In this 90th in a series of live discussions with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying (both PhDs in Biology), we discuss the state of the world through an evolutionary lens.In this episode, we discuss our essay, “On Driving SARS-CoV2 Extinct: Why We Need a Multi-Pronged Approach.” We discuss some of the misinformation that is circulating about…all of this. We then discuss sex and gender: beginning with an excerpt from chapter 7 of A Hunter-Gatherer’s Guide to the 21st Century—Sex and Gender—we ...
Hey folks, welcome to this early morning edition of the Dark Horse Podcast live stream.
We apologize for the early hour to those of you who live in Hawaii.
We also envy you for living in Hawaii because what a marvelous place to exist.
It is livestream number 90, is that correct?
That is correct.
Yes, isn't it amazing how I've begun to iterate by adding one each time we do a livestream, and that seems to generate a pattern that matches your understanding of what livestream this is?
Middle-aged dogs learn old tricks.
Learn old tricks, slowly, but eventually.
Yeah, something like that.
Yeah, 90 trial learning.
90 trial learning.
That's beautiful.
I like that.
Yes, 90.
All right.
Well, we have lots to do today, and I have a plane to catch later, so we should probably get to it.
Indeed.
Let's start with announcements, talk a little bit about where we're going.
We've got two ads today, and then we'll launch right into it.
So we're going to talk a bit about SARS-CoV-2 and COVID, which is getting old.
So old.
So old.
And we wish the virus was getting old.
Instead, it seems to be rejuvenating itself rather a lot.
And we're going to talk about sex and gender a bit today.
The chapter of A Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century, which is our book coming out in September, that we will be talking about today is Chapter 7, Sex and Gender.
So we'll do an excerpt from that and talk about some issues.
Okay, so if you're watching on YouTube, consider switching over to Odyssey.
The link should be in the description, I think, Zachary.
And if you're listening, don't switch at all.
Just keep on listening as you are.
You can ask questions at www.darkhorsesubmissions.com.
Calm, where there are facts to allow you to understand what you're doing.
Please consider joining our Patreons, either or both of them.
It helps us out a lot, and you get benefits including smaller live conversations with Brett at two of the higher tiers, and at mine we do a private Q&A once a month.
Um, and earlier in the month, if you were at a slightly higher tier, you get to ask a question that we will consider.
Um, and those are a lot of fun.
Actually we did ours last, last week.
I think it wasn't last week.
Nevermind.
It was, it was in the past.
Um, it was in the past.
Right.
How to speak carefully so you can't possibly be wrong.
I mean it was in the past.
Yeah.
Can I add something about the... Okay but we're not doing that yet.
I know.
Okay.
The Patreons.
I just wanted to say that we are very grateful for people joining those and we know that we have asked you To help us out as YouTube has clobbered our main source of income and you have turned out in force and we want you to know that we greatly appreciate your doing that and that it enables us to continue to fight so thank you for doing that.
Okay let me just say that while I was looking at you our producer came in and changed something I think and now we appear to be totally washed out at least on the camera on the screen that we can see.
Washed out but not washed up.
I couldn't hear either of you.
And learn to love the balm.
Right, exactly.
All right.
Okay, and those Goliath t-shirts that we put out a couple weeks ago are doing brilliantly on store.darkhorsepodcast.org.
Unfortunately, they have been copied, and a lot of other people seem to be making money on our idea as well.
I want to point out something, though.
They have been copied.
However, As far as I know, nobody has figured out that the punchline is on the back of the shirt.
So if you want the genuine article including the awesome punchline, check out the store and go look at what's there.
And if you want to honor the creators and support the people who actually came up with the idea, please go to our store.
You'll also get the actual article including the back.
This week I launched my new sub stack, Natural Selections.
You can find that at naturalselections.substack.com, and we'll be talking about the second post on that in the first part of our podcast here.
But without further ado, we have two ads for you today.
We are waiting the border that will tell you that we are engaged in ads.
There it is.
All right.
We're going to start off with our excellent sponsor, Public Goods.
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All right, and I am going to bring to you our sponsor, OMAX CryoFreeze.
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So let me first say a few words about pain.
It's useful.
Pain is adaptive.
It's a signal from your body that something is amiss or has been pushed too hard.
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And in fact, it can just allow you to live your life.
If you have chronic pain, that's all the more true.
Chronic pain can be debilitating, we understand, and there is little upside.
So I, for instance, have been spending far too much time at my computer typing, and my hands in positions that, as everyone now knows, are not neutral, are not particularly good for you.
I've been told that I've got the equivalent of both tennis and golf elbow without actually having enjoyed the pleasures of either tennis or golf.
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And in service of being on YouTube and feeling that YouTube is infantilizing its viewers a little bit by making decisions about what it is that we should and should not be allowed to see, today's episode is brought to you by the number 90 and also the letter G. And while we are going through these chapters of our book one at a time up until the launch day in mid-September, the letter G
I'm going to read the index for the letter G.
I'm not sure I can go wild eyed, but I'll do my best. - Oh, you gotta. - Okay.
So the G index from our book, Gasoline.
Gato.
John Taylor.
Excellent guy.
Gay men.
Generalists.
Genes.
Genome.
Culture is genome expression regulator.
Epigenetic.
Genital mutilation.
Genocide.
Geographic frontiers.
Germ theory of disease.
Gestation.
Gibbons.
I don't know why glossary is in the glossary.
That's funny.
I feel like that's an error.
I just spun myself into an infinite loop there.
We will know something has gone wrong if the first copy catches fire.
Wow.
Gluten sensitivity, glycoalkaloids, GMOs, golden-collared mannequins, golden lion tamarins, totally different kinds of organisms there, good ol' Jane, good Samaritan story, gorillas, great bowerbirds, grief, group stability, growth, Guatemalan farmers, and last but not least, guinea yams.
Glossary.
See Glossary.
Sorry, I missed that the first time around.
Amazing.
All right.
I think that's it for our announcements and stuff.
Do we want to start here?
We could.
Maybe I'll say a word of precursor before that.
I will just say we have received a ton of pushback, as you've seen, which is not unusual.
And actually, in general, I would say Pushback is useful and something I think we we like but the kind of pushback we're getting is Remarkable.
A lot of it is quite vicious and unkind, I would say.
And I must say, it has put me in the frame of mind of, let's say, staring into the abyss.
And when one stares into this particular abyss, what one sees is what physicists might call a quantum superposition.
Do you continue to fight for what makes sense or do you walk away and do something else?
And so it's sort of a it's an either or kind of a decision which means as you stare into the abyss and you look at this question of what to do it's like a simultaneous or chasm.
Oh no.
That wasn't worth it.
It wasn't worth it?
No.
Oh no.
I thought it was actually pretty good.
I think the delivery was bad but Okay, this is actually both a good pun and a correct reflection, I think, of what the experience is like.
It's the second time... You put all of us through that for that delivery.
Dude, there were people groaning across the earth.
I think that was worth it.
No, I don't.
I don't because in fact, we are going to be talking about all this a little bit less, but not for the reasons that you just described.
So I mean, I think that's a setup that presents the wrong idea.
Well, I mean, I accept what you're saying, and obviously you and I have talked about this, and I agree, but I also think, well, I don't know.
My sense is that terrible pun, that groan-worthy pun, is also in some sense an accurate reflection, at least of Okay, well some people don't have any idea what we're talking about because no content words have been said.
There's no nouns in what you've said, okay?
So can we just show this?
Let's do it.
And then you can launch into what you're going to launch into.
As I said, I launched Natural Selections this week.
The very first post is called Fact Checkers Aren't Scientists, Too Often They're Censors.
And the second one, which is co-written by Brett and me, on driving SARS-CoV-2 extinct, why we need a multi-pronged approach.
We just published this yesterday evening.
It's very long, sometimes technical, not as much fun as a lot of what I'm going to be posting on natural selections, but it serves both as the response to that misinformation-filled article that was published by Berlinski and Deegan in Quillette a few years ago, and also to some degree by the response to the
Sam Harris and Eric Topol podcast that we talked about last week, which largely, you know, there weren't a lot of errors introduced by them that I think they didn't pick up from the Quillette article.
So, in this piece, the original draft was really a sort of a rebuttal, but we decided, you know what, this is not what we should be doing.
This is not what anyone should be doing.
What we should be doing is laying out what we see as the evidence, what we see as where evidence is missing, where we need more, why we need clarifications, so that all of us can actually remember that we are on the same team, on the same planet, and that we need to have policies that actually serve all of us maximally, so far as that is possible.
And so what we lay out here are really, I guess, six different sort of organizational frameworks, organizational topics.
We explain why it is that we've landed where we have by going through the evidence for the effectiveness of ivermectin as prophylaxis against COVID, the safety record of ivermectin, The safety record of the novel coronavirus vaccines and the effectiveness of the novel coronavirus vaccines.
We then talk some about natural immunity and why people with natural immunity are not being considered in the discussion, rather we have being presented by the media for instance with these With this simplistic and frankly absurd dichotomy of vaccinated versus unvaccinated.
And we speak some to the politicization of the discussion and just a little bit more on some of the many errors that are in some of the pieces that have been produced as if they are good faith criticisms.
And as we have said many times, we need, we want, everyone should need and want good faith criticism.
But at the point that your critics are making false claims about what it is that you yourselves have said or done or believe, that should tell you more about the critics than it tells you about you.
Yes, it's one of two things that I find particularly disturbing about the critics is having to portray us as believing things and having said things that we didn't believe or don't believe and didn't say is obviously evidence of something.
And we can talk about what it's evidence of, but it's clearly, you know, having to defend against straw man attacks is obviously crazy making.
But there's also this question about the.
The implications right what we are being held responsible for I find particularly onerous and Destructive so in essence you will find many people saying well You know lives are at stake and what you are saying on your podcast is going to result in the death of people and this is on the one hand As we ourselves have said before, anyone else said it about us, obviously there are lives at stake.
And so we take this very seriously.
On the other hand, it is cheating to hold us responsible for this.
The correct, honorable way to do this is to recognize that lives are at stake in the public health policy questions and your personal health decisions with respect to how you choose to protect yourself from COVID.
That is true.
What that means is that a great deal rests on how the evidence is interpreted.
And it is true, you can certainly protect yourself from the accusation that you will be responsible for other people's health consequences and possibly deaths by not saying anything.
That's true.
You can simply not say anything, or you can embrace the conventional wisdom as dispensed by public health authorities, and then who could possibly hold you responsible?
On the other hand, you've watched those public health officials fail again and again and again.
And we can talk about why they might be failing.
There are at least two reasons on the table.
One of them is incompetence, inability to read what is taking place in the world.
The other is corruption, which is something that you and I have talked about from the beginning.
And both of these things are rendering the advice we are being given publicly feeble.
So the question is what to do about it.
If you're in a position like we are in, do you talk about what you see or do you keep quiet so as not to be blamed?
Right?
Now, my feeling is we are morally required, to the extent that we believe we can see something that is failing about the public health analysis, we are morally required to engage in talking about this.
You are not required to listen.
You are certainly not required to extrapolate from anything that we say on this podcast and adjust your behavior.
You can just listen in to a discussion.
Imagine it's a seminar taking place in which we are talking about whether or not the public health analysis makes any sense.
Now, if you find yourself persuaded by something that we say, it may indeed affect your behavior.
But that's because you have been persuaded.
We don't have the power to dictate any policy.
Nobody has to follow what we're saying.
Nobody has to listen in.
So people are choosing to listen in.
They are rightly frightened by the fact that the advice they are getting from public health officials doesn't add up, not even superficially.
And so I would just simply ask, it is not the case that we are putting people's lives at risk.
It is the case that lives are at stake in the COVID pandemic and that it is true that lives will be lost if we do the wrong things and not the right things.
The question is, what are the right things and how would you know?
Now, what do you do in a case where you have rampant corruption?
And I do think one of the things that is afflicting people's comprehension of what's taking place here is that many people who have not been inside academia or conversely are so deeply enmeshed in it that they are dependent on it are incapable of seeing that the same corruption that has rendered our governmental structures so thoroughly broken so that they do the bidding of others instead of the bidding of the public That same thing is true inside of academia, more subtly.
It makes its way into papers, it makes its way into analyses, it makes its way into the advice that we get from many people who are involved in that structure.
But you can't see it, and if it hasn't been your home, you don't recognize it.
So you think, somehow, you think, everybody on earth must all be agreed that the right thing to do is to drive SARS-CoV-2 to extinction, or at least manage it really well.
And that must be the source of all of this advice.
But I'm telling you, that can't possibly be right.
It can't be what's generating this advice, because in many places, that advice doesn't add up even superficially.
So there are certain questions that I would advise you keep your eye on.
Certain things that tell you that something other than public health or private well-being is driving the policy.
Why are we told that we should vaccinate those who are naturally immune as a result of having had SARS-CoV-2 already?
That doesn't make any sense.
We know that the immunity you get from the vaccines is narrower, and we know that it fades.
We now know that it fades.
Two, why are we treating the young the same way that we are treating the old with respect to the need to vaccinate?
There's obviously a very different cost-benefit ratio.
And why are we not using safe tools that appear to have some effectiveness to close the gap left by the vaccines?
Those the vaccines can't reach, those the vaccines won't reach, those who need treatment because they have a breakthrough case.
Why wouldn't we use those things?
All right, you wanted to say something?
No, you moved on.
Um, you sure?
Okay.
So, I wanted to make a couple of points.
The defense that we need is simply that we are trying to do the right thing, right?
This is well understood in the law.
There are many places where good Samaritans are protected for engaging in behavior intended to help rather than harm, even if harm is done.
That is the defense necessary for what we are up to.
We do not have some other thing motivating us.
In fact, we have paid a very substantial price for speaking out publicly on this topic, and we would ask that you just simply recognize that whether we are right or wrong, we are intending to do good, and we are also interested, as we make very clear in the piece that we published yesterday, We are focused on the long-term well-being of humanity.
That means not just the well-being of people who are alive today, but people who will be alive generations from now, who either will have to deal with SARS-CoV-2 continuing to circulate in some new form, or won't because we've succeeded in driving it to extinction.
That's a deep question.
We have an obligation to them.
They cannot speak for themselves.
We have to act on their behalf.
And so, oh, go ahead.
Well, I guess I will say, too, to your point about institutional capture with regard to academia, the way you talked about it, it sounded like people will be shocked to hear that academia has become captured.
And in fact, most of our audience will be well familiar with that concept, but in a limited frame, right?
In the frame of grievance studies.
Right.
And also, you know, administrators, you know, there are a lot of ways that people have begun to become familiar with the idea that actually higher ed isn't what it's supposed to be, and it's helping to destroy and make fragile, excuse me, and make fragile, you know, so many of the people who go through higher ed at this point.
And indeed, we have even You know, years ago, a few years ago, at the point that our friends, you know, the people who did the grievance studies, where Peter Boghossian and Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay were doing that, we were saying, yes, for sure, we see that.
We see the sort of the The bastardization of postmodernism from the 90s and those people coming around and, you know, becoming faculty now and indoctrinating rather than educating students.
And it's a, you know, that's a big part of the explanation of what went wrong at Evergreen and what is, you know, all of the, you know, the big, ridiculous kerfuffles on college campuses seem to be about that.
But what we said then, and was harder to convince people of who aren't actually in the sciences was, There is a different problem within the sciences.
It's been brewing for longer.
It's about the economic model of how scientists are funded and how institutions are funded by those scientists, therefore providing perverse incentives for scientists to only do big science, expensive science.
And it has rendered scientists also, not just people with PhDs in fields that probably shouldn't exist, but many scientists incapable of actually doing solid, careful evolutionary thought.
And so credentialism, as it rises, where people say, well, you know, that person is a professor, that person has a PhD in a science, they must know what they're talking about.
The number of people who actually have these degrees and were never expected, in fact, to get those degrees, to do a complete piece of research from beginning to end, to make an observation, to pose all the alternative, the possible alternative hypotheses, to figure out how you might address those hypotheses, what the predictions that are downstream of them are, and how you would address them, and Many people don't experience that in order to get their PhD.
collect the data and analyze the data and figure out what it means and reveal it and communicate it both in speech and in writing.
Many people don't experience that in order to get their PhD.
They walk into someone else's lab with someone else's funding, with someone else's questions already on the table, and they do a little tiny piece.
And why do we expect people like that to be able to think broadly about the entire scientific process and to walk in and say, Actually, that doesn't make sense.
Actually, actually.
You know, when you do widespread vaccination with non-sterilizing vaccines during a pandemic, there is likely to be a selective pressure for new variants to start to spread.
And this is something that we've talked about before, that you had on Geert van den Busch to talk about.
He's been talking about it.
There's a paper that we cite In what we just published from 2015, that goes through the long-established theoretical considerations for why to think that, and the fact that there are lots of models out there that demonstrate it, but then they also do the empirical work, and they're looking at chickens, and they find indeed that non-sterilizing vaccines produce an environment that actually helps the spread of new variants.
Of previously unfamiliar and rare variants.
So I want to go back to the place that you started.
I agree with everything you've just said.
It's vital.
But the piece I want to highlight is when the grievance studies work emerged.
We actually did say to them, The problem is, you didn't do this with the sciences also, and so you can't see that there is a parallel kind of corruption in the sciences.
That the scientific work is not pure, and in contrast, the grievance study stuff is particularly egregious and obvious.
It's transparently wrong.
The problem is that the scientific stuff is cryptically broken.
You know, it's not just the fact that these people have been awarded a degree for work that doesn't actually make them expert in the way science is done because they've done too small a piece.
That's a common problem.
But there's also this issue, the same reason that people end up doing a very small piece of work in order to get their degree, is that there's this incredible pressure that has to do with the way the university is paying for its work by effectively Giving people degrees in lieu of money, that's how it makes itself profitable.
And so that creates this incredible pressure to do work that pleases those in a position of authority in order to get any hope of a job.
And so what you get are these positive feedbacks where some bit of conventional wisdom, the school of thought that owns your field, is in a position to make sure that only work that matches that school of thought and doesn't challenge it emerges.
So it becomes Anti-scientific.
And until you've seen the effect of that corruption, it's impossible to imagine.
And frankly, that truth about how science is funded and has been for decades at this point, at least in the Western world, certainly in the U.S.
and the U.K., and Canada as well, and I think more widespread than that, that necessarily preceded the rise in the grievance studies fields and the capture by them of many university administrations.
Because scientists are encouraged to, and I've talked about this on a previous episode, but because scientists are basically the moneymakers for universities, because the universities get such a substantial overhead percentage of any grants that get brought in, They are given, effectively scientists, academic scientists are given the gift of not having to do some of the other work that they would have to do.
And broadly, there's three sorts of things that academics are expected to do.
It's research, it's teaching, and it's governance.
Governance meaning everything from sitting on the committee that decides who's going to do the catering for your campus, to admissions, to hiring, to decisions about, you know, restructuring of organizations.
of departments and schools within your campus.
Well, if the money's coming in because of your research, you're not going to give research scientists a pass on the research, but you're going to start to minimize what they have to do in those other two camps.
And so you give them fewer teaching responsibilities, which also means they have less and less interaction with students who are actually incredibly useful in terms of giving, yes, a bunch of naive pushback, but also So a lot of sophisticated pushback because they don't know what questions they're not supposed to ask.
So that's a drawback of being Less exposed to the teaching part of it, but it's even easier to say, okay, you don't have, you know, the more money you bring in, the more focused you are on that, we understand you're busy, you don't have to do as much governance, which means that the governance positions are filled more and more.
There's There is representation within governance at many universities that is widely skewed towards non-scientists and towards people in fields that are actually not making any sense at all.
And so all the Grievance Studies kerfuffle is actually downstream of this failure of scientists to continue to be scientists but instead be captured by these economic forces.
Right, and effectively what we're saying is you can see the effect of capture inside the academy.
And of course it has a particularly academic look to it in that context.
It looks very different than whatever takes place where lobbyists are persuading legislators to do things.
But the point is it's a variation on a theme.
And one thing that just occurs to me at this moment You and I have observed in traveling in other parts of the world, especially developing nations.
That one of the things that makes it impossible to govern these nations is that everybody is so pressed for resources that they're very cheap to corrupt, right?
So you've got somebody who's in charge of forest policy in Madagascar, let's say, and maybe they make $10,000 a year, right?
I don't know now, but it wasn't anything close to that.
Let's say they make $10,000 and let's say that they're supposed to prevent you from logging some peninsula and there are Tens of millions of dollars at stake in the lumber there and the question is well How easy are they to persuade to betray their public obligation if it's going to actually enable them to?
You know put their family on a on a substantial footing It's very hard to prevent that kind of corruption when people are not made immune by having decent salaries and And so, this is exactly the case inside of academia.
You've got this incredible insecurity that comes from the fact that there aren't nearly enough jobs, and the fact is it causes people to be easily corrupted, even if they don't understand what they're doing.
There's no bribe on the table, but there are many, many other mechanisms.
Yeah, well, I mean, it's usually not a physical thing, but it's offers of goodies, right, in academia.
It will be obvious that it's a bribe when I say that when I was going through all of the normal channels and doing everything by the book, and I really wasn't cheating at all, And trying to get the permits that I needed to do the work I needed to do in Madagascar, I was asked by the person with the stamp.
Like, literally, it was a stamp, right?
I remember us having to wait for three days to get into this room where the guy with the stamp was finally going to show up at the same time as the stamp.
One day the guy wasn't there, the next day the stamp wasn't there.
I remember that, yeah.
The third day, like, well, the keys to the door weren't there, and he was going to have to go in the – I mean, it was a comedy of errors, but actually true.
But, you know, I had done everything correctly.
I was not trying to cheat the system at all.
And in a different time when I was trying to get the permits for a different field season in Madagascar, I got asked for a Land Rover.
Well, I was a graduate student making at that point, you know, $13,000 a year.
And I didn't have a Land Rover, nor did I have any inclination to give the guy a Land Rover if I'd had one.
But he accepted, in lieu of a Land Rover, a bottle of whiskey.
Which I came back with the next day.
Which I had to, right?
But that's an obvious setup.
That's how we think it's going to look, but in academia it doesn't look that way.
It doesn't look that way.
I should just say that the Land Rover sounds preposterous, except that we knew cases in which Land Rovers had been used because some large project with a million dollar grant needed to get some stuff done.
And you might as well ask.
Right, so yeah.
Maybe she has a Land Rover.
Right, so the problem is that the corruption of science, which is, because it's subtle, it's very destructive, because we can't even, it's very hard to even diagnose, like which stuff do you trust, right?
That's a harder job than it should be.
But the overarching corruption, anywhere where there's something at stake like money, right?
Like this is liable to be much less of a problem in... I'm going to find out that I'm wrong if I say geology because maybe mineral resources.
But if you, you know, presumably astronomy is going to be better about the kind of corruption.
It's going to have a kind of mundane corruption.
And then things get really bad, as I discovered when I did the telomere work, as you get closer to medicine, right?
Things get really corrupt and messed up.
But the overarching impact of that corruption, in all of its forms, is to render the science feeble.
Right?
Which has a paradoxical weird effect that if you don't want to win in its terms, is actually something you can make use of.
Right?
It means that field after field, which is corrupted, are relatively easy to beat.
Right?
If you're free of the influences that corrupt it, you can look in and you can say, this makes sense, that doesn't add up, and you can begin to follow a pattern.
And so what I would say is one of the things that I think we are faced with here is That in effect, we have no power.
We are not telling you do this or don't do that.
We are just simply talking about what we see.
And I'm sure some people are persuaded.
I know lots of people aren't.
I mean, we have conversations in the Patreon discussions that I have once a month.
We've talked about vaccination.
I think almost everybody in those discussions is vaccinated, as we could have ended up vaccinated if we hadn't been paying attention to certain signals that became alarming a little quickly.
But the point is, why would somebody listen to us at all?
Well, one reason that they would listen to us is that we have actually seen ahead.
And that if you listen to us, you were ahead on thinking about masks, you were ahead on thinking about the importance of the volume of the room in terms of infection from COVID.
You were ahead in thinking about variants.
You were ahead in seeing the narrowness of the immunity that was likely to come from spike protein S1 subunit vaccinations.
You were ahead in recognizing the outdoor environment as safe and someplace that you should go.
You were ahead in recognizing The importance of vitamin D. You were ahead with respect to the lab leak hypothesis.
You were ahead with respect to the massive significance of comorbidities.
That's not even a complete list.
That's just a bunch of places where if you were watching us, you were paying attention to these things really early at the very least.
And so I will just finish this by saying For some reason, when we talk about things like foreign policy, we have a term for war profiteers, right?
War profiteers.
War profiteers.
Nobody gets all bent out of shape.
They don't accuse you of conspiracy theorizing if you say there are war profiteers and we need to beware that they may have an effect on our foreign policy that could push us into wars that we would be better off staying out of.
Everybody gets that even when there are lives at stake in the context of war, that there are people whose perverse incentives might cause them to mislead us.
Why do we not understand that that same thing is at least plausible with respect to a pandemic?
Are there pandemic profiteers?
If so, what might they have us do that we shouldn't do?
This is something we need to ask ourselves.
And our ability to predict things is something you could judge us on, but you at least need to recognize that we are in a landscape where potentially people have perverse incentives that might lead us to do things that will result in deaths that don't need to occur.
If I can just restate in a sentence what you just said, profiteer is a general category, and war profiteer is a subcategory that is well understood to be out there, regardless of whether or not you believe that, you know, incident X or Y was an example of it.
War profiteering is a subcategory of profiteering, and so what you're saying is that there are, of course, other types of profiteering, and pandemic profiteering is likely to be one of them.
Right, it's likely to be one of them, and frankly it's not a very big leap from what we've seen from the pharmaceutical industry in other contexts.
We know that very often we see advice, we know that it makes it into the academic literature and then is only later revealed to be harming people.
So, come on, what part of this is shocking, right?
The question is, how much of an effect is it having on the public health advice that we are getting?
And one thing to pay attention to is the public health advice doesn't make sense, right?
I'm not saying none of it makes sense, but a lot of it doesn't make sense even on its face.
Why are we vaccinating people who've had COVID?
That's a question I've not heard a good answer to and the CDC's answer, you can look it up, doesn't make any sense.
Why is that?
Is that ineptitude or is it corruption, right?
Could be either.
Could be both.
But at some level, it's a question that needs an answer, and until it has an answer, there's some issue about how bad is that rot?
Whatever rot it is that resulted in us putting people in harm's way, giving them a vaccine we don't know very much about with respect to the safety, when they don't get a benefit from it, Why would we do that?
Well, we could we could prevent them from taking that risk.
And the fact that we don't raises a question.
How bad is the rot?
How far does it go?
And one indication is if others outside of that apparatus are predicting things about the pandemic better than that apparatus does, then that is a reason for alarm.
So we're most of the way through an hour at this point, and we have a lot to do that's not about this.
But I thought the place you wanted to start is someplace you haven't even gotten to yet.
So do you want to go there without me stealing your thunder?
Yeah, I think so.
So I wanted to gently respond to something published by Andrew Sullivan that I believe came out yesterday.
I at least saw it yesterday.
Do you want to show it?
Yeah.
Zach, do you have the couple?
You can put it on my screen.
Okay, so this is Andrew Sullivan's piece yesterday.
And actually, Zach, could you show the screenshot I sent of his tweet?
And then could you enlarge?
So this is a quote from Andrew Sullivan in his piece posted yesterday, and this seems to me to be the key question here.
- The whole thing. - Is this Andrew Sullivan? - Yeah, this is Andrew Sullivan.
This is a quote from Andrew Sullivan.
- This is Andrew Sullivan in his piece posted yesterday.
And this seems to me to be the key question here.
Do we really want to get back to living?
I do.
So take the rational precautions, a solid vaccine, and go about your business as you always did.
Yes, I'll wear a mask indoors if I'm legally required or politely asked, but I don't really see why anyone should.
In a free society, once everyone has access to a vaccine that overwhelmingly prevents serious sickness and death, there is no reason to enforce lockdowns again or mask mandates or social distancing any longer.
In fact, there's every reason not to.
So, what I wanted to say, and this is offered with full respect, Andrew.
I really like a lot of what you say, and frankly, I understand and resonate with the point that you are making here.
I get it.
But I don't think it's right, because it's predicated on a couple of things that aren't accurate.
So, you are imagining that you are being asked, the CDC yesterday, or the day before, said that it wanted people who had been vaccinated to wear masks.
Why?
That's the question.
Now, the answer that many people are arriving at, the answer that I believe we are being led to, is that you are wearing them to protect unvaccinated people.
And there is a degree of truth in, you're wearing a mask protects unvaccinated people.
But I think the clearest reason why you are being asked to wear a mask is to protect you, a vaccinated person, from the escape variants that we now see circulating, and secondly from... Do you want to jump?
The first reason for you to wear a mask as a vaccinated person is to protect you against the escape variants, which are on the rise, and about which the vaccines with which you've already been vaccinated are very little protection.
Our very little protection, which points to selection exerted by those vaccines on the virus.
So we are ultimately going to find ourselves in an argument about evolutionarily why we are seeing variants now, what their implication is.
But the fact that those variants are good at creating breakthrough cases among the vaccinated implies selection by those vaccines has produced these variants.
That's one reason that you need to be protected at this moment more than the CDC recognized you did a month ago.
The second reason has to do with the fading of the immunity from the vaccines.
So these vaccines, it turns out, not only do they provide a narrow immunity, but they also provide a short-lived immunity that appears to fade.
So in... Oh, go ahead.
Well, I thought you wanted to show this evidence as well as your third reason.
Yeah, and I was going to say there is also a third reason.
So in your piece, Andrew, you repeat a piece of wisdom that has been almost universally embraced.
And this piece of wisdom is The vaccines protect you from getting an infection.
They are not perfect.
They also protect you from getting sick, protect you from getting very sick, if you do contract a breakthrough infection.
Now, what we want to call your attention to is a piece that emerged two days ago?
Yeah, two or three.
Two or three days ago on Substack by a creature euphemistically called... Wait, okay.
Zach showed my screen when I was not ready for it to be shown.
That's all right.
This was published by Dr. Rollergator.
Who I should point out is not actually a PhD as far as I know.
He's also not an actual alligator and his leather jacket is fake.
But his analysis, this is a person who has published a very serious analysis of these... So this is a person you know to be a real person?
Yes.
I do know him to be a person and a ferociously high-quality intellect.
But anyway, he has an ironic personality on Twitter, which he is using for his substack as well.
In any case, it is an analysis of the question of the benefits of the vaccines, and what he posits here, based on a thorough mathematical analysis that appears to us at least to be robust, Is the question about what the vaccines do in the case of breakthrough cases.
Do they reduce the likelihood of getting seriously ill?
So if I could have my screen back for a minute, Zach.
I was just looking something up.
What he is, if I can just, I'm just going to read the section here rather than us.
Yeah.
So this is this is now from our piece that we published yesterday, the little bit of it in which we are talking about his.
In this off-sited study, which is Haas et al.
2021, looking at the effectiveness of the two-dose Pfizer vaccine in Israel, they purport to find extremely high effectiveness against both infections and in breakthrough cases in reducing hospitalizations, severe disease, and death.
And that is the work that has been transmuted into the mainstream media, and largely the reason why People who are vaccinated feel safe not just against getting the disease once they're vaccinated, but in having a reduced case of it should they get a breakthrough case.
But Dr. Rollergator here provides an analysis in which he finds that it is true that the risk of infection is far lower in vaccinated than in unvaccinated individuals.
However, if a person is both vaccinated and infected, the correct math reveals no reduction in deaths compared to being unvaccinated, unless you are old.
And with regard to hospitalizations, there is a tiny reduction in hospitalization for the 45 to 64 year olds, and a larger reduction for the old, but for people under 45.
Again, no reduction at all.
So let's just show his graphs here.
This is with regard to death, the probability of COVID-19 related death if infected for ages 16 to 14.
Basically, the confidence interval, I think this is, I'm not remembering, is much broader for the vaccinated, but they're effectively the same thing.
That is to say their mean is the same.
Yep and um for uh hold on so that was 16 to 44 year olds uh for 45 to 64 year olds there is a you know it looks like a slightly higher rate of death if you're vaccinated but really the you know the numbers are are sloppy enough that there's no reason to think that that is true but there's certainly no protective effect
If you get a breakthrough case, but that flips for the old.
For 65 years and older people, you do indeed have both, and this is just deaths and I'm not going to scroll through and find the hospitalization graphs that he has produced here.
But if you're over 65 and you get a breakthrough case because you're vaccinated but you get exposed to COVID and you get a breakthrough case, being vaccinated does predict a better outcome with regard to you not dying and you not being hospitalized.
But for people younger than that, that pattern falls apart.
Right, so let's say this work has just emerged.
It will be interesting to see if anyone finds a flaw in it.
But the basic point that this paper makes is that in fact what we are being given is something like a sales pitch in which the reduction in deaths and hospitalization... Which paper?
Relegator's paper?
Yes.
Relegator is giving a sales pitch?
No, he is alleging that we are being given a sales pitch.
And the sales pitch is that you have a reduced likelihood of infection, a reduced likelihood of severe disease, and a reduced likelihood of hospitalization and death, when in fact those are the same reduction.
That is to say, if you don't get COVID, you obviously won't go to the hospital for COVID, and you won't die of COVID.
But it is not that if you get an infection, you also have a much reduced likelihood of these things.
You don't unless you're in this very old age group.
Right, exactly.
So, effectively, the way that the numbers were analyzed amounts to either just a naive misunderstanding of how they should have been analyzed, or hopefully not an intentional erroneous signal put into the world.
Right, but I think the point about Andrew Sullivan's piece is that you can see, even in that quote that we read, that what he is imagining is that He's going to go about his life, and if he gets a case, it's going to be much reduced, and so why should he be wearing a mask?
And the answer is A, because your likelihood of getting a case is going up as a result of the fading of the vaccine immunity, as a result of the narrowness of that immunity, and the variants that are now increasingly dominating the pandemic.
And the benefit that he's imagining, should he get a case, is likely to be close to non-existent if this analysis is correct.
Yeah, he's not alert.
Right, so I guess the sum total of all of this, the way I would sum it up is I believe we have to recognize that we have been given a bunch of intuitive-sounding wrong things that many people believe.
We are facing increasing frustration, and in fact I believe we can see an orchestrated campaign to blame the unvaccinated for the continuing pandemic, as if there was ever a plan in which these vaccines were going to end the pandemic, which is inconceivable in light of the fact that even if you were to vaccinate all of the Western world, you couldn't reach the entire world with these things, which meant there was going to be large populations that were going to continue to have this which meant there was going to be large populations that were
So you needed effectively sterilizing vaccines that were rolled out simultaneously everywhere.
And and, you know, I hope that.
We all wish that we had sterilizing vaccines.
Absolutely.
And, you know, we arrived at the pandemic with the vaccines that showed up, sort of, and, you know, still hoping for, you know, good solid sterilizing vaccines to show up.
That would be great.
But also the way that these vaccines were rolled out, at least in the U.S., was very slow.
And if, you know, you will remember it was, you know, it's healthcare, there were all these tiers.
It was healthcare workers first, and the elderly, and people with comorbidities, and people were, you know, vying to break rank and get vaccinated early, but there just wasn't enough to go around.
And had the goal been to eradicate the virus and stop the pandemic, there would have been a concerted effort to wait until there was enough vaccine supply and concentrate the vaccine rollout so that as many people as possible got vaccinated all at once, as opposed to providing this sort of rolling target for selection to act.
Right, so you can imagine, like if we really had non-corrupt, highly competent public health authorities, you would imagine that as painful as it would be to delay vaccination, because of course there would be lives lost in the interim, that there would have been a delay to allow A sudden deployment of the vaccines universally, there would have been special guidance around how to behave while you were developing immunity.
So even in the case of a sterilizing vaccine, the period of time in which you're developing immunity is a hazard.
So, you know, Well, I did see.
I mean, the guidance was until you are considered fully immunized, which was two weeks after your final shot, if you got the two-shot vaccine, you need to behave as if you're not.
Well, but behave as if you're not doesn't begin to cover it.
So, my point is, we could have really high-quality guidance, and we could have really high-quality vaccines.
Maybe that's harder to get to?
Yeah, I'm not... We don't know.
We don't know, but... We should certainly... We hope that there is R&D going on right now for high-quality sterilizing vaccines.
It would be lovely, but it would also be lovely to imagine that there's not going to be a fight between manufacturers over whose vaccine has the market and that that fight is going to have very little to do with which vaccines are best for humanity.
I hate to say it, that may sound cynical, but given what I've seen, I would expect jockeying for position.
Pandemic profiteering.
Right, pandemic profiteering is what I would expect.
You could imagine very brief guidance, right, that you would get vaccinated, you would coordinate with your family, maybe, and, you know, isolate completely for some period of time.
I don't know what the... we would really want high quality analysis, but you could imagine a campaign.
But this campaign does not look like it was designed in any way that anyone could have imagined it was going to end the pandemic, and yet that's kind of been the implication.
That we would have ended the pandemic if only it weren't for the holdouts.
And that's just nonsense.
It can't be right.
Should we pivot?
Yep.
All right.
We're going to talk about sex and gender a little bit.
All right.
All right.
We're going to start with this excerpt from Chapter 7 of A Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century, chapter being sex and gender.
I'm going to read a, what is it?
You actually chose this section this week.
So we actually read the audio, we recorded the audio book this week.
Both of us are going to be Doing that when that comes out, September 14th.
So I already read this aloud once this week.
But this is the section you chose from the Sex and Gender chapter called Division of Labor.
Already in the chapter we've walked through sort of all of the all of the basic biology and evolutionary biology of what sex is, what sexual reproduction is, why there's two, you know, why we don't change sex, all of that.
Division of Labor.
In many modern households, women clean the floors and men take out the trash.
In some households, those roles might be switched, and it might be true that both members of a pair bond spend equal time doing domestic work, but it's fairly rare for both partners to do every domestic task in equal measure.
This is division of labor.
From many angles, the division of labor makes sense.
It has even been argued that division of labor by the sexes is what made us human.
Even if we don't accept that conclusion, we can agree that it's efficient and generally a good use of everyone's time.
Saving time by dividing up the work leaves more time for things we might want to do more of, like play or sex.
The division of labor can and has created rigid roles, however, many of which are outdated in the 21st century.
It is useful to understand some of where those roles came from in order to determine which ones are unlikely to change and which ones might.
From the earliest inequalities in investment in gametes, females and males have engaged each other and the world differently.
Among hunter-gatherers, men have been far more likely to be hunters of large game, women more likely to be gatherers of plant foods and smaller animals.
Hunter-gatherer women likely spent most of their adult, premenopausal lives pregnant or breastfeeding infants and toddlers.
When breast milk is all or most of a child's diet, the mother is effectively on birth control, as she experiences physiologically induced amenorrhea.
She cannot get pregnant when breastfeeding at frequent intervals.
This keeps birth intervals relatively long and the birth rate fairly low.
Jump forward to the human transformation of landscapes with agriculture, and gender roles become even more constrained.
Being tied to a particular piece of land, we were now more sedentary and had ample grain stores with which to supplement our and our children's diets at any time.
Agriculturalist women thus experienced a decrease in the birth interval.
Babies came at a faster rate, and so the birth rate climbed.
This increase in fertility tied women to hearth and home, and we saw a concomitant decrease... I think it's concomitant.
I think so too.
Yeah.
And we saw a concomitant decrease in women's roles in economic, religious, and other culturally important realms.
Men and women exhibit so many differences, it would be impossible to catalog them all here.
Before we mention just a few more, another reminder about populations is in order.
When we say that men are taller than women, the words on average are implied.
Pointing to the existence of your friend Rhonda, who really is quite tall, does not negate the statistical truth that on average, men are still taller than women.
Some of the average differences between the sexes include that men have more investigative interests, while women have more artistic and social interests.
Men are also, on average, more interested in math, science, and engineering.
On tests, girls score higher in literacy, while boys score higher in math.
And although average intelligence is the same between boys and girls, the variability in intelligence is not.
There are more boy geniuses and more boy-complete dullards than there are girls in either category.
One interesting piece of neuroscience reveals that, across several domains, including both emotional memory and spatial ability, women are better at details, men are better at gist.
This finding manifests, for instance, in the average man's superior ability to remember a route, and the average woman's superior ability to remember the location of the keys, the cup of coffee, the document in need of being signed.
The differences between the sexes are found in babies and across cultures, too, so this is not some weird, weird phenomenon.
Given a choice, neonate girls spend more time looking at faces, while neonate boys spend more time looking at things.
And across cultures, work is gendered early.
In an analysis of 185 cultures, in every culture studied, some tasks are always gendered in the same direction.
Iron smelting, the hunting of large marine mammals, metalworking, all of these are done by men only in those cultures that do these things at all.
More interesting is the tasks that are highly gendered across cultures, but for which some cultures curtail female involvement, while other cultures curtail male involvement.
These include weaving, the preparation of skins, and the gathering of fuel, among others.
This suggests that there is a value in the division of labor, even when neither sex is inherently better at the task.
Consider also the Pueblo people, who have long been understood to be master ceramicists.
It had been assumed, given contemporary patterns, that pottery making was exclusively the domain of women.
In Chaco Canyon, however, in the Four Corners area of the American Southwest, a different story is emerging.
When Chaco Canyon was a rapidly growing religious and political center 1,000 years ago, the population was expanding, and with it, the demand for pottery.
More and more vessels were needed to carry and store grain and water, so gender norms loosened, and men began doing this otherwise highly gendered work.
What might we learn from these truths?
We can learn that gender roles can be re-upped for modernity.
Some men will prefer hearth and home to a grueling career that is facilitated by having a spouse taking care of the domestic duties.
And some women will prefer the latter.
But many men and women, we argue, will prefer to be restricted to neither domain.
Without being slotted into preconceived roles, many people of both sexes will prefer a partner who is their equal without being identical.
We can learn from a more nuanced understanding of gendered work that traditionalist appeals to women not working outside of the home, or to men being dominant in economic and business matters, are regressive, without any nugget of necessity or truth.
Historically, women and men have had division of labor, both in family units and in societies.
But other than those tasks mandated by anatomy and physiology, gestation, lactation, there is little in the modern world that some women might not choose to do.
Similarly, men are ever more welcome in traditionally female fields, such as nursing and teaching, although we shouldn't expect parity there either.
Different preferences lead to different choices.
Pretending that we are identical, rather than ensuring that we are equal under the law, is a fool's game.
And one more, so we have a corrective lens section at the end of every chapter, and the final one for this chapter is...
Recognize that our differences contribute to our collective strength.
If we more highly valued the work that women are more likely to be drawn to, e.g.
teaching, social work, nursing, perhaps we could stop demanding equal representation of men and women in fields that women are simply not as likely to be interested in.
Recognizing that we are, on average, different is the critical first step to building a society in which all opportunities are truly open to everyone.
Equal opportunity is an honorable goal in step with reality, whereas aiming for equal outcome, in which every occupation from daycare workers to garbage collectors has equal representation between the sexes, will disappoint everyone involved.
Yeah, I always wonder if those who apply these very naive, equalizing kinds of remedy proposals, if they have contemplated what it would be like to live in the world that they are imagining.
Yeah, and this came up in that event that I did years ago now with James Damore in the wake of the Google memo.
This was very much, and that had Peter Boghossian and Helen Pluckrose as well, and you introduced us back before we lived in Portland, but it was an event here at Portland State University.
Exactly this came up, right?
We also don't hear the cry from the gender activists for there to be equity in the sexes among garbage collectors, right?
There's plenty of dangerous or banal or dirty work that men are far more likely to do.
And no, that doesn't pay particularly well.
And we're not hearing that we need equity there.
What we're hearing about is in those fields and I actually, in that event, I pushed back against James, James Damore a little bit.
It is true that the work that men are more likely on average to be interested in doing does pay better, and this does have to do with historical record of sexism.
Like, and we have inherited that, and this is, you know, in this way, unlike in many ways, The modern manifestations of sexism do mirror the modern manifestations of racism, where you have inherited an historical set of policies, most of which don't exist now, but their ghosts do, right?
The manifestations downstream still do.
I believe what you've just said is accurate, but I want to add another category here.
So there is some sort of structural inherited bias against work that has traditionally been female.
But there's also an economic reason that that would exist that has nothing to do with any kind of bigotry, right?
That because women are saddled with or privileged with, whichever way you want to see it, the actual production of babies and their nursing, The economic model would predict that that would be budgeted in, right?
And so that... Well, I mean, I think... I know I interrupted you, but you know, as we moved to agriculture 10-ish, 10 to 12-ish thousand years ago, you know, most of us have ancestors that became agriculturalists 10 to 12,000 years ago.
As that began to happen, you know, For a while, everyone was working to support their own family, and that might have been extended family, but as trade became more common, the things that men were doing were tradable and therefore monetizable, and the things that women were doing were less tradable and monetizable until very, very recently.
And there are a lot of us who think that that monetizing of things like, you know, of reproduction and sex, you know, obviously sex has been monetized forever, but You know, things like surrogacy is a brand new phenomenon, but for the most part, the things that are mandated by anatomy and physiology that women do was not brought into the market, except for, you know, actually having sex.
You know, prostitution is super old, as we all know.
Um, and so the, the work that men were doing, you know, being able to sell the grain to allow for, um, to purchase things that you couldn't make at home, uh, was, was something that tracked men's work and not women's work.
And you know, we can, we could think of, you know, Putting up the food, you know, preserving the food, that was for a while anyway, more women's work, but it also didn't generate nearly as much of the potential revenue.
And so you have this sort of, you know, initial inherent inequality, not based inherently on any bigotry, as you said.
Right, not based in any bigotry.
Now, it doesn't mean it's not structural.
It is.
And it doesn't mean it can't be structurally corrected.
It can.
But the point is, let's, you know, it's tempting to just simply Demonize a system that has biases in it and then those jump to bigotry is the only possible bigotry is the explanation And then as long as you're doing that the other temptation is to do it unevenly so all the crappy stuff that men end up doing is You know, nobody's all that eager to democratize that, right?
The dying as you're fending off tyranny, the, you know, descending into the sewers to break up giant globs of fat.
Right.
I mean, right?
Like, these are not things that women are in general trying to break into.
So anyway, there is something to be done.
There's always questions of fairness with respect to access.
But come on, these things just aren't simple.
Right.
No, they're really very much not.
I love that work that I was reading about with the 185 pre-agriculturalist societies or pre-industrial societies that you know.
I used to teach with this a lot.
I used to use Use that work to teach descriptive statistics, among other things.
But I think it, you know, everything in this book got so shortened because it has such breadth.
But the point there about division of labor persisting in across cultures in across for many activities, but which sex does it varies is extraordinary.
I love this.
The fact that in some cultures, weaving is very much a man's job and women shall not touch it because it would, you know, Sully the weaving or the men or something.
And in other cultures it's exactly the opposite story and of course the languaging around it will come will be different, both because it's different cultures and because the reasons that we say that women shouldn't touch things and men shouldn't touch things tend to be different as well.
But, you know, Weaving.
Well, that's man's work.
Weaving.
That's women's work.
Okay, both things are argued in different cultures at the same time on the planet, and that tells us there's value in division of labor without those divisions of labor inherently having anything to do with underlying differences in ability or interest.
And the fact that that one goes in both directions tells us that both men and women weave well enough alone.
Okay, that one I'll accept.
You'll accept.
Yes.
Phew!
All right.
Yeah.
Okay.
So there's a few, there's just, there's always stuff going on in culture about sex and gender.
So I'd like to just talk about a couple of them right now.
Actually, Zach, I didn't figure out which part of this five-minute video to show, so maybe we won't show it.
Let me, don't pull up my screen just yet.
Okay, I guess Let's see here.
There is Harvard lecturer, I think she clarifies that she is not actually a professor, Carol Hoeven, who joined Fox and Friends for, joined, that's their language, she would not say that.
She's a liberal who spoke to Fox for a four or five minute clip to talk about the ideology that is happening in education and specifically the medical school, specifically the Harvard Medical School.
And I think they found her through Katie Herzog's recent excellent piece that was in Barry Rice's sub stack.
So that's a lot of names.
But Dr. Huban here talks about male and female being different and us being able to talk about men and women being critical in a medical school and being able to say things like pregnant women.
Uh, and I will, I will link to this in the, in the show notes, but rather than have you listen to the whole five minutes, you know, I listened to it.
It's not that long.
Um, and there's exactly nothing transphobic or harmful in what she says.
And yet here we have someone, um, tweeting out this video saying, a woman by the name of Laura Simone Lewis saying, as the director of the diversity and inclusion task force for my department at Harvard H-E-B, that's, um, human evolution and behavior, I think.
I am appalled and frustrated by the transphobic and harmful remarks made by a member of my department in this interview with Fox & Friends, to which I quote treated as an evolutionary biologist, I am appalled and frustrated by the scientific illiteracy that is apparently being facilitated by our most elite institutions.
I don't honestly know how we are going to continue to function if this continues.
I mean, we're seeing incompetence and inability to think through basic scientific arguments over in virus and vaccine space.
At least that's a little bit complicated.
At least it takes walking through a few steps of logic to arrive where people should be arriving at.
But the observation that everyone on the earth has made that male and female are different and the fact that in our lineage alone we have at least 500 million years of uninterrupted sexual reproduction in our lineage And sex has been around, sexual reproduction has been around for, oh, anywhere from 1 to 2 billion years on the planet, and probably our uninterrupted lineage goes back that far as well.
That 500 million years number that I quoted, that's just, that's me being conservative.
Like, yes, intersex people exist.
And yes, gender, and here you and I always have a slightly different definition for this, gender is the behavioral manifestation of sex.
In non-human animals, what we call gender in humans, we call sex role.
And, you know, the way that you manifest your sex is your sex role, is your gender.
Are there some humans who feel deep down that they are not the sex that they are born to, yes.
And they are transgendered and we will treat them with respect and we need to do so.
But this has got to stop.
This has got to stop.
This is insanity.
You're absolutely right.
It is going to result in the destruction of everything.
As we pointed out a long time ago, you know, if your schools of engineering are going postmodern, then the point is you're giving an advantage to any competitor who can manage not to suffer that same fate, right?
And so basically we're talking, you know, on a global scale of those societies that can resist this nonsense are going to have True, but in the meantime, bridges may start falling.
And in the meantime, as medical schools are captured and cannot agree to really the easiest and most basic observable fact of human biology.
I mean, if they started saying that humans have three legs, I'd find that more plausible.
Right?
If this is going to be killing people, because guess what?
As we go through the evidence very, very briefly in a different part of this chapter, the number of medical conditions that manifest differently not just in frequency, but with regard to etiology, that is what causes them, and with regard to symptoms, how they manifest,
by sex is huge and growing all the time and a that's going to start disappearing we're not going to be able to know about it the research isn't going to be allowed and people are going to arrive in hospitals presenting with things where if you don't even get to know as a doctor what sex is And it's largely, frankly, probably, going to affect more women than men.
So just as the vast majority of medical research until the mid-20th century was done on men, and it was assumed that what was true for men was true for everyone, it was pretty recently that we started seeing a recognition that men and women reveal disease differently.
And this improved women's health care.
Well, this is just going to take us right back.
Well, I think it's even worse than that.
If you think about the game that we play politically, right, where we force you to effectively engage in a career of legal corruption Before you can get to the highest echelons of leadership, right?
So we force you to prove that you will make the mental the moral compromises in order to play that game Before we ever learn your name as a senator, you know presidential candidate or anything like that in this case It's effectively imagine that what we did was we just said, okay From now on we are gonna ask people a question before we let them into medical school.
Do you agree that men can get pregnant?
And if the answer is, well, no, men can't get pregnant, sorry, you're not qualified for medical school, right?
Then you get a medical school in which everybody agrees men can get pregnant.
The question is, what is the quality of what will take place at a medical school where you had that as a gate, right?
The answer is, that's not going to be much of a medical school because what you've just done is demonstrated that everybody there is a A coward or a fool or some combination of those things.
And if you build a medical school of cowards and fools, it's not going to be a high-quality one.
So at some level, you have to empower people to be able to say, look, I get it that it's really unpleasant that there are two sexes and that we can distinguish them immediately on birth, except in very rare cases.
Except by the way, it's not.
Right.
But the fact is, come on.
You cannot allow these things to take over essential functions.
And essential functions means not only things like medicine and governance, but also things like the military, right?
Increasingly, we are feminizing our military, which, you know, from the point of view of us empathizing better with each other, there's an argument to be made for it.
From the point of view of the ability to have A, you know, unique gender profile.
What you really need is a powerful masculine military to protect the freedom that allows you to figure out how you want to live, right?
If you say, well, that freedom should exist in the military too.
And why is this military regiment, you know, so dictatorial?
Shouldn't it be democratic?
And, you know, shouldn't we figure out, you know, let's not make a military move until everybody's had a chance to speak, right?
I mean, you can imagine applying these rules being well-intentioned, but my god, you're going to create a system that cannot function.
Yeah, chain of command goes right out the window.
Yeah, it sure does.
Okay, show my screen just for a minute, Zach.
Here's a Guardian article from, when is it, two days ago.
IOC, that's the International Olympic Committee, praises weightlifter Laurel Hubbard before transgender athlete's Olympic debut.
If I may have my screen back.
So this person, Laurel Hubbard, I think is going to debut on Monday, so it has not happened yet.
I'm just going to quote a few more places from the article, but from my screen, so don't show, Zach.
The IOC's Medical and Science Director, Dr. Richard Budget, said, quote, everyone agrees that trans women are women.
Hubbard's participation in Tokyo, Hubbard being the athlete, has proved controversial, with her supporters hailing it as a historic moment for trans rights, with the IOC's critics believing that the 42-year-old New Zealander, who had never competed internationally until transitioning at 35, has an unfair and substantial advantage.
Final quote.
Recent scientific papers have also shown that anyone who undergoes male puberty retains significant advantages in power and strength even after taking medication to suppress their testosterone levels.
And one of the papers, you know, you don't say, right?
One of the papers that they cite here, or maybe the only paper, is this excellent paper by Emma Hilton and Tommy Lundberg that just came out and that we managed to just sneak into our book just before final Final edits were done, called Transgender Women in the Female Category of Sport – Perspectives on Testosterone Suppression and Performance Advantage.
One thing I want to say here is, slight kudos to The Guardian.
It's by no means a perfect piece, but The Guardian has been a sort of canary in the coal mine of woke ridiculousness for a while now.
Exactly.
Thank you.
Has been a canary in the coal mine for woke, woke ridiculousness for a while now, but this piece actually has not just some nuance, but actually some truth.
And, you know, having just, just simply putting it out there that the IOC's medical and science director says everyone agrees that trans women are women.
Well, no.
No, they don't.
And if you've got a degree and you're the director of both medicine and science, the fact that you can say that means you're not fit for your job.
Yeah.
Like, you're just not.
And, you know, who cares?
A 35-year-old person transitions, never having competed before, and now seven years later is in the Olympics in weightlifting?!
It's not even, like, fencing!
Right?
Which, like, everything is sex-segregated.
Everything is sex-segregated, but weightlifting, for Christ's sakes?
Yeah.
Like, even our pelvises being differently shaped makes men more stable on their feet.
This is insanity.
Yeah.
Like, I can't believe we're here.
I can't believe we're here.
Right, and it's heralded as a major victory for trans rights when it's actually a major setback for women, right?
Yes.
So disappear women's sports, right?
And in fact, I just want to read a small bit from this book, Helen Joyce's Trans When Ideology Meets Reality.
This just came out this month.
We got a preview copy and I have not read the whole thing.
I have skimmed it all and read some of it.
And it is, as I was expecting, quite excellent.
And she does a section on basically the history of female sports as well, which I didn't know and is quite interesting.
And basically, you know, like with the recognition that women have different ideologies and manifestations of disease, and we need to recognize that in our healthcare practices in order not to be killing women because we think they're just men but smaller,
So, too, have just recently women been not just allowed to compete at the elite levels, but been given their, you know, our own places to do so, because when women compete directly with men, unless it's in something that is explicitly co-ed, like mixed doubles in tennis or, you know, the sport that we played a lot of, Ultimate Frisbee really allows for wonderful games when they're co-ed.
And, you know, I played a lot of co-ed frisbee.
I played competitively on the women's team at University of Michigan and watched, therefore, in a lot of tournaments, a lot of men's play, a lot of women's play, a lot of co-ed play.
And frankly, in that particular game, and there are a lot of games that, there are a lot of sports that don't allow for it, but in that particular game, co-ed, he's going to knock that over.
Can I just move that?
Co-ed play allows for the best of both, right?
Well, hold on a second.
For those who haven't played it, it specifically neutralizes the problem, right?
If you take the big dude on the ultimate team and he teams up against the little woman.
They're doing mana and he lines up against a woman and that's who he's defending against.
He'll shut her down and that's considered unfair.
So the idea is when you line up before a particular point, you line up against somebody with whom you are appropriately matched.
So it can be a man against a woman if they're appropriately matched, but the point is it neutralizes the ability of men to shut down women.
Right, but I mean also if you're playing zone rather than man on defense, that further neutralizes it.
But you do need, I mean it's understood that you need to have an equivalent or, you know, usually an equivalent sex ratio on both teams.
If you've got, you know, and this is true in co-ed competition where I think it's been a while since I played.
I ruptured my Achilles tendon doing so.
I think you're always required to have two women on at a time.
And basically, if you claim you're a co-ed team and you only have men on the field at the time, you're not effectively playing co-ed.
But what I was going to say is an all-male game, which Fun to watch.
You know, there's just this raw physicality.
But there tend to be long hucks and fast runs into the end zone.
You know, layouts, spectacular, all of this.
But the points are short.
Most people don't touch the disc.
A lot of people don't get play.
Many beers are held.
No, but you know, in women's games, it tends to be almost the opposite.
Like a lot of short passes, a lot of focus on making sure, you know, not in the competitive stuff, there's not as much focus on like make sure everyone touches the disc, but you know, shorter passes, fewer long hocks, longer points, gets a little tedious.
And you know, I never liked playing the women's game as much as I liked playing the co-ed games because it has both.
Because there is more strategy and focus on how are you going to do this if you've got some six-foot-six guy who's going to show up and shut you down anytime you get the disc, you've got to think strategically and realize that your strength isn't necessarily in raw power and size and speed, right?
So anyway, in that case, and it won't be the case in a lot of team sports, but in that case there is actually a way to play co-ed that is wonderful and I would say that's what life offers as well.
Let me just read one paragraph from the introduction of Helen Joyce's new book.
She begins by saying, oh no, just one paragraph here.
This is a book about trans activism.
It is a story about policy and institutional capture.
...of charitable foundations controlled by billionaires joining forces with activist groups to pump money into lobbying behind the scenes for legal change.
They have won over big political parties, notably America's Democrats, and big businesses, including tech giants.
They are backed, too, by academics in gender studies, queer theory, and allied fields, and by the pharmaceutical and healthcare industries which have woken up to the fortunes to be made from gender-affirming medicine.
So, it's the same everywhere, right?
We got the same kind of story everywhere.
We got capture and activism that may or may not be coordinated, but its effect is as if it was.
I hate that this is now manifesting in new realms, but really the point is this was what we were trying to warn people about when we were talking about the danger that capture and corruption poses to our ability to function coherently.
You know, the fact that you're seeing it across the social media platforms, the fact that you're seeing it in science medicine, health policy, you know, our military, everything.
The fact that everything is susceptible to being pushed into insane contortions is just evidence that we have a very serious problem, right?
And, you know, Evergreen, many people took to be almost funny in how over the top it was, but it was a warning, right?
This is what corruption does to a system.
It renders it incoherent, and an incoherent system doesn't collapse immediately, but at the point you recognize that these, you know, falsehoods have taken over the steering mechanism, it's an emergency whether or not there's an iceberg visible, right?
There's gonna be one at some point.
Yep.
All right.
Last week, you had us use a thumbnail with a bee and a flower, and obviously that should have been the thumbnail for this week.
Damn.
On sex and gender.
Oh, right.
Twice over.
You were arguing the bee was sleeping somehow.
I argued it was going to sleep at some point.
Yeah, it wasn't sleeping at the time.
Capable of sleeping.
No matter.
So do we have a thumbnail for this week?
I'm hoping you do.
We'll figure it out.
We are going to end here.
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