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May 22, 2021 - Dark Horse - Weinstein & Heying
01:28:25
#81: Permission to Think (Bret Weinstein & Heather Heying DarkHorse Livestream)
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Time Text
Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse podcast live stream.
Number is it 81?
It is.
81!
Today we collectively comprise a perfect square.
I am not as square as people imagine, I would just like to say.
Not at all, but between all of us here at the Dark Horse Podcast, the three of us involved are a perfect square.
The three of us are a perfect square, which is kind of geometrically weird, but you know, I get it.
And if you're going to be a square, might as well be perfect.
Absolutely.
Yep.
All right.
Well, we'll start with some announcements.
Let's do that.
Talk about where we're going today, and then we have a couple ads at the top of the hour before we get right into it.
So, announcements include, as always, we encourage you to join us at our Patreons.
Right now at my Patreon, the 48-hour window that is monthly for asking questions is open, so at the $11 or more level, you can go there and pose a question and we will try to get to it.
Those Q&A sessions that we do in the last Sunday of the month are quite a lot of fun, and the live chat is small enough that we can actually engage with the chat, which of course we don't do in these larger live streams.
Where we're going today, we're going to talk a little bit about why it's important to keep track of who actually got it right, and pattern recognition, and some other things in the space of how to use the scientific method to discern what is actually true.
How to science good, I think would be the way to say that.
That might be a way that some people might say that.
They could.
You try it on.
That is true.
We're going to talk just a little bit about some more benefits of being physically active, as if there weren't already enough known.
We are going to find that trans ideology has come to both kickboxing and taxonomy.
Thank goodness.
And finish with a poem that I found on the streets of Portland, a beautiful poem.
And we're actually going to finish with two pro bono ads at the end.
Oh, I guess one more announcement before we get into the paid ads, paying our mortgage for the week.
In last week's episode, we talked a lot about ivermectin and you finished that segment by taking some on air.
I did.
You had researched what the prophylactic dose was.
And you offered it to me and I said, you know, it would be unlike me and uncareful even as much as I trust you and love you to do that without any forewarning, without doing my own due diligence and research.
So I did and I have.
And indeed we then posed the question with all of the information.
To our two children, 17 and 15, and they also chose to join us in that.
So we are all on prophylactic doses of ivermectin at this point.
And none of us have experienced any ill effects, and I have to say, while it is obviously completely psychological in nature, I do feel protected based on what we have read about the effect of ivermectin.
Well, and that's consistent with what I've heard from a few people who have been vaccinated, that now they just feel like this weight is lifted off of them, like now you can actually engage more safely in the world than you have been able to engage since, I don't know, February of 2020.
So yeah, there's that.
All right.
All right.
So yeah, time to pay the rent.
Time to pay the rent.
All right.
I'm going to begin by talking about omax cryo-freeze, as we have talked to you about here before.
Pain is useful.
It is a signal from your body that something is amiss or has been pushed too hard, but sometimes pain is too much.
And as long as you don't push harder after alleviating pain, it's wonderful if you can get rid of it.
If you have chronic pain, this is all the more true, and as chronic pain can be debilitating and there is really little upside.
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You should not push through the pain.
You should find the right kinds of body work and activity to heal yourself and get back to full functionality.
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All right, and I'm going to talk to you about VPNs and in particular ExpressVPN.
So I want to break this down into a couple different categories.
Do you need a VPN?
Yeah, you do need a VPN and there are two reasons that you need a VPN.
One reason is that there's content that you may want to access that you have trouble accessing from your location.
So although I am not a medical doctor and therefore cannot recommend that you watch the BBC, if you're an American and you want to watch the BBC and you're willing to take the risks that come along with watching the BBC, you may have to make your computer appear as if it is in the British Isles in order for the BBC player to work.
Express VPN will help you do that.
I know you're giving me that look, but it is true.
And then the other big reason that you need a VPN is that you are constantly being tracked on the internet and you are being modeled and this facilitates people invading your privacy and figuring out how to manipulate you in ways that we can scarcely imagine.
So if you want to immunize yourself from that, You need your computer not to be easily identified as associated with you and a VPN will do interesting things like it will pull your identity under a shared IP address which therefore does not have a particular character.
So, You do need a VPN.
Why should it be ExpressVPN?
It should be ExpressVPN because ExpressVPN is absolutely excellent.
What makes it excellent?
That it's mostly seamless.
They have servers all over the world, they're very rapid, and you don't notice their interaction for the most part.
So if you decide You want to get ExpressVPN, what you should do is you should go to expressvpn.com slash darkhorse expressvpnexpressvpn.com slash darkhorse and that will get you a VPN, it will help support the podcast, and it will anonymize you online.
And you'll get three extra months for free.
And you get three extra months for free.
I forgot to mention that.
I know it's here on the paper somewhere, but I misplaced it somehow.
That's probably also because I'm not a medical doctor.
I don't think so.
You don't think so?
No.
Alright.
All right.
You wanted to believe a few things.
You wanted to begin by talking about the move to script history and what we understand to be true and how it is that we understand to be true.
How it is that we understand things to be true.
Basically a sort of a sociology of epistemology.
Two words that probably most people would flinch at and probably have just lost a considerable part of our audience.
No, it sounds scintillating, does it not?
I mean… Not really, actually.
But it is!
It's more scintillating than you would think.
So, yeah, actually I would say a couple things have collided with each other this week and they, you know, unleashed a flurry of thoughts that I think are important and so we're going to develop them a little bit here.
One thing that we have is we have the mainstream press falling all over itself to script the story of how we went from knowing for sure that COVID-19 did not leak from a laboratory to being open to the possibility that it very well may have.
Right, so obviously things have been moving on this front over the course of more than a year, but suddenly the mainstream has been forced to change course and acknowledge what it can no longer deny.
And so the question is, for all of the people who should have let us know that this was actually visible early on, who failed to let us know, and in fact kept doubling down on the idea that this was a preposterous notion, they have to explain themselves in such a way that they do not degrade their position of authority in the world.
We would expect them to want to do that.
Why we would let them do that is a different question, but nonetheless, real time as the mainstream attempts to construct the story of why it got the possibility of a lab leak wrong and why it is now still worth listening to having made that error.
And so you can see this in a few places.
You can look at Donald McNeil's piece.
Donald McNeil actually is an interesting case.
Donald McNeil was the lead COVID-19 reporter at the New York Times who lost his position when a strange scandal emerged After it was discovered that years prior, on a trip in which he had led students in Peru, he had not used the N-word, but he had said the N-word in a discussion of its meaning and implications.
And apparently that was simply too much for the pearl-clutching class, and he was unceremoniously booted from the New York Times.
And of course, in that situation, we would certainly have supported his continuation.
Uh, there.
But this week he came out with a piece.
In which he attempts to describe the new landscape.
And this piece focuses very directly on the emergence of Nicholas Wade's piece in the Bulletin of Concerned Scientists and Medium last week.
And it effectively describes the story in terms that viewers of our podcast will regard as somewhat preposterous.
Let me see if I can find the salient paragraph.
People can't hear you when you're in front of your mic like that.
Sorry.
So here he says, for about a year, there was general wisdom among science writers.
The lab leak theory, by the way, he should say hypothesis, but theory migrated back to the far right where it had started, championed by folks who brought us Pizzagate, Plandemic, Kung Flu, QAnon, Stop the Steal, and the January 6th Capitol invasion.
It was tarred by the fact that everyone backing it seemed to hate not just Democrats and the Chinese Communist Party, but even the Chinese themselves.
It spawned racist rumors, like Chinese labs sell their dead experimental animals to food markets.
And then he skips and he says, and now to the present day, two weeks ago, my former New York Times Science News colleague, Nicholas Wade, wrote an article in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists and on Medium, arguing that the lab leak theory deserves a harder look.
Okay.
So anyway, he makes this move in which he completely ignores all of the people who didn't get this wrong, right?
Nicholson Baker, Josh Rogin, Sagaranjeti, and Crystal Ball.
Matt Ridley.
I'm going to hold it there because the list of people who didn't get it wrong is quite long and involves a lot of interesting, important people.
I think Steve Hilton on Fox actually deserves quite a lot of credit for courageously looking at this story.
In any case, There is this move to create the impression that this story was so polluted by the nature of the people who were discussing it, that it was actually responsible to get it wrong, because you wouldn't want to have trafficked in conjecture by those people, when in fact that is not the right story.
And then, to my mind, maybe even worse, David Frum came out with a piece this week that makes the very same move.
It is a piece bizarrely titled, The Pro-Trump Culture War on American Scientists.
Zach, do you want to put it out?
Yeah.
And I looked at this piece and was very interested to see Frum's perspective and then was quite disturbed to find that it was absolutely obsessed with Donald Trump, which of course has had nothing to do with the discussion in responsible circles of the lab leak hypothesis for the last year.
Hence the sociology of epistemology, right?
The applying of human social truths to an understanding, to an analysis of an understanding of what is actually true.
Yes, it is a social first epistemology in which the actual truth is subordinate to narrative, which is, of course, absolutely antithetical to the scientific method.
From, in this piece, mentions Trump no less than 29 times.
You counted.
I had my computer count.
It was easier.
One's eyes tend to glaze over as it jumps from Trump to Trump to Trump.
But the point is he makes the very same move in which he describes basically, he does not use the term basket of deplorables, but the piece effectively describes those who got this right as a basket of deplorables.
And only after Nicholas Wade had cracked the case was it possible for people to see that this was actually quite a logical hypothesis.
Now, of course, those of you who have been paying attention to the Dark Horse Podcast know that this has long been discussed by responsible voices and that that story doesn't make any sense.
I will say there was also a tweet by Matty Iglesias earlier this week in which he does slightly better than from and McDonald McNeil, sorry, Donald McNeil.
And he says that actually what cracked the case and brought it into the mainstream was Nicholson Baker's article, which is closer to the truth.
But nonetheless, there is a long history of scientific work and a journalist who was actually interested in how this story had evolved over this period of time would have to go no farther than the internet in order to be able to reconstruct that narrative, the actual one.
Exactly.
I'd like to just read one paragraph from a piece that I published this week in Aereo, which is called What If We're Wrong?
It is exactly about these issues.
It begins with these questions.
What if the earth isn't the center of everything?
What if the ancestors of humans once looked like monkeys or were single-celled organisms?
What if the continents move?
These questions were once beyond the pale.
They were not to be discussed in polite society, were outside the frame of the Overton window.
None of that made them untrue, however unimportant.
And then, as the article proceeds, I ask the questions, you know, what if SARS-CoV-2 emerged from a lab?
What if there are long-term effects of mRNA vaccines?
What if ivermectin is a safe and effective prophylaxis against and treatment for COVID-19?
Of course, the answers to these questions are not resolved.
All of them.
The answer to all of them might be it didn't, there aren't, and it's not safe, right?
But the posing of questions is absolutely necessary to the conducting of science.
And so I also talk about Pasteur in here a little bit, and this is the paragraph that I wanted to read.
For every Pasteur, Louis Pasteur, Who obviously among many many other contributions to modern science created the first rabies vaccine.
For every posture there must be thousands of people who have had an idea that didn't pan out as well as countless others whose ideas were good but never got traction.
Science depends on the tenacity of the person with a new idea even when others take pleasure in mocking it.
And if science depends on individuals with tenacity then society depends on all conversations being possible.
The adults who mocked Pasteur before he was successful in creating a rabies vaccine were simultaneously small-minded and arrogant.
On the basis that he lacked the appropriate credentials, many medical doctors of the time scorned Pasteur and his work.
Pasteur's contemporaries imagined that the current consensus was all there would ever be to know.
I don't know if there was a Trump in Pasteur's time, or if there was some other easy fall guy, easy scapegoat, with which to ignore him, mock him, deride him.
But every single person in whatever is the modern moment in history seems to imagine, who is engaged in this sort of thing, that finally we've arrived at the true moment.
Finally we've arrived at the moment from which we can see everything, and it's akin to declaring themselves God.
I mean, it really is the height of arrogance.
Yeah, and the fact is, at any of these moments, there are lots of people who know better.
And the question is, are you going to listen to the people who do know better or don't?
And you know, we have had the experience of being ridiculed for our position on the lab leak hypothesis from the beginning.
And so we know what it's like to be portrayed as right wing or Wild-eyed or you know tinfoil hat or whatever it is and then when it finally comes around you get to see the evolution of what has to be acknowledged.
So until very recently my feeling was you know what as long as we get there maybe it doesn't matter that much about making sure that that the right credit is due.
But largely through conversations with you I have come to a different position.
I'd like you know either I can play devil's advocate for the other side or just pose to you as if I still have what I think now is a naive position.
Why does it matter?
Aren't you being petty?
Doesn't it matter most that we actually now have all the hypotheses live on the table and are moving forward?
Yeah.
I want to answer that question directly, but I want to pair what we've already got here with the lab leak hypothesis and the jump that it has taken with another story that we have a very different All right.
So this is the story of so-called UAPs, which is, I guess, a kind of acronym euphemism for UFO.
And the fact is that it's the acronym used in in military, in the DoD.
Yeah, I don't know when exactly that became the term, but, you know, I would imagine there was a discussion somewhere that said if we call them UFOs, which is of course a perfectly neutral term, they're unidentified, they fly, right?
Who could doubt it?
But the point is that term is searchable, and so somebody came up with a different acronym that you wouldn't necessarily guess.
But anyway, the point is this story has taken a quantum leap in terms of its discussability.
This week, 60 Minutes did a story on UAPs in which they interviewed military personnel who'd had encounters.
Some of them described having encounters on a daily basis for over a year.
So, suddenly we are able to discuss this at the level of the cocktail parties that are reflective of 60 Minutes as an authoritative source.
Now, of course, the New York Times had had discussion of some of the same observations very recently.
So, what we're watching is the evolution of discussability.
Now, one of the incidents that was in the 60 Minutes piece, a focus of the 60 Minutes piece, dates back to 2004.
And it's an incident that has four high-level witnesses, airborne at the time of their interaction, Who all make a very credible case.
They don't claim to know what they saw, and they all acknowledge that had they seen it with no one else present, they would have been hesitant to say anything because they know it would call their credibility into question.
But given that there are four of them, the courage existed to discuss it.
Nor are they in any way attention-seeking.
One of the people says, I never want to be on national television talking about this.
This is not my goal here.
Right.
So anyway, very credible witnesses, right?
These are highly technical, serious people who saw something, and they don't know what it was.
But it's hard to dismiss it as any normal phenomenon.
But it goes back to 2004.
And I know because of some of the sources that I look at for things that You know, will clue me into features of the lab leak hypothesis that I don't know about.
I know that there's nothing at all new about this discussion except the discussability of it.
There were serious people- The discussability, the veil of discussability as provided by the New York Times in 60 Minutes.
Is that what you mean?
Yes, that there is something going on.
And it goes back to your point about social epistemology.
There is something about this topic, even discussing it now, right?
If I am talking about an incident in 2004, I'm on solid ground as long as I'm talking about it from the perspective of 2021, where it is now discussable.
But the fact is, That incident existed in 2004.
The evidence has not changed.
Right.
And there were serious people discussing these kinds of incidents and military observations of them, and not just a few, 20 years ago.
So the point is, what do you do with the discovery that you and we were induced to be timid about this story when the story was every bit as real And then we get permission to think from something like the New York Times or 60 Minutes or something like that.
And we are in a different position on the UAP issue because we haven't been early on it, right?
In fact, we got a question a couple weeks ago after the New York Times heard its piece.
I have no idea.
And, you know, joked about it.
Seems like the same old, same old.
I think if I don't remember exactly what I said, but my guess is what I said was actually the stuff is more credible than you would think.
Right.
But the point is, is the Dark Horse podcast way ahead on UAPs?
No, we are not.
But we are in the same position with respect to commenting on the epistemological process.
It just got safer.
It got safer.
And that's why this is suddenly on people's minds.
Not that anything new has happened.
You know, Nicholas Wade.
He did a beautiful job of summarizing evidence that had been accumulating over the course of more than a year.
He didn't change the story.
He didn't add anything to the story, but he made it discussable.
He gave cover.
Now, back to your question.
Yes.
Why does it matter that we keep track of who is early?
Why does it matter that we give credit where credit is due?
Right.
Here's why it matters.
Because this process is an evolutionary one.
And what is supposed to happen, so you've got signal and you've got noise.
Somebody could get this right Early without understanding anything.
In fact, it's a strong argument to be made that that's what happened with Trump.
That to the extent that he said anything coherent on the issue of lab leak, he just had the same instinct on hearing the evidence that this had emerged right near a laboratory.
Circumstantial evidence was all he knew.
It was all he knew.
It was being discussed in places on the internet he paid attention to and he tossed off something because he thought it worked in his advantage.
Now that doesn't Add or detract from the actual credibility of the story.
In fact, it has zero weight, right?
But the point is, okay, you're gonna get some people who get lucky early.
Will they be able to repeat their ability to predict the future?
No, you will find an awful lot of noise and very little signal.
On the other hand, somebody who has a track record... Hold on, sorry, but you also want to keep track of, for those people who get lucky early, is it because they are broadcasting predictions?
If they are making, you know, 100 predictions and one of them turns out to be true, but the other 99 have disappeared into history, you know, perhaps because they're just constantly blathering about stuff.
That's also not an indication that they have a finely honed epistemological brain.
Right, and so you have to pay attention to the signal-to-noise ratio.
How difficult a prediction is it?
How early ought to count?
How early relative to the recognition that it's real?
How many wrong predictions of a similar type are there?
So, anyway, you can track that.
But the important thing, if the system is to get better at spotting things that matter in time to do something about them, is that the people who get stuff right have to advance, and the people who get stuff wrong have to have the weight of their opinion downgraded.
And you're not actually making an argument.
That argument would be true from, say, a market perspective.
It's good to incentivize people who are good at this for them to know that they will be able to advance, right?
That's the market reason to do this.
But from the perspective of science and knowledge and the well-being of humanity and the planet, This is also, you know, in this case, the incentives are aligned.
We actually need to make sure to know who gets it right early, because they are the ones who are most likely to be able to see patterns in the future that other people are not seeing, in combination with stand up against the madding crowd, you know, the social forces that say, we don't talk about that, and if you do, you're wrong and you're bad.
All right, this is excellent.
Those are two quite distinct points.
Yes, in order for us to get collectively smarter, you have to empower the people who are capable of seeing farther, seeing earlier.
But also, you want to reward the people who show evidence that they are actually immune to the social incentives that would have shut them up.
And if you do advance those voices, you do get smarter.
And in this case, you can see why that is in a position to affect whether or not millions of people die.
Because at this very moment, lab leak is the central question in whether we studied gain of function too much, or we studied it not enough, potentially.
Right?
Now, again, if those of you who follow along with our course, We'll know that we had a discussion very early.
If you have to do gain-of-function research, which we do not believe you have to do, but if you have to do gain-of-function research... We don't.
Much of the world seems to.
Civilization needs to do gain-of-function research on human pathogens.
It should do it under circumstances that are safe.
And what I proposed was such a thing, if it needs to be done, could be done on a ship Right?
At sea, far away from other things.
Now, again, I don't think we need to do this research.
I think it's more dangerous than it's worth, but if we decide otherwise, you would want to take precautions like that, right?
Something with no leaky borders.
Right, exactly.
You would want to have another system to protect you, and to the extent that we now have all woken up to the hazard of pathogens moving freely about the globe, so a cold that starts in one part of the globe is all over the place inside of We could start getting serious about the major human cost of all of these relatively minor pathogens that are circulating and start figuring out how to frustrate that process, right?
So anyway, that would all be worthwhile.
But everything depends on us not rehabilitating people who got it wrong because they were socially motivated.
And elevating people who were, in fact, insensitive to the social incentives and willing to see what was right in front of them all along.
And yes, there are millions of lives at stake.
And I would also point out we have two forks of the question of where the lives are at stake.
One of them has to do with a future lab leak, which is all too possible.
The other has to do with whether or not understanding if this pathogen came from a lab, what were the protocols that were used to generate it?
If we could understand what was done that generated this thing, we would have a great deal more predictive power with respect to its future evolution, for example.
And by playing as if this is all impossible to navigate, we have slowed down the process of understanding what value there might be in understanding protocols that, for example, might have created this.
In a way, actually, you know, we've begun to say welcome to complex systems, right?
I mean, we've been saying it privately for a long time, but we've begun to say that here.
And I feel like a recognition that many people have at an intuitive level that, you know, a virus is different from a rock.
And a virus that has been worked on through some fancy accelerating evolutionary change research in a lab is potentially going to be a different thing from a naturally wild type virus from a rock, a rock which is not a complex system.
That it is actually that sort of intuitive recognition that most people have now that like so much of the world is so complex, and most of us don't have the background to assess from first principles a lot of what we are being told.
And so there's a lot of this like hand waving.
around LabLeak and SARS-CoV-2 origins, and in fact vaccines, and in fact ivermectin, and in fact all of these stories around this pandemic, where it's kind of like, it's complex, you wouldn't understand, don't bother looking here, besides also, you know, the guy you don't like said it.
So it is, in some ways, it could be viewed also as a weaponizing of the concept of, this is complex systems, and you, you know, you little people wouldn't understand.
Well, it goes back to the distinction I draw between terms of art and jargon.
So my claim is that terms of art are terms you have to invent or redefine in order to discuss something technical, right?
They have to exist, but it's a necessary evil.
It's not a good thing, right?
And then there's jargon, which is used to keep people out, so they don't know what you're talking about when you could well explain it, right?
And so, yes, it is being used as a territorial protection.
You know, you've got journalists who are protecting their territory and now have to protect it in spite of the fact that they screwed up, and I don't mean it's a lab leak, I mean they screwed up pretending or believing their terrible sources who said it couldn't possibly be, right?
Yes.
Had they looked into the evidence and found that there was no reason to pursue it and said, I'm not going there, it's not worth my time, that's a very different kind of You know, mistake.
I think it's still a mistake, but it's not one that is opposed to the job of journalism.
Whereas circling the wagons against a story, against a hypothesis that has growing evidence in support of it and nothing to falsify it, that is against science, it's against journalism, and it's against progress.
It is, and there's another thing that just looms into view there, right?
This is not like a historical case where we're now building the description of, well, here's what actually happened, and here's what its implication is for who the authoritative sources were.
We've got, I would say, several live heads to this hydra, right?
We have permission now to talk in public about the lab leak hypothesis and to not be snickered at or derided for doing so.
We don't yet have that permission with respect to ivermectin.
We don't yet have that permission with respect to the actual hazards of Vaccines, be they short term, be they long term, be they epidemiological, all three of those things are places where we are headed for a collision with complex systems.
Specifically with the COVID vaccines.
You're not talking more broadly.
Well, I mean, I am talking more broadly.
Yes, the COVID vaccines, we have a particular problem because they're so darn new, and so there's so little insight into what we should expect going forward.
But, you know, it turns out that we've got an overly pretty view of vaccines because, frankly, they are so highly effective.
They're such a marvelous tool that, you know, we tend to absorb the brochure version, which is that these are these You know, marvelous technological advancements that, you know, with just... With no downsides.
With no downsides, and it's just not right.
So anyway, I guess what I would say is, again and again and again, we see analogous failures.
And these analogous failures are telling us something.
And one of the things that you can see this week that was harder to see three weeks ago is what role is what you have permission to think about playing in what you understand that could hurt you?
I didn't know the term gain-of-function research in, you know, October of 2019.
I had not run across it, right?
I now know- Had it been described to you, you would have understood it as I would have.
It's, you know, It is obvious in retrospect for those with evolutionary background.
Right.
But here's the thing.
I was asking before that date, all right, in light of the financial collapse of 2008, in light of Fukushima, in light of the Aliso Canyon leak, in light of the Deepwater Horizon accident, in light of all of these things where we discover, we in the public discover, that we in some technical field are doing some really dangerous thing that then we hear about at the point something has gone wrong, right?
I've started asking the question, well, what are we doing that I should know about now before something has gone wrong?
And gain of function research would have been a great answer to that question.
We're doing gain of function research.
Oh, that sounds great.
On what?
Human pathogens.
Oh, we're enhancing human pathogens.
I would imagine that we are doing that at sea, where if such a thing escapes and infects one of the people doing the work, we're not all going to infect it.
Is that in fact what we're doing?
Oh no, we're doing it across the road from a seafood market.
So that's a great list.
I mean that partial list like that shows up in our book as well.
But you mentioned the financial collapse of 2008, Aliso Canyon, Fukushima, and Deepwater Horizon.
I wanted to just say those again.
I don't know if you want to spend just a minute on each of those or maybe not.
Sure.
So the financial collapse of 2008 is very famous.
I probably don't need to say very much if you are curious about this and you Don't mind pain, you could watch the big short and get a really good idea of what happened, but basically the bubble game was, it came to visit the mortgage market and got amplified by processes so arcane that no one would have thought to ask about them.
And obviously almost crashed the world economy.
That's one.
Aliso Canyon was a natural gas leak where we had been injecting natural gas for storage in Southern California in an emptied crude oil deposit.
So basically we had a pressurized crude oil deposit full of natural gas and it sprung a leak and was hard to plug.
It was very reminiscent of what took place in the Gulf of Mexico with the Deepwater Horizon accident where we had drilled into a very large crude oil deposit in the floor of the Gulf and at the point that they had a blowout, the technology to plug the blowout did not exist.
The fail-safes had not worked and it leaked extensively.
Fukushima, we had a triple meltdown in Japan as the result.
of a tsunami that swamped the diesel generators that were supposed to keep electricity running to the reactors.
And it turns out that when fission reactors do not have power fed to them, they melt down.
So we had a triple meltdown.
One of those meltdowns in Reactor Building 3 actually appears to have been a prompt criticality where a nuclear chain reaction Unfolded.
The other two were hydrogen explosions where the radiation had torn apart water and left hydrogen and oxygen highly flammable and had blown apart the buildings.
And frankly, it could have been much, much worse if those fuel pools had cracked, which they didn't, but because we were lucky.
So anyway, these are all places where our technology allowed us to do something that we were, the technology to control what we had done was far behind the technology that allowed us to get into trouble.
There it is.
Yep.
And all of these, the financial collapse of 2008 is the earliest of those.
So this is, it would appear, and this is not a careful statement that's backed up with any statistical analysis, but it would appear that we are putting ourselves at ever greater risk as we as we have Ever greater numbers of people who are even tighter specialists who are doing work outside of the view of, you know, of those of us who could assess it and as simultaneously journalism and academia fall apart with regard to their ability or willingness to actually keep eyes on these things.
So, you know, what if If COVID-19 turns out to be another one of these, this is by many measures the biggest.
And what's next?
What's next?
And, you know, okay, we've got a discussion about gain-of-function research and the cost-benefit analysis.
We have Dr. Fauci, who apparently played a key role in lifting the ban on gain-of-function research, which may well have led to this pandemic.
And we have Richard Ebright, who has been attempting to call people's attention to the danger of this kind of research.
Who do you want looking out for you in the discussion of whether or not we should do future gain-of-function research on human pathogens?
I want Richard Ebright there.
Right.
Now the question is, if we get the right story of what happened and we say, all right, where is Richard Ebright in that story?
How early was he?
How accurate were his predictions?
Then the answer is, oh yeah, of course you want him in the room.
It's not going to be easy.
Right, he's gonna set a high bar, but that's what you want.
You want somebody to set a high bar for you.
Do I want Fauci there?
Well, I sure as hell don't want him there if he doesn't admit what role he played here, and frankly, I probably don't want him there at all, right?
He obviously led us into danger.
Whether that danger actually resulted in the lab leak, I hope we find out.
But nonetheless, you're really talking about a battle between people mostly you haven't heard of who did get it right and might have protected us from this, and people who got it wrong who would like to hold on to their credibility and obscure, basically airbrush the others out of history.
Right.
All right.
Are we there?
I think so.
All right.
Let's talk briefly about a paper that came out this recently called, and you can show my screen if you like, Zachary, by a crew of researchers, Salas et al.
Published in the, boy I've lost track of where it is published, in the British Journal of Sports Medicine, called Physical Inactivity is Associated with a Higher Risk for Severe COVID-19 Outcomes, a Study in 48,440 Adult Patients.
And most of the conclusion is discernible from that title, but I will read to you just a couple of paragraphs from the introduction as well.
The U.S.
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the CDC, has identified risk factors for severe COVID-19, including advanced age, sex, male, and the presence of underlying comorbidities such as diabetes, obesity, and cardiovascular disease.
However, there are no data regarding the effect of regular physical activity on COVID-19 outcomes, even though a lack of physical activity is a well-documented underlying risk factor for multiple chronic diseases, including those associated with severe COVID-19.
They then go on to say that the U.S.
physical activity guidelines suggest that all American adults engage in 150 minutes of activity every week and that includes just a brisk walk actually counts towards this.
So what is that?
Two and a half hours of Merely brisk walking or more a week of physical activity counts as meeting the guidelines.
Next paragraph.
During the pandemic, populations across the globe have been advised to stay home and avoid contact with individuals outside of one's household.
Lockdowns and other measures that constrain travel have restricted access to gyms, parks, and other venues where people can be active.
In the USA, education about the benefits of physical activity and advice to maintain or increase physical activity during the pandemic has been essentially absent.
While pre-pandemic levels of physical activity were generally insufficient, pandemic control measures have likely had the unintended consequence of reducing physical activity even more.
Indeed, early studies indicated a significant reduction of physical activity levels since the beginning of the pandemic.
So that's the setup.
And indeed they refer to another paper that was published just last year, which does indeed find that while this is all self-reports, and indeed this paper itself is self-reports of physical activity as well, but it's a way of self-reporting that has been otherwise demonstrated to be pretty accurate.
We know that the people reporting on their levels of physical activity in the wake of lockdowns, many people are saying it's the same, but to the extent that people are saying it's different, many more people are saying, yeah, I don't do as much as I did before than are saying I'm doing more than I was before.
Although there are some people in that other state too.
So if this is all true, And if physical activity has an effect on COVID-19 outcomes, then we've got, at the very least, yet another strong messaging problem.
And indeed, what this paper finds is... let's see, I'm not sure... yeah, there was no... the graphics here aren't terrific, so I'll just go to one more paragraph in the discussion.
The magnitude of risk for all outcomes associated with being consistently inactive exceeded the odds of smoking and virtually all the chronic diseases studied in this analysis, indicating physical activity may play a crucial role as a risk factor for severe COVID-19 outcomes.
So, you know, again, like we've talked about before with regard to obesity, there are some things that aren't even hidden, but that are hidden from conversation, that are hidden within the media, that are not discussed, that you actually have control over.
And even more than obesity, because, you know, some people, once they have become obese, especially if that's due to developmental intrusions into their lives, And if you don't, it's an emergency that you develop that capacity, that you build up to it.
many people who are obese are actually going to have a very hard time getting unobese.
And that's not to say that you don't have agency, but it's tough.
But do you have an ability to get active?
Does everyone in fact have an ability to simply walk briskly for two and a half hours a week?
I say yes.
And are there rare exceptions?
For sure.
And if you don't, it's an emergency that you develop that capacity, that you build up to it.
Exactly.
So I just wanted to add here, I don't think this paper discusses masks.
It discusses activity.
But I want to point out the absurdity in light of this, of two things.
One, One, you know, as we pointed out over the last couple of weeks, The idea that one has to wear a mask outside, which is completely unscientific, it's an anti-scientific conclusion, but that conclusion portrays the world as 100% dangerous where it is in fact 99% safe by virtue of the fact that it's 99% outdoors and the thing doesn't seem to spread outdoors.
At least it hasn't learned that trick yet.
But, the fact of that misportrayal in conjunction with the idea that even outside, because it's all dangerous, you must wear a mask, that idea which reigned until a couple of weeks ago, that means that to the extent that there was a question about should you go outside and be active, There were really two things marshalling against it.
One was outside is dangerous.
So yeah, you should probably go out and be active.
But you know, it's you're not escaping COVID out there, even though you really are.
But the second thing is that it complicates being highly active.
As bad as it is walking around with a mask, running around with a mask, or biking around with a mask, or any of those things, is awful.
It makes it less likely that people will choose to do it, it's harder to do, and in many places it was actually forbidden for a while, to just go outside at all.
I think indeed one of the studies we talked about earlier, which had this very strange result about dog walking being associated with Um, with higher rates of COVID.
And I think that was in Spain.
Uh, after we talked about it, we heard from a number of people, actually, this was, uh, if memory serves, in a city where a lot of people are living in high rise apartments.
And the one thing you're allowed to do is walk your dog.
And in order to get your dog down to walk them, you have to be in these elevators, which are these tight, you know, enclosed spaces.
And so probably this was, you know, the dog walkers were just simply the only people who were going up and down the elevators with an irregularity.
And that was likely to be the, But anyway, there are a lot of people who just weren't even allowed to go outside.
Right, weren't allowed to go outside.
But imagine for a second that the actual adults had been looking at the actual evidence and making actual recommendations for how you actually avoid COVID and they had concluded, you know what?
Physical exercise is key.
Obesity is a disaster.
Masks are potentially helpful but not outdoors and they impede the very behaviors that are most likely to make you well.
Psychological well-being is increased by your going outside.
So, sit down everybody.
Here's the recommendation.
Go outside.
Spend as much time outside as you can.
Go to the beach.
Have a good time at the beach.
You know, remind yourself what it is like to live without fear.
If you had that kind of recommendation, this would have been a very different pandemic.
Instead, we were having officials close down beaches.
Right.
You can't play tennis.
I mean, there's still signs up.
I think it's allowed now, but in Portland, I was taking pictures and showing them on air all through last summer.
Yes, the swimming pools were closed.
I think at that point, we didn't fully know if maybe water transmission was possible.
I did not come down strongly against that.
It felt like a A tragedy for the children, but okay.
But, you know, sporting fields, no baseball, no basketball, no football, no tennis.
Not even for kids!
You know, kids who were immune by virtue of the fact that COVID does not seem highly capable of infecting or damaging kids.
They could have had sports and other activities outside.
Engaged with each other.
Engaged with each other.
So much of the harm here was needless and there's something about it which one just has the impression that there's a certain kind of authoritarian that likes spoiling people's fun.
And so instead of embracing the counterintuitive facts about COVID and saying, you know what?
COVID is a disease of indoors.
It's the buildings that are dangerous.
If you can figure out how to stay out of the buildings and really think very hard about how not to be in a car or if it's winter and, you know, open the windows all the way and turn the heat up if it's winter.
These sorts of pieces of advice about How to continue to live a normal life we would I think we'd in some ways be like a different people at this point because we would all discover what it was like to be advised actually, you know the dangers in your house, but out there you're safe and you know, we might have well I wouldn't say the dangers in your house The danger is not in your house If you you know, if you aren't letting lots of strangers come and come and go the danger is about being indoors Among other people who might be infected
Well, I slightly disagree.
I mean, I think your caution is accurate, but a lot of what was true here was that once COVID got loose in a house, it tended to bounce around to anybody who could catch it.
Definitely.
And actually, that mode of transmission appears to be, if not the one of the most frequent modes of transmission.
Absolutely the most dangerous thing is to have somebody bring COVID home.
Which is, again, another of the recommendations across the U.S.
anyway, and I don't know how widespread this was outside of the U.S., was if you get sick, given that we're so worried about ICU beds, what you do is you go home.
Really?
You just guaranteed a lot more people are going to get sick.
Yeah, right.
Exactly.
And so anyway, I just, we will never know.
But I do wonder if this might not have been an enlightenment, if instead of having fingers wagged at us for smiling outdoors at each other without a mask on or whatever it was, right?
If instead of being scolded for natural, the sense of relief that you should have had outdoors, for those of us who did experience it, right, we also experienced stigma for apparently not being decent, right?
That was preposterous.
That wasn't science.
Well, I mean, there was just across pretty much every domain that SARS-CoV-2 touched, there were simple rubrics that people felt empowered to use against other people to increase tribalism, to increase fear, to make their own selves feel better.
And just, you know, here's an anecdote, which maybe I've mentioned before, but I was walking outside without a mask at one point, um big broad path and there was a woman coming towards me with a mask and she saw me and she saw someone way behind me um and gestured at her and yelled in my general direction thank you for wearing a mask Like, you are yelling.
If you are sick, the mask is not going to fully block when you're yelling.
And I'm not speaking because I'm actually interested in not getting you sick and I'm more than six feet away from you and all of these things are true.
And the idea that signaling to someone you don't know about how awful I am is making you feel better, You know, can't we all get a life at some level?
Like, aren't we all capable of bringing something to the world that actually builds it up?
Don't we all have some ability to create or to build or to heal or to communicate or to To adventure, to discover, to analyze.
Like these are all productive, amazing activities and I haven't begun to, you know, to exhaust all the possible verbs of productivity and building that humans can involve themselves in.
And you know, is critique an important part of the human endeavor?
It certainly is.
But anyone whose job entirely is about critique is not really doing the world a service.
Yeah, I mean, I agree.
Although, you know, I sort of think of critique as the good version and criticism.
But I'm not sure that most people will agree with me.
I'm not sure that anyone really will.
But I've thought about this, and I don't think that as much as critique and criticism are kind of flip sides with different connotations, and critique is the positive, and we know that critique is absolutely necessary in science and in art and in all endeavors.
If the only thing you engage in is critique, I don't think you are doing the world the kind of service that you imagine you are.
Oh, yeah, definitely.
I guess I'm... There's a sense... You know how there were teachers who had a really deep insight into human development, and yes, they were part of the schools, but they also We're sort of above that level of, you know, rules and regs, right?
They were flexible.
They had nuance.
They were about discretion.
And then there were other teachers who were just all about the enforcement of the rules to the letter without any consideration of why the rules necessarily existed.
I feel like we are all somehow being reduced to some schoolyard that is being ruled by the least imaginative Buzz-killing, rule-loving, authoritarian nanny teachers, and we just gotta rebel, right?
Yeah.
The fact is there are places where the rules are essential, and there are other places where somebody made them up because they wanted to tell you what to do.
Well, I guess there's three categories, really.
There's places where the rules are essential and they have to be the right rules.
And then there are places where the rules aren't essential, but if you're going to have rules, they have to be the right rules.
And then there are places where you don't need rules, and if there are rules at all, you should be free to ignore them.
Right, but in this case, right, it is amazing to me that in some sense, the solution to a huge number of the problems created by COVID, problems that none of us invited, right?
A huge number of those problems were solved by going outside.
I mean, even the social distance that this put between us didn't need to be maintained in the same way outside, right?
And, you know, if You know, we have this saying in the Pacific Northwest, there's no such thing as bad weather, just inappropriate clothing.
You know, if you have to discover what you're going to have to do in order to be outside in the winter because there's a new wrinkle that makes it hard to be inside, right?
Okay, that's the thing we should have advised people.
Here's, you know, here's the gentle slope to getting yourself active in cold weather in your environment or something like that.
And, you know, I just, I feel terrible for our species that we allowed this to happen to us.
And not just, you know, the disease, but the way we botched the coping mechanism.
We just screwed it up.
Well, I love this framing of yours.
You know, the idea that instead of this just debilitating debacle, worldwide debacle that we find ourselves in now, it actually could have been the opportunity for another enlightenment.
Yeah, how tragic.
Yeah, utterly tragic.
Utterly tragic.
And it's tragic.
But you know what, there's a reason we focus on tragedy.
And that's because you can learn from it.
And that's right.
You know, we don't know what the next thing that has the magnitude of COVID could be.
It's hard to imagine such a thing.
But you know what, given the way disasters are going, the magnitudes going up, something is going to be down the pike.
Let's not screw it up next time.
That's right.
Okay.
Slight change of pace but no more uplifting really.
This week in sex and gender madness.
I wanted to this week and I definitely want to at some point talk about some of the diabolical stuff that's going on in schools.
with regard to, you know, what is happening under the auspices of sex ed and inclusivity.
And I've heard from some parents on this topic, and I went looking for those emails or notes this week, and I could not find them.
So if you're listening, please send them to me again, because I know that there is some stuff going on in many school districts that are worthy of discussion here.
Absent that, though, I wanted to talk a little bit about kickboxing and an aunt named They.
You know, just because.
First, though, here is the kickboxing thing.
Oops, there we go.
Oh boy, that wasn't good at all.
There we go.
So the British Kickboxing Council, an organization I had not previously been aware of, tweeted In the end of March.
Today we celebrate hashtag trans day of visibility as our trans inclusion and kickboxing project continues.
Access to sport they say is a fundamental human right supported by the Olympic Charter.
Please read Emily's story and check out Mermaids UK's brand new active about inclusion website below.
So for those of you who don't know Mermaids UK is an ideological organization that is doing tremendous amount of harm and of course they're claiming to be about the new civil rights fight for you know trans awareness and inclusion but it's really quite I'm just going to use the word again, diabolical, actually.
But when you go into this site, what you find is that the British Kickboxing Council is proud that now they're going to let trans women compete against women.
So I said in response to that quote tweeting, for those of you who are unfamiliar, blissfully unaware of Twitter, what I said was, this week in progress, men can kick women for fun, and if you object, you're the problem.
to which someone uh who said who is on twitter as a quote-unquote enlightened scientist says responds to me anyone who has been involved in martial arts knows men and women and boys and girls frequently spar together and learning about inclusion respect and fairness are fundamental to this principle i'm not sure what the problem is here i mean really probably we can just leave it there but
Anyone who invokes the cool fact that at this point in history, certainly girls and boys, but let's put that aside for the moment, but that men and women can get together and engage in sport together, including martial arts, on a friendly basis, conflating that with competition, which pretends that men and women are the same and that all you have to do to turn from one into the other is to declare that you have,
is so misunderstanding of reality, and frankly so misogynistic and dangerous to women who would compete, that being able to finish a tweet with, I'm not sure what the problem is here, well, really, if you can't see what the problem with encouraging men who've declared themselves women to compete in kickboxing against women is, I'm not sure how to help you.
Like, what do you say to him?
Yeah, well, as you're talking, I'm seeing the picture even more clearly.
Terrific.
Go for it.
Here's what I see.
You've got two sides of this argument.
One of them says trans rights, right?
It sees only that as an objective.
And who could object?
Trans rights.
Trans rights are good.
I would agree, trans rights are good.
There's the other side that recognizes that there's a tension between something.
Which is, you would like to give trans people as much leeway to live in a way that feels authentic and right to them as you can.
But that if you just simply grant them every right as if they were born into the other sex, that you start infringing on things like the protections of women.
And so one side is engaged in a discussion of how do we draw this line so that the ideal balance is discovered, right?
So that we do protect trans people and we do protect women and we do so simultaneously, right?
And the other side only wants to talk about one side of a trade-off.
Now in my opinion, The side that wants to talk about one side of a trade-off is not offering anything.
It is an act of purist advocacy and we have an obligation not to listen.
In some sense, it's not even a complex systems-level problem.
It's just a systems-level problem.
Well, and I agree, but also there are places in this discussion about trans rights where, you know, all reasonable people I've ever met are interested in accommodating people such that they can feel respected regarding the choices they are making, so long as no impinging is done on pre-existing rights of other people.
And so especially when what is required is, I declare myself X, but actually, you know, we all know that I'm not, but I declare myself X. That, at that point, I'm not, I am not interested, actually.
in giving up any of the hard-won rights of women, or children, or homosexuals, or, you know, to sort of go slightly smaller with each group in terms of the number of humans who are represented in each group, or female competitive athletes, right?
And so, you know, sport is a human right.
I don't know where that came from, but like, imagine for a moment that you believe that to be true.
Sport is a human right, which again I think is an absurd proclamation, but even if you think that's true, that is not the same thing as saying, therefore anyone can compete against anyone else.
If we want to do that, And acknowledge that actually we are no longer interested in seeing women win at sport or engage in team play or be able to be competitive in informal sport.
Then we make everything unisex and we watch as men win.
That's it, right?
And the trans women won't win either against the men, but they will win against the women, and sure, there are always going to be a couple of exceptions, and that does not disprove the rule.
Because populations and individuals are different.
And at a population level, men are going to be stronger and faster and fiercer and all of this than women, and therefore the elite among them will be as well.
Yeah.
And in fact, the tale of the distribution is what the competition ends up being about.
Exactly.
And that, you know, that is why this response from this, whatever adjective he used for himself, this scientist, is insane.
You're talking about the tales of the distribution and encouraging men and women to spar with one another as they're both learning to figure out, you know, maybe some of the moves that men and women do that are different.
You know, I don't kickbox.
I don't do martial arts.
I don't know what they would be, but that could be informative.
That could be interesting.
It's not the same as competition.
You're not talking about the tails of the distribution.
Right.
So I guess another way to look at it is the accusation that is supposed to limit, you know, you're not supposed to have permission to discuss the difficulty of trying to protect trans rights in the context of pre-existing rights.
So we don't have that permission yet.
So we get stigmatized.
And the stigma is one of bigotry.
Now, how can it be bigotry if the description of the position that you hold is, yep, I am open to granting any right to somebody to live as they want to live up until the point that it starts infringing on other people's rights?
That sounds like a completely non-arbitrary place.
It does not sound like anybody trying to deny somebody something, right?
It sounds like trying to preserve something.
And so, you know, the solution here is that we actually have to stare down the accusation.
Yeah, this has zero to do with bigotry.
This is not about Not wanting anything ill for trans people or not favoring living authentic lives.
I'm going to go further.
I think too often it has a lot to do with misogyny, actually.
Well, I agree.
Not only does it have nothing to do with bigotry, but the people who are claiming that those of us who are trying to defend women's spaces and all the rest of it, those people who are saying you're bigots, very often what they're engaging is misogyny and sometimes it's even conscious.
Well, so I think a good way to ask the question is, given these two positions, where are the bigots?
Right?
Good.
Where are the bigots?
And in fact, this has been a theme of recent history, because of course that was the thing that made the Evergreen story and all of the CRT stuff so difficult for the so-called mainstream press to deal with, was that the bigots were on a side it wasn't used to them being on.
And so it decided to pretend they weren't there or that they were on the other side.
And that, of course, confused everything.
But which side of the bigots on, I think, is a fair question.
And when your position is non-arbitrary and is based on preserving pre-existing rights, rights that were hard won, frankly, that's obviously not motivated by bigotry.
You know, you used to say a lot something about the thing in the package is not the wrapping paper.
So what's the exact... The label on the box does not match the contents.
Yeah.
And so, you know, this is something... I used to joke when I was teaching animal behavior for all those many years that, you know, wouldn't it be easier if the squirrels or the butterflies or the monkeys could talk to us and then we could just ask them?
And, you know, if you've ever thought about cultural anthropology and ethnography and what it takes to actually figure out what is true of human behavior, or if you've just ever been a human, really, you know that we prevaricate all the time.
We lie all the time.
And so it's actually much easier if you can, as we've also said, turn down the volume and watch what is actually happening.
And then if you can map, if it is an organism that actually communicates, map the conversation onto it or map the explanation of what's going on onto it, If it matches, cool.
Very often it won't and then you have something to explain.
It's actually easier to do animal behavior than it is to do human behavior because the animals that you're watching are very much less likely to lie to you.
You have to learn some different skills and you have to learn different kinds of patience and all of this, but at least they're not trying to convince you in exactly the mode of communication that you have as your most fundamental mode.
This thing that people are doing where they're like, all I have to do is slap a label on the thing and Everyone seems confused.
They said he was a racist.
He must be a racist.
They said she was a transphobe.
Must be a transphobe.
You know, it literally costs nothing to say that about someone, right?
There's no fact-checking that is even expected behind name-calling.
It's a simple epithet.
Right, and in fact some of these things are, it just simply takes the form of a description of a moral failing, right?
Turf, right?
Turf is leveled as if it is a dire failure of character when in fact it doesn't even superficially add up to a description of what it's
It's talking about right trans exclusionary radical feminist a traditional minded person is not a radical, you know, so the basic point is it is like saying I You know, it's j'accuse With a kind of empty placeholder and for some reason people continually fall for it So, let's talk about an ant named They.
Of course.
Of course.
Okay, so you may show my screen, Zach.
This was covered in a lot of places.
This is a popular version of A story called, for those just listening, Entomologists Discover New Species of Trap-jaw Ant in Ecuador.
That seems, you know, classic taxonomy, somewhat dull perhaps, not that relevant.
But what it turns out it is called is stromagenous ayers-they.
Ayers-they.
Sounds like pig Latin.
Yeah, it does.
And so if we go, actually, I'm just going to go to the actual paper that was published in Zookes, and we scroll down.
It's, you know, classic taxonomy, just, you know, morphological data, indexes, this, all of these measurements, really not that interesting.
Until you get to, and this is description, mesosoma, interestingly here we have a description of, this is all of the workers, and then when we get to description of the queen and male unknown, so that's pretty typical, but
This is a description of a new species, a species new to Western science, where you find the workers, but it's much harder to find the queen, which is there's one in a colony in most cases, or the males, where very often there just aren't any at the moment.
And that, you know, that gets into interesting ant, bee, and wasp eusociality and genetics, which we won't go into now.
But right after the queen and male unknown section, we have etymology, which I will Which I will read to us if I can make it just a little bit bigger so I can see it.
Many cultures have recognized a spectrum of genders between and beyond the binary of male and female.
Not a sentence I was expecting in this paper.
Okay, to continue.
However, by following a rule exampled in the International Code of Nomenclature for how to name species after individuals, one might conclude only binary gender assignments possible when assigning new species names derived from Latin.
Dubois 2007 provides clarification to this rule, stating that there is no need to amend or latinize personal names, and therefore no need to assign gender.
In contrast to the traditional naming practices that identify individuals as one of two distinct genders, we have chosen a non-latinized portmanteau, honoring the artist Jeremy Ayers, and representing people that do not identify with conventional binary gender assignments.
Strumogenes, Ayers they.
The They recognizes non-binary gender identifiers in order to reflect recent evolution in English pronoun use.
They, them, and their, and address a more inclusive and expansive understanding of non-neutral gender identification.
It goes on and talks about who this artist and activist was and why, and it turns, as it turns out, sort of the pièce de résistance in this Is that we learn in the acknowledgements that, quote, we thank musician and artist Michael Stipe for contributing to the etymology in honor of a hero to many and a dear friend to those that knew him.
So Michael Stipe helped write that etymology description, which, boy, I would have hoped for more from him.
Are we sure that's not an oblique reference to a song or something?
Which?
The credit given to Michael Stipe clearly indicates that he participated in thinking through how to name this app?
That is, yes, and that is described in the various other articles about this that aren't the scientific article.
I will point out that the article that they claim finds Basically sets the stage for them to name this specific epithet.
They, in fact, does no such thing.
Here we have, again, just super tedious really taxonomic literature.
The Dubois 2007 article called genitives of species and subspecies nomina derived from personal name should not be amended.
This is taxonomy for you guys.
This is really getting into the nitty-gritty of how it is that you name things because there are rules and there are expectations about how you follow them.
From the abstract, Article 31 of the Code allows to form a species or subspecies from a personal name using a nomin in the genitive case.
Some zoologists have construed this rule as meaning that such nomina should always end in "-i," if dedicated to a man, or in "-ae," if dedicated to a woman, etc., etc.
A detailed analysis shows that the latter is wrong, and that the original spelling, including its ending, of any new nomen based on a personal name should not be modified.
So, the article that they cite to excuse their adding "-they," to the end of a Latin name of a new ant actually says, no, you shouldn't do exactly what you've just done.
And just one more thing before we riff on this a little bit.
We have, I pulled up, I pulled up but now have lost on antwiki.org, one of your favorite sites and mine.
Of course, of course.
I remembered that two of our friends when we were faculty at Evergreen who left before we did, Jack Longino, Internationally renowned ant taxonomist and his wife Nalini Nadkarni, internationally renowned canopy expert and... Ecologist?
Ecologist, yes.
He had found, Jack had found, A new species of ant that he had the honor of naming, and he in fact named it Proceptocerus.
I'm probably butchering that pronunciation of the genus, but the specific epithet that is the second name in the Latin binomial, which is the scientific name of the species, is Nalini.
He named it for his wonderful wife, And he did not add the Latin ending, which had become fairly popular to add.
He knew back in, I think this was early, this was 2002, that you needn't, and that it would have distracted, and certainly, you know, Nalini is no they, but it would have been absurd to add an English pronoun to the end of a Latin-specific epithet.
Nalini is so hard-working that she could be a they in the sense of being many people.
She is a badass tree-climbing tropical ecologist.
Yes, completely incredible.
Yeah, completely incredible, as is Jack.
But Zach, may I have my thank you?
So, especially in an ant, especially in an ant, Especially in an ant, right?
Where actually the distinction between female and male is so clear that females literally have twice the genome that males do.
There's no they in ants.
Well, not only that.
They didn't find any males, which is not surprising.
They probably weren't present at the season that this ant was discovered, but would it have been alright for them to declare some of the ants that they found male on the basis that that would have been more, I don't know, equal?
I find the sex ratio unfair.
Right.
What do you mean there's 100% females they found?
So for those of you who aren't intimate with ant ecology, when they say workers, it's all females.
It's all females.
So the point is they're making grand claims about biology being non-binary, that they're making Absurd claims about the fact that recent evolution of language, well, okay, yeah, maybe technically… Again, with the sociology of epistemology, frankly!
Right, and so, you know, okay, if this is evolution, let's be technical here, right?
You've got two things going on.
You've got noise and maladaptation on one side, and then you've got adaptive changes which will stick and be augmented over time.
And they have leapt to the conclusion that the absurd embrace of new pronouns, which are not necessary, right?
You can be perfectly honoring of trans people with the existing set of pronouns, right?
Well, I don't think this is even about trans.
This is this further nutty, even nuttier than trans ideology.
I'm not saying trans is nutty, but trans ideology is nutty.
And this non-binary thing where, well, I don't fit 1950s-era gender norms, therefore I'm a they.
What the hell?
I hope none of us exactly fit 1950s gender norms at this point, and that doesn't make any of us a they.
Right.
It doesn't make any of us a they.
And there's useful information in the pluralness or singularness that is lost.
So you're actually degrading the capacity of language to convey things and to… Yes.
Yeah.
So anyway, there's something so troubling about this.
Some, you know, people who on the one hand understand biology well enough to realize that they only have female ants and that that's not that surprising, right?
But it's sufficient to make a whole new species because it's fairly common.
Because the males are implied.
Right?
We know that they're there, we just didn't see them, right?
The males are implied.
The males are implied, right?
But, you know, yeah, the absurdity of this and, you know, I just think the arrogance of people using the scientific voice and indeed the scientific literature and the scientific form in order to make an absurd and obviously political signal of their own virtue for which I'm certain that they were heralded by people Right, this is not the place, right?
This is not the place.
Not the place, right?
If you want to have that discussion about whether or not we should change the language, all right, we can have that discussion.
But you're borrowing the scientific literature to, you know, to pull a fast one.
And you're doing so in the context of creatures that, frankly, you know, so predate any of this human absurdity that the idea of sort of imposing it on them as if it's their obligation to broadcast your virtue is just absurd.
Yes, it is.
Yes, it is.
To finish up, I wanted to share a poem that I saw in Northwest Portland this week.
And then you wanted to have us do two quick what we're calling pro bono ads.
Pro bono ads, and these enhance your life.
That's the key.
Yeah, that's right.
So, Zachary, you may show my screen.
In one of these situations that might sometimes be a free library and exchange library on a street corner, I found this poem this week, and I'm going to... No, I've got a different picture here.
When This Is Over, it's called, by someone named Laura Kelly Fanucci.
When this is over, may we never again take for granted a handshake with a stranger, full shelves at the store, conversations with neighbors, a crowded theater, Friday night out, the taste of communion, a routine checkup, the school rush each morning, coffee with a friend, the stadium roaring, each deep breath, a boring Tuesday.
Life itself.
When this ends, may we find that we have become more like the people we wanted to be.
We were called to be.
We hoped to be.
And may we stay that way.
Better for each other.
Because of the worst.
That's a really good poem.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I was struck by it when I ran into it.
Delightful that you found it outside.
Indeed.
Yeah.
I was out getting a little brisk walking outside and I found that poem.
Yeah, that's great.
That's great.
Yeah.
Yeah, I have the sense that the person who wrote that is a wise person.
Indeed.
It'd be cool to figure out who they are.
Yeah.
Well, if anyone here in Portland knows her, tell her we talked about her.
And consider getting in touch.
It's a beautiful poem.
I think it's a natural segue to Epoxy Putty.
Oh, man, is it?
Yes.
So this is now pro bono ads.
We're not being paid for these, but we wanted to just talk about a couple little things.
Yeah, not being paid, don't know if the people who make this stuff are decent people or not.
But we do know something about the products that they make, and we think you should, too.
So in our family, we have, I guess it's an aphorism.
Okay.
And the aphorism goes like this.
Epoxy.
It's the adhesive for when you're done fucking around.
So, I believe in this.
I know you do.
Epoxy is really a... You had me take epoxy and epoxy putty, I believe, when I was out in the field in Madagascar.
I mean, you'd be crazy to go into the field without it.
I would have been.
You really would.
And the secret, you should all know, are the epoxide bonds, which happen to be triangular, which makes them very strong.
They're really called epoxide bonds?
Epoxide bonds.
You didn't just make that up.
I kind of think you did.
Oh, I'm pretty sure I didn't.
If it's not true, I was lied to, but no.
Triangular bonds are the key to making this stuff so darn stable, and it is available in so many different kinds that are useful for all kinds of crazy things.
I am a huge fan of five-minute epoxy because very often you can't figure out how to clamp something, but you can hold it still for five minutes while it hardens, and so you can accomplish things with five-minute epoxy that can't be done any other way.
But what I want to talk about Today is epoxy putty, and this is the, you know, this is a sort of professional version.
You find this in the plumbing section.
It's not in the adhesive section in general.
It's in the plumbing section of a really good hardware store, and it's a very interesting substance.
As Heather mentioned, it is something I take a lot of into the field because it solves problems you can't solve any other way.
So I was trying to figure out how to demonstrate What this stuff can do it appears you have destroyed one of our bowls I would say I have enhanced one of our bowls Clamp here that I don't seem to see Where has the clamp gone?
I don't know.
Well, I'm not going to be able to demonstrate it with the clamp, which is truly unfortunate.
Did the cat eat it?
Heather, do you see a clamp here?
I don't see a clamp.
Here comes our producer.
Here comes Zach looking for a clamp.
Alright, I am going to describe here.
Suppose that you had this bowl, and for some purpose you needed to affix it to one of these arms.
Right, so that you could do something cool, like suppose you decided to take your podcast and embrace a busker model for funding it, and you needed a bowl.
You need an extension arm on your bowl.
You need your bowl to be able to attach to your microphone stand, for example.
But how the hell are you going to do that?
You could put a hole in the bowl, but then you breach its integrity.
So, you know, you could try to weld something to it that had threads that would allow you to connect to a tripod fitting like that.
But who has the time to weld these days?
And, you know, let's suppose that the fitting that you wanted to attach happened to be aluminum and your bowl happened to be stainless steel.
It's not gonna work.
Right?
You might be able to solder that, but you can't weld it.
In any case, epoxy putty, this stuff, is a putty that comes in two parts which are in a basically it's got a outer and an inner core they're two different colors so the distinction epoxy comes liquid in two tubes and you mix them and this is this is a solid putty two cores you mix them together Yeah, you mix them together, and it will get into the grooves in your hand, but it wears off pretty good.
Anyway, it's this putty stuff, and maybe you can see it's got an inside of one color and an outside of another color, and you mix them until the colors become uniform.
That's when you know you're ready to go.
And then you can make a very powerful attachment point like this.
Let's say you were lacking that fitting, you could also put a little grease onto your threads here, and you could wrap the epoxy putty around it, you could make corresponding threads, you could do anything you want.
But the point is, that allows you to take two things that nobody envisioned you were going to connect, like this arm here and this bowl, and make a very fine connection, very strong stuff, because of those epoxide bonds, you know.
Triangular epoxide bombs.
See, I was paying attention.
You were paying attention, which is awesome.
Right, but for example, you know, there you go.
Voila!
You're now in a position to do buskering with your... I think it's busking.
Is it busking?
I don't think it's buskering.
I don't know.
Okay, well, busking.
You could do busking, you know, and people could throw coins in your microphone stand attached bowl.
But anyway, here's the thing.
This is not a very good demonstration of what you could do with it, but you can extrapolate from what I've done here, which isn't all that useful, to things that you might do, which would be super useful.
And the basic point is, look, you know, you will seem to the outside world at least 20% smarter for having this stuff, right?
One recommendation.
Yes?
Ask your partner.
Or whoever else you live with, before you start applying it to their bowls.
We'll talk about that later.
As you know, this bowl was not precious to me.
The bowl was not precious to you.
I'm fine with what you've done to the bowl.
I believe I can recover that bowl.
Enhanced as it may be, I believe I could downgrade it back to where we were.
Not easily, of course, because a foxy putty is very, very...
Hard, sticky stuff.
It's tenacious.
It is tenacious.
But, you know, anyway, this stuff, it does wonders.
I swear if the professor had had this stuff, Gilligan and his friends would not have been stuck on that island.
They would have, I don't know.
We all would have been the better for it.
They would have flown off in a coconut airplane bound together with epoxy putty or something like that.
And I guess the last thing I will say is, remember, Rome wasn't built in a day, but it's only because they didn't have epoxy putty.
Maybe we should stop there.
Really?
Yeah.
Okay.
I think that's good.
I think, you know, maybe we're ready for another Pro Bono, but I think we should save it.
Save it?
Yeah.
Alright.
I think that's great.
You guys, you can start extrapolating then, now.
Extrapolating with epoxy putty?
Yeah, about how they're going to enhance their own lives with this stuff.
Ah, yes.
You see?
Yes.
Do extrapolate, but do so carefully.
Yes, always.
Safety third, as you like to say in the field.
I do like to say that.
And no students to whom I have said that have suffered great harm, so so far it's worked.
Yeah, true.
All right.
Do we have a thumbnail for this week or not yet?
No worries.
No worries.
We don't need one.
Yeah.
I mean, we'll have one.
We are going to need one, but I don't know what it is.
Yeah.
Someone knows we're ending.
Okay, for those of you just listening, our deputy producer, who's sitting on the table the whole time, has just stood up and revealed his ears to the audience.
All right, we will be back next week for episode 82.
If you are watching, we will be taking a 15-minute break and coming back with our live Q&A, during which we will answer your Super Chat questions.
We also, every week, answer one question that's been voted on from the Discord server every week.
You can get access to the Discord server at either of our Patreons.
Other things you can access at our Patreons are Right now, you can go on to mine at $11 or up level and pose a question to be considered in the Q&A, the two-hour Q&A that we do on the last Sunday of the month.
And at Brett's, there are higher dollar amount conversations on the first Saturday and Sunday of the month in the morning.
We encourage you to subscribe and like and share this channel and videos on this channel and also from the Clips channel, Dark Horse Clips, which is really taking off and we are thrilled about that.
You can always send logistical questions, not super chat questions, not content questions, but logistical questions.
To darkhorse.moderator at gmail.com.
Our moderator will also share, for instance, a P.O.
box that we have.
We have been receiving some really remarkable things from people, and we appreciate those things.
And maybe that is it.
As always, I will advise that you be good to the ones you love, and that you eat good food, and that you get outside.
Get outside.
Get outside.
All right.
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