don't actually take over?
Most of the people in their startup, or whatever the equivalent of the startup would have been back in the early 20th century, We'd have laughed at them.
You can't spend time there.
You can't spend your resources there.
We're trying to make a go of it.
We're trying to get this amazing new technology out there into the world.
You don't think about putting the brakes on it before it even has momentum.
No, and in fact, this is what the right fears about the left, is at the point that you make an internal combustion engine, and you've come up with something.
Crude oil literally used to sit as a nuisance on the surface of the earth, right?
It was a problem sludge.
You grew up near one of these problem sludges in the tar pits in La Brea in L.A.
But it used to be much more widespread than that.
The idea that you could fractionate that material and use it to transport goods arbitrarily long distances… It's unimaginable!
It's unimaginably awesome, and the idea of the buzzkill that's wagging their finger at such a process and saying, don't you realize you could screw up the atmosphere with that, it's like...
How much of this would you have to do before you even affected the atmosphere?
And it's like, well, ultimately we'll get there, right?
So that very thing, the fact that you need a process that allows people to discover shit without people wagging their fingers at them and saying, you never know what the downstream consequences are going to be, right?
That voice has to shut up.
But there has to be some process that recognizes, you know what?
You do enough of that.
You will alter something that matters, and we have to be able to say no to you at that point, even after you've become a tycoon, right?
Yes.
Especially at that point.
Right.
We have to be able to say no.
We have to be able to say no to you more so the more power you have, and yet it's also true that some things that you set in motion are incredibly difficult to unset in motion.
Right.
And how you even do it.
I mean, you know, the social media one, right?
At the point that somebody figures out how to connect a group of people who are interested in, you know, making models of famous Battles, right?
If you're making miniature models of famous battles and you're gathering on the internet to talk to other people who are hundreds of thousands of miles from you, right?
And somebody's looking at that thinking, you know, this process, it could get away from us.
It could derange us.
We could stop being able to think collectively about how to behave as a society.
That sounds nuts!
Right?
But lo and behold, you start dealing with, you know, machine learning and search and feed algorithms and filter bubbles and all of this.
And next thing you know, there's like an honest debate about whether 2 plus 2 actually equals 4.
Right?
It's not honest.
It's a debate, but it's not honest.
Let's put it this way.
Maybe that's even worse.
Yes.
Whatever debate it is that can catch a fire that has us debating this, that has us, you know, looking at the question of whether or not to, you know, eliminate the police because maybe that would be better.
All of these things are nuts.
So my point would be the senescence of civilization would sound exactly like this.
Basically, here's the point.
What does senescence sound like in a person?
It very often sounds like dementia.
That's what happens when a brain is suffering all the downstream consequences of whatever made it.
Vibrant as in youth, right?
And this is like societal dementia, and it has exactly the nature that you're pointing to.
You've got two groups.
We agree on what the failure mode is, right?
It's some kind of authoritarian evil that we don't want, and both groups think the other one is going to bring it.
Except that it's also true that some members of both groups only don't like authoritarian regimes when they're not in power.
Right.
And they won't say that out loud, but it's clearly true.
And this is something that we've been saying since before Evergreen went public, that the goal is not about reversing oppression, it's about turning the tables of oppression.
And, you know, that is just true.
We've seen that over and over and over again, and it has no place in this moment in history, and yet it is claiming the throne at this moment in history.
Well, and you know, I keep struggling for a better analogy than a ship, but it is as if we are on a ship on which our very survival depends.
We're somehow in the middle of the Pacific.
If the ship sinks, there's no one to come get us.
It's just simply our ship.
You know, two people.
A Nazi and a Jew on the same ship in the middle of the Pacific ought to agree that the ship is actually top priority, right?
Because absent it, they're both doomed.
So… Well, at one level, in terms of individuals making bad decisions right now… A lot of the people who are very, very confused are millennials who were parented really badly, not because their parents were mean or evil, but because they accepted a stupid parenting ideology of snow plowing and parenting and helicoptering, all risk and challenge away from their children.
At the same time that the elites in the West were grabbing more and more power for themselves.
So now we arrive at today with a group of up-and-coming adults and adults who have rarely experienced real risk and challenge in their lives because just within their tiny family structure they were protected from all of it if they were of a certain socioeconomic class as many of the activists were.
And simultaneously, there is an abdication of responsibility for the common good at the higher levels.
And so we have these people on the streets now who are, you know, fighting, fighting, fighting, you know, fighting against the man or whatever they imagine it is, because someone has always been there to take care of their problems for them.
Someone has always been there with the juice boxes, to get back to that.
And in fact, the real power has walked away with their goodies.
And has left a vacuum at the top, and the parents who created them in part helped create the mess of a whole generation of kids who are now adults, who don't know how to behave like adults because they never had challenge or risk as children, are breaking things in the streets because I imagine their sense is that things always get put right.
There's no one around to put these things right.
They are breaking things that cannot be put right, especially by their nimrod parents who protected them from all risk in the first place.
Right.
You're attacking the ship or whatever analog for it there is.
Yeah.
And the point is, look, kids, we may not be able to stop you from doing that.
But do you know what happens if you succeed?
Right.
In attempting to stop you, we're actually, you know, doing you a service because you if you succeed, you'll you'll you'll doom us all.
And so I don't know what I don't know exactly how that message gets through.
Yeah.
We'll say, hey, Zack, could you put up the New York Times article?
So I just want to stop here briefly and say that we saw today, this article emerges, How a Pledge to Dismantle the Minneapolis Police Collapsed.
And I was thinking of reading a few paragraphs, but I won't.
I think the point here is that many people on the city council agreed to abolish the Minneapolis police.
And they are now discovering that A, Nobody wants this, or at least nobody smart does, and B, that it's an insane thing to even consider, and so they're trying to walk- I have not seen this article.
Is the idea that it- this policy was enacted a few months ago and it started to come into play, and lo and behold, it's not a good idea?
Yeah, it was three months ago, and the fact is it's not popular.
People, you know, Black people prominent among them, of course, because they need the police as much as anybody, don't like this.
And so what I've come to see is that, you know, the people definitely want us to abolish the police.
The public does not, right?
And it's like, well, what do you mean?
Well, the people is like this tiny little group of folks who are either confused or malevolent or a combination of the two.
They're out of control.
They don't know how anything works.
And so they're, you know, they are having a tantrum and it is causing society to bend as if it is the public demanding these things, which the public is not.
And so somehow the public needs to reassert itself because the people are going to get us killed.
That's good.
Yeah.
So, So I would just, not a millennial, Judith Butler, who is the sort of spokesperson, originator of gender theory, she's in her 60s, an academic I just had an interview in the New Statesman.
I'd like to just read a little bit from this interview.
She has given us a ton of the nonsense and the crazy that we are living through today, and then I want to provide a couple of examples of how nuts her ideology is.
So really, her book – hold on a sec, just keep it on both of us for the moment.
Yeah, actually you can put my screen up for a moment.
This is the new statesman from a couple days ago, and being interviewed on The Culture Wars, J.K.
Rowling, and Living in Anti-intellectual Times.
So she published a book 30 years ago called Gender Trouble, in which she introduces the idea of gender as performance, And asks how we define, quote, the category of women.
Okay, so I'm going to read a little bit from this, but Zach, give me my screen back so I can have some quotes.
She says, I find it worrisome that suddenly the trans-exclusionary radical feminist position is understood as commonly accepted or even mainstream.
I think it is actually a fringe movement that is seeking to speak in the name of the mainstream and that our responsibility is to refuse to let that happen.
So the New Statesman says, one example of mainstream public discourse on this issue in the UK is the argument about allowing people to self-identify in terms of their gender.
In an open letter she published in June, J.K. Rowling articulated the concern that this would, quote, throw open the doors of bathrooms and changing rooms to any man who believes or feels he's a woman, potentially putting women at risk of violence.
Butler responds, if we look closely at the example that you characterize as mainstream, we can see that a domain of fantasy is at work.
One which reflects more about the feminist who has such a fear than any actually existing situation in trans life.
The feminist who holds such a view presumes that the penis does define the person, and that anyone with a penis would identify as a woman for the purposes of entering such changing rooms and posing a threat to the women inside.
It assumes that the penis is the threat, or that any person who has a penis who identifies as a woman is engaging in a base, deceitful, and harmful form of disguise.
This is a rich fantasy, and one that comes from powerful fears, but it does not describe a social reality.
Trans women are often discriminated against in men's bathrooms, and their modes of self-identification are ways of describing a lived reality, one that cannot be captured or regulated by the fantasies brought to bear upon them.
The fact that such fantasies pass as public argument is itself cause for worry.
She uses the word fantasy a billion times in this paragraph, and she engages in really crappy logic in a lot of places, and the idea that someone who calls herself a feminist and is actually this like
icon in a way that, you know, Ruth Bader Ginsburg actually is, and this woman has no business standing for women in any way, but her work is in women's studies programs across the country, you know, probably almost every class that calls itself gender studies or women's studies.
The idea that, oh my God, I just, I can't even believe that she would say some of this stuff.
And that anyone is arguing that all people who are trans cause problems, no.
Right.
No one is saying that.
Maybe a handful of extreme bigots, maybe, but really no one is saying that.
So just one more little quote here.
Butler, feminists know that women with ambition are called monstrous.
Or that women who are not heterosexual are pathologized.
We do?
Since when?
Yeah, since when.
We fight those misrepresentations because they are false and because they reflect more about the misogyny of those who make demeaning caricatures than they do about the complex social diversity of women.
I'd say Butler's the misogynist here, but okay.
Women should not engage in the forms of phobic caricature by which they've been traditionally demeaned, and by women I mean all those who identify in that way.
New Statesman says, how much is toxicity on this issue a function of culture wars playing out online?
Butler, I think we are living in anti-intellectual times and that this is evident across the political spectrum.
To which I say, Judith Butler, you created, you really helped create these anti-intellectual times.
Like, this is on you and all of your comrades and your peers and your colleagues, and you indoctrinated an entire generation of students who looked around for majors and thought, oh, women's studies, that sounds interesting.
We know people who majored in women's studies.
They're not loons.
You aren't inherently a loon if you go into that field, but it loonifies people.
It has a hard time not, and some people have resisted, but it's hard not to when this is the kind of garbage rhetoric that you see.
And so I just want to point out two, just two, tiny downstream effects of this kind of garbage.
My link's not going to work.
Okay, Zach, if you would show, here's just a tweet from a couple weeks ago.
Let's stop angrily denying trans girls experiences of period symptoms, this person says.
And it gets almost 4,000 likes.
People like to bring up science to discredit us, but studies into our biology are still grossly underfunded.
Wait, what?
So that is a direct intellectual descendant of Judith Butler, right there.
That is incoherent, science-denying, biology-denying, female and male difference-denying nonsense.
Okay, if I can have my screen back, Zach, please.
And another one.
… comes out of the Harvard-originated Gender Science Lab.
So this is – Zach, thank you – this is out of Harvard.
The Gender Sci Lab is a collaborative interdisciplinary research lab dedicated to generating feminist concepts, methods, and theories for scientific research on sex and gender.
That might sound to most people like, okay, fine, but they are a tiny step from saying they're trying to do feminist science.
There's no such thing.
There's no such thing as feminist economics.
It's not a thing.
You can't do science when you already have a lens and therefore a set of answers that you are trying to arrive at in advance.
That's not science.
That's the opposite of science.
I have a particular example from here, but just an anecdote, which I was reminded of reading that just now.
Years ago, when I was looking for a publisher for my first book, Antipode, about my life and research in Madagascar, my agent got a bite from actually a small press here in Portland.
When we lived in the Midwest, we lived in Michigan at the time.
I'd never lived in the Pacific Northwest at that point.
And this little press, which called itself a feminist press, was really excited about this book of mine.
And in their description to me of what they were excited about, they said, this is going to be feminist science.
You're a feminist scientist.
And I said to them, and it was probably foolish at one level to reject an offer of publication when I'd never had a book published and I was just a graduate student at the time, but I politely said no.
And I said, I can be and do like to identify as a feminist.
This was back in 2000, 2001.
And I definitely am a scientist.
But those are two different things, and science cannot have an adjectival label attached to it and remain science.
It cannot.
That is not what science is.
Yeah.
And you and I have both made this point repeatedly, that if you attach an agenda label to science, you are invalidating it.
If somebody said Democrat science, you'd know there was a problem.
Feminist science makes exactly as much sense.
So one more thing on my screen, Zach.
The people associated with the Gender Psy Institute include a lot of people who, you know, many of whom I hope and presume are doing good work.
Here we have, of course, the obligate pronouns, she, her, he, him, she, her.
Here we have Katherine Gilson does not use pronouns.
Does not use pronouns.
Not even they them, which itself wraps us in knots and disables normal conversation, but does not use pronouns.
And so I was reminded, Zach, thank you, of what Douglas Murray said.
In his recent excellent Joe Rogan appearance, when he was talking about people coming out as non-binary, he said, it's people declaring themselves, look at me.
It's just an attention grab.
It's a narcissistic little way to claim something of meaning in a universe that seems probably big and fraught and anonymous, and like it won't pay any attention to you.
But for God's sake, figure out something interesting about yourself.
Something interesting about yourself.
I'm sure there's something that doesn't involve, don't use pronouns with me.
That's not who I am.
No, actually, if you're going to speak English, we're going to use pronouns.
I must say, I don't need to look at this person who doesn't use pronouns, but I'd like to talk to them.
I cannot overcome my curiosity as to what that would sound like.
No.
Right?
So, I mean, when we- It's next level for sure.
When we were at Evergreen, we had to write these narrative evaluations, as you know, at the end, so they didn't have grades.
And people will laugh at that, but this was actually a very interesting and important part of the experience for the students.
And so we would write these narrative evaluations of them, and the pronouns that we used had to match the pronouns of the gender that they had on file.
And occasionally we had actually legitimately trans students, yes, who had not transitioned officially with the school yet, and so we were in a position of saying, look, I I either have to use the pronouns you have on file, or every time I want to refer to you I have to use your name, and that's going to be, you know, that's going to be very awkward.
But here are the choices.
Here are the choices I've been given by the situation, by the combination of the college, and what you are declaring yourself as, and what you have done with the college at this point.
And, frankly, those few cases where they said, okay, no pronouns, use my name, it reads super awkward, right?
And, you know, do it, be respectful, of course, but boy, it makes communication difficult.
Yeah, it's almost as if language evolved for the purpose of communication rather than this peacocking, whatever it is.
Peahenning, I don't know what it is, but yes, it's awfully awkward.
I guess it has to be pea-chickening because that's the only gender neutral term.
Whoa, I don't even know what that means.
I'm going to take some time to parse that.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, where does this leave us?
Yeah, I think this leaves us just about ready to take a 15 minute break.
But before we go, I want to say a few things about what else we've got going on, which is that our private Patreon Q&A is tomorrow at 11am Pacific for those
Who are patrons of mine at the $5 and up level, and probably before we meet again next week for our next live stream, if we don't come back until next Saturday, you will have had your first of the month long-form Patreon conversation with the patrons at the $100 level.
Yep.
Next Saturday from 10 to 12 Pacific, and you can also get access to Go to the Discord server on either of our Patreons, and go to the Clips channel for clips.
What else?
I don't know.
Maybe that's it.
All right.
All right.
So that means we are facing this intermission, and we will see you in 15 minutes, and we'll answer your Super Chat questions then.
