#119 An Epidemic of Sophistry (Bret Weinstein & Heather Heying DarkHorse Livestream)
View on Odysee: https://odysee.com/EvoLens119:cfd6bcb4c935ec43547b282b60c78902c33073ae View on Spotify (With video): ***** In this 119th 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. This week, we discuss science, sophistry, mis- dis- and mal- information, and making sure that people on the fringe remain there. We discuss corruption, and the lab leak hypot...
- Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse Podcast live stream.
Winter is leaving.
We are at number 119, am I correct about that?
We're at live stream 119, and as we streamed to you today on March 19th, it is the final day of winter in the Northern Hemisphere.
The final day of winter, making tomorrow the solstice.
No, the equinox.
Yes.
In which day and night are Equal in length, although of course because in physics anyway, light spreads and darkness does not on a planet with an atmosphere.
Of course, there is actually more light, more time with light than with darkness on the equinox.
In the rest of the world, in the social world, darkness seems to do a very good job of spreading.
There is a lot of darkness and it does seem to be spreading kind of almost like it's oozing Yeah, no, the shadows, they expand their reach in a way that, you know, sunlight being the best disinfectant would that there were a metaphorical truth there as well.
It's not always the case, it seems.
Right, well, I mean there are other aphorisms we could go to.
It's always darkest before it goes pitch black.
That's one.
I don't know if that's helpful, but... Or true.
No, I think it actually...
Yes, I think it is, because inherently it's like the ball has to go to a speed of zero before it reverses direction and falls back down.
Yeah, but if pitch black is actually darker than what it was before, then it wasn't darkest right before then.
Short of pitch black, it is as dark as it gets.
See, aphorisms don't... you don't get caveats with aphorisms.
You don't get caveats with aphorisms.
Is that a rule?
I think so.
Okay, that should be an aphorism.
That should be an aphorism, wow.
Okay, we are early today.
Some of us, at least one of us, has not had any coffee or anything, so here we go.
Well, I had coffee.
It did not help.
You had coffee for both of us, perhaps.
Yes.
Yeah, it's spring.
It's spring, and that does help with the rest of the world would follow along.
We've got some announcements.
We have, as is usual, we'll have three sponsors at the top of the show, and then the rest of the show is ad-free.
And then we're going to talk about Lab League.
We'll talk about trans athletes.
We might talk a little bit about a Nobel Laureate.
We're going to bring these things together.
I feel a theme emerging.
It's like one of those situations where, you know, back when we were teaching at Evergreen, there was this phenomenon where you had a sort of plan about what you were going to teach, but actually things tended to gel after you got it all on the table in a way you didn't expect.
So I'm hoping for that.
I see, okay.
I'm not sure that was exactly my experience, but we had very different approaches, didn't we?
So, but today I am pleased to go with your plan.
Excellent.
Okay, a couple of announcements before our ads, before we dive right in, and then, you know, once we're into the main part of the show, we're going to try to keep it relatively quick today, because we are coming to you early, because we have some place to be.
That's all I'll say for right now.
So there's a podcast out this week that we did last week called The Evolution of Medicine with host James Maskell.
We've not listened to it, but we participated in it, and it was really a terrific conversation, and we got his book.
This is The Community Cure.
He's actually written two, but this is The Community Cure by James Maskell.
Transforming Health Outcomes Together is the subtitle.
And he and the people around him, the people with whom he works, have been working hard for many years to transform.
How medicine is practiced and how people experience medicine and therefore their own health.
And I've just begun to dip into this book.
It seems great.
Certainly the conversation with him was terrific.
And it left, I think I speak for both of us, with a lot more hope about the future of health care and medicine, potentially globally, but we know the most about the U.S.
situation, than I've had in a very long time.
Well, I would put it a little differently.
I would say there's tremendous reason for hope in our discussion, but as always the question is what school of thought is going to win out?
And in so many places, you know, we have the materials to do much better than we are doing, but we are in some sort of a battle with forces that are capable of derailing superior ideas in favor of, I don't know, what I presume are lucrative ideas.
So, anyway, I guess the point is, listen to the podcast and see if you don't hear a more reasonable, rational approach to medicine than you typically get from mainstream sources, and then ask yourself this question.
If that's true, why aren't you hearing more of this?
Yeah, yeah, good.
And so we'll put the link to that to the podcast in the show notes.
Speaking of books, our book is still out there, Undergatherer's Guide to the 21st Century.
We heard, actually I don't remember if it was this week or last week, that it's been adopted again as a text in a college class, this time a sociology class, and this just, this thrills me as a way to introduce evolutionary thinking to people.
I think that's wonderful.
So Consider picking it up at a bookstore, at a library, wherever, and taking a look if you haven't.
The live chat, if you're with us live, is live on Odyssey.
We're also on, of course, YouTube for the time being, and some other places.
You can ask your questions for the second hour at www.darkhorsesubmissions.com.
What?
Oh right now on my Patreon for uh members at patrons at the $11 and up level you can ask questions for a monthly Q&A which are private Q&A which happens next Sunday.
That's always a lot of fun and uh we we have we have fun with that and you do with your conversations at your at your Patreons as well.
You can think of that private Q&A as Dark Horse Dominance as opposed to Dark Horse Submissions.
It's you know Two different ways to approach the Dark Horse Podcast.
Okay.
Yeah.
Left you speechless, didn't I?
You did.
You did.
We've got stuff.
We've got merchandise at darkhorsepodcast.store.darkhorsepodcast.org.
And as always, weekly posts from me at naturalselections.substack.com.
But I'm not sort of feeling like pitching all these things right now.
So let us go into the three ads for the week.
I actually have two brand new sponsors to us this week, and one that is tried-and-true.
So I will start with the first brand new sponsor, Brett will go to the next one, and then I will wrap it up with our tried-and-true sponsor.
They are Blinkist, Bright Move, and Sol.
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And I also use Blinkist as a kind of library.
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All right, now our second sponsor is also new, and it requires a little bit of explanation.
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Now, in this case, this is not a service that we have used, so I have to explain to you how it is that we are confident in recommending it.
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The service is a recruiting tool.
I'll get to the details of that shortly.
Applicant tracking system, right?
An applicant tracking system.
And it was... the company was co-founded by David Webb, who is the current CEO.
Now, David became known to me as he joined forces for Unity 2020, where he did a lot of excellent work.
So not only is David Mission aligned with us here at Dark Horse, but he was a prime mover on the Ranked Choice Voting System that we use to select the Unity candidates.
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Right.
I'm sorry.
I flubbed that.
Nope, we're good, we are good.
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Sol is a sustainable orthopedic footwear company.
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We thank our sponsors very much.
Yes, we do.
Okay, you want to lead us off?
We've talked about various topics.
Which topic are we leading off with?
You said you were going to bring it all together.
No, that's at the end.
That comes at the end, the bringing it all together.
All right, would you like me to start off?
Yes!
All right.
I wanted to start then with an exploration of a hidden principle.
Maybe it's two hidden principles in the universe.
The first one I was prone to revisit by a tweet from our friend Mark Andreessen.
Zach, could you put up Mark Andreessen's tweet?
So, since Zach is fiddling around here, Mark, who of course was a... we cannot read that from here, Zach.
All right, so Mark, who was prime mover behind Netscape Mozilla, Tweets.
Overheard in Silicon Valley.
New rule.
It's okay to think critically about the previous thing.
Right, now this is a phenomenon that I think we have all begun to recognize, especially those of us who have been out at the fringes of heterodoxy.
In recent times, which is that there is some sort of a process by which we are Penalized for discussing certain things and then certain changes are made and we are suddenly allowed to talk about certain things so people will remember for example the moment at which Jon Stewart went on Stephen Colbert's program and famously said
Something hilarious about the fact that science has been wonderful in helping us address the pandemic which was caused by science.
Suddenly it was possible to talk about the lab leak theory and the aftermath of that, whereas before it had been nearly impossible to do so.
Well, that's a question.
No, you're right.
Heather has corrected me here.
She has whispered hypothesis.
And of course, this has been something I've been very careful about.
Now, the question is, is it still a hypothesis or has it become a theory?
Now, I do think I made the error you suggested because- No, but this is someplace you're going.
I know.
I'm talking about a period in which it was- still contentious.
And so therefore, possibly, I should have said a hypothesis here, but nonetheless. - There's many people who would argue it's not only still contentious, but actually almost certainly false today.
Right.
And in fact, this has had a very interesting trajectory.
So first, I want to introduce what I think the principle, the extension of Mark Andreessen's point.
So Mark is saying that he overheard in Silicon Valley that it is permissible to think critically about the previous thing.
Presumably, his point is something like you're not allowed to think critically about Ukraine at the moment, but you can now go about thinking critically on COVID now that people have moved on to Ukraine.
My point would be, yes, this is true to an extent.
However, there is a subsidiary principle that people should be watching out for.
And the subsidiary principle is that you can think critically about the previous thing, but the vindication of those who thought critically about it in real time is not permitted.
Right?
And so we will not see the resurrection of the reputations of people who were stigmatized during the initial phase.
Uh, because, and there's a very good reason for this, and I'm not saying it's a valid reason, but I'm saying that there's an, uh, an easily understood reason, and the reason is something like... Just be, this, this is a point about which, uh, we are often People are often confused.
When you say, in this case, there's a good reason, people assume what you mean is there's a reason I like.
Or when you say there's a good hypothesis, people assume you mean that's a hypothesis I hope is true.
Part of the problem is language, and that the language is a little unclear.
What you mean, and you were very clear here, but it's a more general principle, is there is a reason that is understandable, that we can track back and see why it might be true.
There is a hypothesis that is plausible for these reasons, and that is quite separate from whether I think it to be true, but even more so quite separate from whether I would like it or not like it to be true.
And so in this case, you're about to discuss an idea that we wish were not true, but appears to be, and here's why.
Right.
So, you know, if you were to describe this print, if you were to sit down on a park bench and try to describe this, you'd want to be careful to say, I hope this will be taken in a non-normative context.
That way it would clarify this to you.
It does sound like park bench conversations.
Well, depending on if you're talking to the pigeons.
Very good.
I was just headed to the pigeons.
Sure.
All right.
So here, here's the, uh, the point.
Um, Let's talk for a moment about meritocracy.
And again, this needs a little bit of a caveat, too.
Meritocracy is a marvelous thing, and to the extent that it functions, it is a tremendous engine of insight and innovation.
We do not have a perfect meritocracy anywhere, so far as I'm aware.
So when one invokes meritocracy... It's not possible.
It is certainly impossible.
You might be able to rig, you know, it might be that An infinitely iterated series of chess games is a perfect meritocracy for success in chess.
But other than a trivial example like that, it's very difficult to have a perfect anything, and meritocracy is a place— Every variable has to be well-bounded.
Right.
And so the thing is, the more interesting the thing you're trying to do is, you're trying to accomplish, the more novel it is, the noisier your meritocracy will be, even when your meritocracy is well-structured.
There will be lots of luck and things that impinge.
But here's the point.
Corruption of all kinds disrupts the search for merit.
That is what corruption effectively is, is the breaking of a system that claims to be the pursuit of merit in favor of other objectives like enriching some particular constituency or something like that.
When something becomes corrupt, The thing people do not necessarily intuit is that it becomes...
Often very powerful in protecting itself, but also very easy to beat, right?
If you have a corrupt department that is supposed to be innovating things, then it will do a poor job because it's really, you know, feathering somebody's nest or advancing somebody's political interests, and those things come at a cost to doing what it is supposed to be doing.
This is true for fields as well.
Academic fields, as they become corrupt, become surprisingly easy to beat.
Right?
Now, it is not surprisingly easy to beat them and get credit for it, right?
But if the point is you want to, you know, if predictive power is the purpose of the advancement of science, it is possible to generate more predictive power than a corrupt field.
The more corrupt the field it is, the easier it is to beat it in this regard.
You can outthink it.
Yep.
And so what you get is a dynamic.
As corruption takes over something, you have to find a reason to dismiss people who are finding the thing that is corrupt easy to beat, right?
So you dismiss them on the basis that they are kooks and only a fool cannot see through them.
That's a typical one, you know, or that they are corrupt in their own right, that the corruption is really on the part of the people.
Basically the point is you demonize the fringe, right?
Now the problem is, for anybody who's tracking actual predictive power, the fringe will surprisingly keep being the place where the reality is spotted first and carefully argued, and the mainstream, the corrupt thing, will keep being embarrassed by those on the fringe, right?
But the fringe will also be the home of spectacularly wrong takes.
Right, most of the fringe.
Which are easily pointed to as evidence that therefore so must be all of what is not mainstream.
Right.
And so you will get all kinds of shell games like, okay, so-and-so on the fringe was right about X, but for the wrong reasons, right?
You'll get little excuses like this.
And the point is, okay, that can be true on any one thing, but it doesn't generate a track record.
If you are repeatedly right and you're not repeatedly right by virtue of predicting everything and then claiming those places where you were right, which is one trivial way you could...
Technically accomplish something but if you are in general more right than wrong and Significantly more right than a field that has become corrupt and therefore isn't all that interested in being right or all that capable of getting there Then you are a threat because over time the question will be well, okay if the fringe is inherently Kooks then why is it telling me things that turn out to be true again and again and again?
So, the fringe must never be vindicated, even if the mainstream is forced to accept some new principle.
Now, I would argue that this is happening in multiple different domains.
There were three major COVID domains as we encountered them.
One COVID domain had to do with the origin of COVID itself.
The other two had to do with the utility of early treatment, drugs like ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine, and the third had to do with the safety and effectiveness of vaccines, right?
Now on all three of these, we could talk about what it is that the fringe spotted, that, you know, the fringe had been actively driven to the fringe, that actually there were things that the mainstream should have been talking about that it wasn't interested in talking about.
One thing that is true is that the fringe gets defined by taking a position that runs counter to whatever prevailing forces are running the establishment.
So there are a lot of scientists, researchers, health professionals, who Two years ago, two and a half years ago, five years ago, thought that and appeared to be completely within the mainstream in terms of, you know, doing good work, doing honest work, having integrity, pursuing evidence as it, you know, pursuing evidence as it showed up and figuring out what it meant and if A, what then, you know, what B if given A.
And, um, we're pushed into, we're vilified, we're named as people on the outside because they arrived at conclusions that didn't fit.
It's not that they were, they were or many people were not already on the outside, nor were these people who were looking to be Fringe.
To be contrarian.
To be outside of, you know, the civilized discourse of cocktail parties.
There are certainly people like that, but this is not the driving thing.
The driving thing is What's true?
What are we doing?
Oh my god, there's this evolving situation, quite literally, on many levels.
What is true of it, and therefore what can we do to better ourselves in the face of, you know, COVID two years ago, and to prepare for such a thing in the future?
What is the likelihood of such a thing, and what is this thing?
What is the nature of the thing?
Right, and in fact, one of the things that tells you that COVID is an incredibly screwed up, I would argue, upside down landscape is the high quality of the people who are supposedly French.
Right, so you've got, you know, Tess Lurie and John Campbell on ivermectin.
Tess Lurie literally being a highly decorated WHO scientist.
You've got Pierre Cory, you know, who has, you know, literally written a textbook on pulmonology and is a highly decorated ICU doc.
Right, you've got one of the world's most published cardiologists, Peter McCullough.
You have, you know, literally one of the arguably the primary architect of the mRNA technology that went into vaccines, raising alarm about these mRNA vaccines.
You really couldn't ask for more highly qualified people Right?
But nonetheless, they are portrayed as if they are fringe.
In fact, we will get back to Sam here a little bit later, but Sam actually wondered aloud.
Sam who?
Sam Harris wondered aloud in one of his podcasts on the subject, whether the explanation for these people was that they were simply part of the small percentage of the society that's schizophrenic.
Well, in this actually, because we have so much to talk about, let me just slip in here something that I thought we might spend more time on.
But Luc Montagnier died in February.
He was a Nobel laureate.
He received the Nobel in 2008, I want to say.
It was a co-recipient, and he and she shared it with someone else, and I'm not just not remembering the specifics, but he shared it with, gosh I've forgotten her name, For the discovery of HIV.
And there have certainly been people who received the Nobel, who later on, people came to think, oh, I'm not so sure about that.
The fact that Luc Montagnier came to question some of what he had understood to be true later on, and what indeed whether or not HIV was the sole cause of AIDS, which is certainly not a mainstream position and it's not accepted within the establishment, but he was pursuing evidence.
He didn't say, you have to listen to me, this is the only way to proceed.
He said, I am wondering about this.
And in COVID, he came out early by actually talking about lab leak.
He said, I cannot comprehend, given what I've seen of this virus and a lifetime of research on viruses, and indeed as a Nobel Laureate, that this particular virus could have a zoonotic origin.
So he certainly was well outside the mainstream, and he has other positions that are well outside the mainstream on COVID.
But at the point that he died, the obituaries were a slow-incoming and either so banal as to be clearly disrespectful in that regard, or actually disrespectful.
So let me just say this.
I'm going to point to this I chose the wrong week to switch to Brave because nothing is quite simple anymore.
Let me see if I can find it.
Here we go.
Here's an obit in Science, in one of the two premier science journals in the world, published just two days ago, even though he died in early February.
So that in itself is quite something.
It's quite a short obituary.
It has really nothing about his controversial positions, and it ends with this line.
As Bjorn Vennstrom, I don't know, I don't remember who that is, remarked at the 2008 Nobel Ceremony, Montagnier was in the right place at the right time.
That is so nasty.
It's so nasty, and this is how, when someone has gotten so many accolades that it's really hard to make them into the fringe, this is fringe-making.
Yeah.
That's what that is.
It's hard-coding the analysis that Luc Montagnier is fringe, that his success, which nobody disputes, is the result of luck.
Right.
Right?
He was surrounded by good people.
Right.
And let me tell you something scientifically speaking, right?
All of us who actually get how science works understands that it's a self-correcting process.
And so this idea that science has arrived somewhere and we are all to follow it is bullshit from the get-go.
But the basic point is, look.
When somebody with a Nobel Prize, a relevant Nobel Prize, takes up a heterodox position, especially one with a high social cost, right?
You don't necessarily know that that person is right, but you do know that you would need to know a lot In order to dismiss them, right?
So let's just say, okay, you've got Luc Montagnier, one of his positions, you know, the thing for which he got the prize, the discovery of HIV, right?
His later change of position involved his emerging belief that HIV, the virus that he discovered, which nobody disagrees, exists, is a co-traveler with AIDS and not causal.
So his new belief downregulates, downgrades the importance of the discovery for which he got the Nobel Prize.
Of his own contribution.
Right.
So in a court, we would call that like statement against interest.
Right.
You're more likely to believe this because it's not something you would be expected to say because it's good for you to say it.
Right.
Right.
So, okay, that's interesting.
Does the fact that somebody who is capable enough to get a Nobel Prize would reach this paradoxical conclusion about the very thing for which they got the prize...
That's interesting.
Even more interesting when you get to the fact that he wasn't the only Nobel Laureate to reach that conclusion.
Right?
Cary Mullis, who also recently died, and also was on the other side.
He died at the very beginning, maybe even just before COVID.
But he had already ended up on the wrong side of Anthony Fauci.
Right.
He was alarmed by Anthony Fauci and he was also alarmed by the use of his invention for testing for things like viruses because he knew PCR to be so sensitive that the cycle threshold issue made it possible to abuse it very easily.
It was not an appropriate diagnostic tool.
He won the Nobel for the, I guess we would say invention of polymerase chain reaction as opposed to the discovery in the case of Montagnier's prize of HIV.
And actually there's a connection.
This is a connection that will come back in a few minutes if I can remember it.
But the connection is Like many of our best tricks in medicine, PCR is, yes, it's an invention and a brilliant one, but it is borrowed almost entirely from nature, right?
Well, that's why I sort of paused.
I'm like, it's an invention, but it's inspired by and uses many of the tricks that nature has used.
Let's put it this way.
Its primary tools are enzymes that we could not have written.
Yeah.
Right?
Yeah.
Not even close.
We just borrowed them from nature and they do what they do and, you know, they can be modified, but we just don't know enough to do it.
Okay, so we've got this process of fringe making, right?
That has nothing to do, it's, you know, actually, you know what it is?
It's an exact parallel to that thing we just described.
Right?
This is the manufacture of an artificial fringe, like in the center of something, right?
It's like you've got a carpet and you decide to put a fringe somewhere in the middle of it in order that people don't pay attention to the stain or whatever, right?
Because these people aren't French, right?
Now, again, you don't know whether Luc Montagnier Knows something far beyond what you understand.
At the point he says, no, no, HIV is not causing AIDS.
You don't know whether he's goofed.
Right.
Or he's got some deep insight.
But what you do know is that you can't casually dismiss it.
Especially in light of the fact that he's going after his own- Having won the Nobel, he's out of kook territory.
He could be a kook.
The point is, A, what gets you to that level in science is something unusual.
So at the point he says something really unusual and counterintuitive, especially something that Downgrades the importance of his own discovery, right?
You have to listen.
And then at the point that you find another heterodox Nobel laureate, right, who has reached the same conclusion, still doesn't make him right.
But it does mean, hey, how much would you have to know before you were in a position to say, yeah, these people, they've lost the thread, right?
You'd have to look, you'd have to know a ton.
But instead, the point is, oh, well, that's a crazy, everybody knows HIV causes AIDS.
Okay.
Everybody knows that, but you're now, you know, it's rather a lot like Robert Malone, right?
You want to say Robert Malone doesn't know what he's talking about with respect to the safety of these vaccines.
Really?
Then who does?
Right?
You know, if anybody is likely to have insight, it would be Robert Malone.
And if anybody was likely to be corrupt in the direction of thinking that they were safer than they are, you'd expect it to be Malone, because that would make his invention that much more useful.
Well, and there are a lot of these sleights of hand, and they all have some... there's some differences between them, but another one that comes to mind is, well, everyone knows that VAERS isn't reliable, that the, you know, Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System isn't reliable.
Like, oh, well then what are we using?
Oh, we don't have anything but that?
Like, okay.
If we accept the, well, everyone knows that initial, like, you can ignore the man behind the curtain part of the argument, there's almost always a, like, well then, who?
Or what?
Or, you know, on what basis do you know that?
You know, they did exactly this thing to me on the mice, too.
Every time I tried to raise this issue about, hey, you've created an evolutionary environment in your mouse breeding colonies that has created mice that are lying to you and telling you that drugs are safe, right?
I got back.
It's amazing how often people were like, everybody knows the mice are broken.
And it's like, look, first of all, if everyone knows the mice are broken and you're using them for drug safety testing, then that's on you.
Second of all, there's no reason they have to be broken this way.
I can tell you how to fix the evolutionary environment in those colonies, and the point is you're not interested because you just feel like, well, I'm in the know like everybody else, you know, and you're on the fringe.
No, the fringe is in the center of the goddamn carpet.
Well, and again, I mean, it's a social argument as opposed to an argument about reality or about science, right?
Like, you're telling me something I already knew, maybe, but two things, right?
Like, you were in fact telling them You were telling them something they already knew, but with so much more precision that you actually had a solution for it.
And the idea that because they knew something in that territory in advance doesn't clear them of the responsibility for therefore basing all of their science on a bad model.
Well, I was telling them something that they could plausibly dismiss as something they knew.
They didn't really know it, right?
The fact of the telomere elongation, A, which didn't have to happen, that was the result of them not realizing that a colony is an evolutionary environment and not realizing that it was going to have a particular effect.
But the point is, yes, all models are imperfect.
Right?
A mouse is not a person.
There are going to be ways in which a mouse is an imperfect model for people.
We all know that.
The fact that it's broken in a particular way, especially a solvable way, right?
You have to be a fool to dismiss the insight into how it's broken, because if you could fix it, you know, if everybody knows the mice are broken, then wouldn't it be cool to have some mice that were less broken?
Right?
You know?
So anyway, it's an interesting... I guess the point is it's all Specific versions of a very generic game, right?
The powerful people are constantly fringing their detractors, right?
No matter how central those detractors are in the case of, you know, Corey, Teslauri, Peter McCullough, Robert Malone.
But anyway, that's a process of like forcibly painting someone as a fringe when that's not not what they are okay so let's try to connect this up to some some other stuff all right so the weird thing is and this surprised me at the time I'm I had numerous conversations with people who had not taken a public position but privately were suspicious about LabLeak.
As effectively we were winning the argument on LabLeak, right?
I had numerous conversations.
This is a little bit of a surprise that we're winning.
Usually the enemy is so powerful that even if you win the argument hands down, you don't win the perception of the argument.
Right, because it is so capable of wielding its propaganda machine to prevent recognition, you know, as it's done with the mouse delimiter thing, for example, right?
I haven't won that argument anywhere except analytically.
But okay, so here's what's happened with LabLeak.
Like, Lab Leak went from a stigmatizable fringe to something unignorable where Jon Stewart signaled, hey, it's safe for normal people to see normal things with their regular eyes and, you know, call a spade a spade or whatever it is.
And now it's taken this weird reversal, right?
Where suddenly as the world has moved on to thinking about Ukraine and not thinking about COVID so directly, there have been, there's an emergence of new papers arguing that actually the puzzle has been solved and it is a natural origin via the wet market, right?
So Zach, would you put up the Forbes article I sent you?
So is it not going to turn out to be those frozen ferret badger stick popsicles?
Or is it going to be those?
Because I was sort of excited about the prospect of those maybe entering the market.
Not that market, but you know, maybe... These papers are not completely clear.
Okay.
So anyway, if you'll... So here we have a classic version of the middle ground scramble that we talked about.
Maybe two months ago.
So the middle ground scramble being people who had not nailed the issue of the lab leak now emerging to carve out a middle ground position.
And in any case, here's a great example in Forbes.
And anyway, if you scroll down to the end of it, Zach, you'll see covers the three papers that have recently emerged Back up.
Back up.
I think it might even be the next article.
Well, anyway, I'm not going to waste... Okay, yep, stop.
Go back down a little bit.
See, first paper by George Gao.
Okay, so there are three papers that are being pointed to as suggesting, hey, finally we've solved the problem, and it turns out That it was the wet market all along, right?
Now, these papers are not – the first one is arguably substantive, but it's not meaningful.
It doesn't reach the conclusion that is derived from it.
Well, actually, this is the first time I've seen this Forbes article, and I haven't looked at the Gow et al.
paper, but according to this Forbes article, The Gao et al.
paper says that no virus was detected in the animal swabs covering 18 species of animals in the market, and quote, in other words, the virus was found at the marketplace, but not in any of the animals, suggested that infected people walking through the market were the source of those positive samples.
Where did those people get the virus?
This paper doesn't answer that question.
Like, for... Right.
I'm trying to swear, but like...
People in the city where the first cases are publicly recognized to have been, which is practically across the street from the laboratory, were infected.
That is no kind of smoking gun with regard to origins at the market.
People were walking through a market and were infected, and there's no evidence of the stuff anywhere else.
Yeah, no, it's nothing.
In the market.
But then, okay, so that's the George Gao paper.
So what about these other two papers?
Did they do it?
Could you scroll down just a little bit?
Okay, so these other two papers, interestingly, do not nail down what is claimed here either.
And in fact, interestingly, Who would you expect to be a co-author on both of these?
Can't be Peter Daszak, because that would be spotted too easily.
It's going to be, what, Christian Anderson?
Christian Anderson.
Right.
So Christian Anderson.
All right, I hear you asking, what is a Christian Anderson?
Christian Anderson is the guy who was caught red-handed in Fauci's email exchanges.
What?
It's not the Ferret Badgers, it's the Raccoon Dogs.
Raccoon Dogs, right.
Well, the thing is, I don't know if you've ever been to the Wuhan Seafood Market, but you get the Ferret Badger popsicles and the Raccoon Dog steaks from the same vending machine.
Yeah, that'll do it.
All right, so Zach, could you put up the Fauci email response to Christian Anderson?
Okay, perfect.
So here is, so this is an email from Fauci to Anderson just saying, thanks Christian, talk soon on the call.
But it has the email to which he is responding.
This is Christian Anderson's email to Anthony Fauci.
25 months ago.
Who he calls Tony.
26 months ago.
And the key thing is at the end of the letter here, where he says, I should mention that after discussions earlier today, Eddie, Bob, Mike, and myself all find the genome of SARS-CoV-2 inconsistent with expectations from evolutionary theory.
That is Christian Anderson in a private email telling Anthony Fauci, uh, this looks like it came from a lab.
Okay, now put up the proximal origins paper.
I believe it did.
All right, well then I will just tell you about the Proximal Origins.
You could plug Proximal Origins into a search engine, not Google.
But in any case, the Proximal Origins paper is Christian Anderson's paper.
It's co-authored with a number of other people, in which he, after having privately said to Anthony Fauci, hey the genome of this virus is inconsistent with evolutionary theory, In the proximal origins paper, which you don't really have entirely here, you've got a reference to it.
Click the DOI.
Yep, there it is.
Okay, um, so let us... To the editor, and then you've got a bunch of stuff here about the coronavirus.
Here at the end of the second paragraph it says, our analysis clearly show that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus.
Now this is Christian Anderson lying.
Okay, and let me tell you why I say lying.
So we've talked about this paper before, but if you would scroll back up a sec, I'd just like to see when this is dated.
So this is dated just about exactly two years ago.
That email interchange that we saw was from January 31st and February 1st.
Usually, of course, it would take a lot longer than six weeks even to get published, but this is a pandemic, whatever.
But we have less than six weeks, or just about six weeks, between what is now a publicly available email saying, inconsistent with basically a natural origin according to what we know about evolution, and a coming out Coming out guns blazing, saying this is natural, it's inconsistent with a laboratory construct or purposely manipulated virus.
Now, people can learn a lot of things.
Data can show up.
Anderson has been asked to explain his reversal, and he has not compellingly done so.
But even I leave open the possibility that his perspective could have evolved.
What I don't leave open the possibility of is that he could have written this paper and not understood the way in which it was misleading.
Okay?
So, what the paper argues, as we have discussed once or twice before on Dark Horse, Is that this virus has to have come from nature because we scientists don't know enough to have basically written the edits that make it so effective at invading human cells.
His point is, look, we're just not that good, right?
Now, the reason that that is not just an error, but is clearly a lie, is that we have another mechanism for improving something like a virus, right?
We use evolution to solve problems that we don't know enough to solve directly, right?
We use serial passaging to get evolution to favor variants that can infect things we wouldn't know how to describe the solution to.
And so, basically the point is, What isn't in that paper is the proximal origins paper is any analysis that says this didn't come from a lab with serial passaging used as the mechanism to generate it.
Well, here we have actually the last sentence of the paper.
You can show my screen if you want, Zach, because I just pulled up the paper on my computer in a PDF form.
Irrespective final sentence of the Anderson et al 2020, March 17th, 2020 paper on proximal origins of SARS-CoV-2.
"Irrespective of the exact mechanisms by which SARS-CoV-2 originated via natural selection, the ongoing surveillance of pneumonia in humans and other animals is clearly of utmost importance." Via natural selection is effectively doing very, very heavy lifting there.
And it always does, of course.
But what will not be obvious to most readers of this paper, and what I don't think would have been obvious to me five years ago, is that he can mean there entirely zoonotic origin, or he can mean natural selection through serial passaging in a lab.
No, I think he has to mean natural selection in the wild, that artificial selection.
I think it's covered.
I don't think it's covered, but in any case, he clearly lies in this paper by saying that this has to have had a natural origin by virtue of the fact that we don't know enough to have written it, okay?
That clearly elides what he and others in this field absolutely knew, which is that they had other mechanisms at their disposal.
And what Christian Anderson himself clearly knew in his email exchange with Fauci, where he says that the genome is inconsistent with expectation from evolutionary theory.
So to find him now as co-author on these late emerging reversals, right?
Two of these three late emerging reversal papers, right?
So now you're talking about the papers that were cited in the Forbes article.
How are they reversals of his position?
They are reversals of the acceptance that lab leak was... so the mainstream accepted that lab leak was a viable explanation.
Many of us had recognized that it was the explanation to which all of the evidence which pointed in any direction actually pointed.
But they're not reversals for him.
No, no.
He is returning to his original position.
My point is the narrative... Sorry, I just... I don't... I don't see how this is an inconsistency on his part.
This feels like it's very consistent.
It's not.
Okay.
The inconsistency is the world moved on and it stopped fighting us on LabLeak because it kept losing.
I mean, Christian Anderson literally left Twitter.
He was a laughingstock, right, for having written that proximal origins paper.
He disappeared for months from Twitter.
And the point is the world moves on to Ukraine and it's like, let's go back and get that LabLeak thing.
It can't be lab leak because it vindicates too many voices that we don't want vindicated, right?
Well, I mean, I think maybe more important to many people than vindicating voices that were right is that if lab leak, if the last two years can be blamed on, yes, extraordinarily bad policy that may have been intentionally bad,
But more ultimately than that, this kind of research, which indeed, at least within the U.S., Obama put a hiatus on and then it just got shunted over to China.
By Fauci.
Under the direction of Fauci.
Then really the whole world should be expected to say, at the very least, no more of this.
No more of this.
And, you know, that is part, there are all sorts of reasons that we need, that it's actually totally relevant from a public health perspective, from a virology perspective, from both individual and population level responses to this perspective.
Whether or not this was a naturally occurring zoonotic virus versus something that was created sort of chimera-like in a lab, but it also has specific ramifications for whether or not this kind of research should be allowed to continue at all.
Well, it's even stronger than you're stating it because really there are two interpretations and they're polar opposites, right?
Two interpretations of what?
of the pandemic.
If the pandemic emerged from the Wuhan Institute, right?
And then if you take my analysis, for example, from my UnHerd article, where I said, actually, this was a jump that was unlikely to happen without human help, right?
Then the point is, you must not do this research, because this research is the most likely source of such a pandemic, and maybe by orders of magnitude, right?
If, on the other hand, this emerged from nature, then they get to make the argument that they made that made this happen in the first place, which is we have no choice but to do this research.
In fact, with respect to SARS-CoV-2, we hadn't put our foot on the gas hard enough.
We weren't ahead enough to do anything useful with SARS-CoV-2, and that's because we hadn't done enough of this research, right?
And so the point is those It's one or the other of these worlds.
And for those of us who believe that what we've got is a laboratory origin and a large, unlikely-to-be-jumped gap between nature and humans, the point is, oh boy, somehow we have to Not only not do this research, we have to not allow this research because a pandemic, potentially a much worse one, could emerge from a lab quite easily, right?
So, anyway, that's where we are.
So, in effect, they are resurrecting the structures.
Oh, I wanted to connect one more thing here, which is we talked a week or two ago.
About the fact that the quote-unquote peer review system that we have, the system of grant-getting and therefore backscratching, reciprocal backscratching, that exists in the publication apparatus and in the grant-getting apparatus, turns scientists, it trains them to be salesmen.
And the basic point is what you're getting, as you point out, is a sales pitch for future gain of function research, right?
And it's happening basically at the moment when the world, like we all understood that it was not okay to laugh at the lab leak hypothesis, right?
And then Ukraine happened, and then papers emerge, and people may get the vague sense that yes, for a while we thought it might have been a lab leak, but then it turned out that it wasn't.
There was, wasn't there that scientific work, you know?
That actually did show that it was the market.
And of course, that work doesn't exist.
And, you know, I don't know why they didn't keep Christian Anderson's name off these papers.
It's too obvious.
But, you know, he's there.
The guy who reversed himself, you know, didn't say in his Proximal Origins paper what he had said to Anthony Fauci, right, is on these things.
And, final point, This isn't just Lab League, right?
Who is Christian Anderson's boss at the Scripps Institute?
I don't know.
It's Eric Topol.
Who's that?
I know.
Yes, you do know.
Eric Topol has made the rounds on early treatment and vaccine safety and effectiveness.
He's been a great champion of these vaccines, right?
Not exactly a champion of early treatment, however.
No, quite the opposite.
And he went very directly after us on Sam Harris's podcast, I believe.
I can't remember the exact quote, but I think he called me a villain of some kind.
But in any case, the point is, look... You're a piss-poor villain, man.
Yeah, I'm not great at it.
No.
But, you know... You just can't manage to stay on the side of darkness.
Yeah.
Try as you might, and you don't even try.
All right, I'm going to think about that later.
There were a couple of reversals in there.
But anyway, the point is, you've got some powerful structure.
I don't know what job it's doing, but I can see the symptoms.
The symptoms involve creating an artificial fringe where there isn't one.
...involves making sure not to vindicate people who were right early as they embarrass the mainstream, which is too corrupt to get things right, at least publicly, right?
It's the same game again and again.
I'm sorry.
I mean, nothing to do with what you're talking about, for those watching.
It's just a dog just knocked over a piece of art, shook herself off, wandered off.
I'm beginning to think she's in on it.
She also makes a very poor villain, however.
Yeah.
The worst.
Being a Labrador and all.
Yes.
There's just no pinning anything to her.
Yeah.
Oh, so I guess there is one last piece as I'm connecting things together.
You're going to be sorry you asked me to do that.
You said you wanted to.
Well, I did at the end, but I'm doing it at the beginning, which is making it a mess.
Well, we're closing in on the end at this point.
All right.
Zach, can you put up the New York Times article?
Which, what's the subject?
The New York Times article is on the closely related subject of Hunter Biden's laptop.
You don't have it?
Okay, so let me just tell you that the New York Times this week acknowledged that Hunter Biden's laptop is indeed the genuine article, right?
Signaling that it is now fine for people to discuss in polite company the awkward situation of Hunter Biden being a I don't know, a crazed maniac.
Point of order.
Yep.
I don't know, two, three episodes ago, you brought to everyone's attention the new formal definitions and descriptions of mis, dis, and malinformation.
Yep.
That were published in, gosh, I don't remember.
The DHS.
The Department of Homeland Security, obviously.
And what I didn't see in the descriptions of mis, dis, and malinformation, which are keeping us very safe.
Oh, so safe.
Was a description of at what point having had a piece of information, or indeed a person, declared to be a purveyor of mis, dis, or malinformation.
When reversals happen, as apparently has happened here, and I know I have been avidly paying no attention to this story, but what's the protocol?
Like, what is the process for becoming unmiss, undiss, or unmal-informed, or to no longer, you know, to have said something?
It's not like that.
Oh you you have missed the glory of malinformation Because here's the thing.
Let's say you take the laptop story.
We'll need a reminder So malinformation is it's true, but we don't like it right now.
It's true, but it causes you to mistrust the government Okay.
Right?
Okay, so check me out here.
Do you remember back during the election of 2020?
Which one?
Yeah.
The recent presidential election.
You remember that fella from The Apprentice was running against that fella who's lost his marbles?
Indeed.
Right.
Okay.
Some of us at the time, you will remember, were quite alarmed about the Hunter Biden Laptop, and the reason we were alarmed was that there were some remarkable things there.
A, it suggested a kind of out of controlness right there in the first family, but that's obviously not the presidential candidate.
But B, much more importantly, it suggested that Hunter was selling his father's influence.
Right.
He was peddling influence.
Where was he peddling influence?
Ukraine, right?
And so the point is, wow, this is really dangerous.
You remember what we were guilty of at the time?
It was misinformation because the whole idea that this was really Hunter Biden's laptop and that those things were true, that was Russian disinformation.
Okay, now the New York Times acknowledges it was not Russian.
People saying this were engaged in misinformation because they had fallen prey to Russian disinformation, but now it turns out it's malinformation because it is true, but it's still bad for the government.
Now you're getting it.
Okay, so the point is, when this was misinformation, according to the DHS's modern taxonomy of terrorism, which surely they had a private version of back When this was misinformation, because the Russians had planted this laptop with false stuff on it so that we would believe it, right?
Yes.
When it was misinformation, it was terrorism, okay?
Now that it turns out, according to the New York Times, the laptop is genuine, it is malinformation and therefore terrorism.
And still terrorism.
Right, exactly.
Now, why is the New York Times not guilty of terrorism?
So, the addition of malinformation to the taxonomy.
Yeah.
It allows for there to be no mechanism by which you have to slide between categories, because you can keep track if you want to, but regardless, you're definitely guilty of terrorism.
Sweet.
I told you this was going to happen.
You're putting it all together.
The fact is you can't be resurrected for having had the Hunter Biden laptop story correct back during the election.
Still a terrorist.
Right, exactly.
You will not be vindicated, right?
Because we don't vindicate terrorists because they're bad people.
Yeah.
Right?
Okay.
Otherwise they wouldn't be terrorists.
Yeah, exactly.
Or something.
Right, or something.
So anyway, the real mystery is why the New York Times is not going to be, I don't know, closed down over its airing of this Hunter Laptop story, which No, I mean, because, and I don't have the taxonomy, I don't have access to the inside thinking of the DHS, of course.
I'm not up to their level.
But because the New York Times was working in the interest of the government back when it turns out to have been spreading misinformation, That was the opposite of malinformation, which gave it a pass.
It was like, you go right to go, you pass go, you collect your $200, and that's going to protect you.
When engaging in anti-malinformation, you have a get out of misinformation free card.
I believe you have just grabbed the brass ring, because what you have effectively done, as you have said, the only cure for malinformation is anti-malinformation, right?
This is a Kendiism, but extended into a new realm.
Kendiism, yes.
And I think the New York Times is inherently anti-malinformation.
And inherently Kendiist.
That they are.
This has gotten silly.
Well, you know, the DHS is a silly organization.
A little bit too silly.
What better moment to talk about trans athletes?
I knew we were going to get there.
Yeah.
Can we wrap it into that brass ring moment though?
That's the question.
Yeah, well you said you saw a connection.
So far we've done great on the connecting stuff.
Yeah, okay.
Well, Leah Thomas.
Born and went through puberty and indeed competed in swimming competitions as male.
Just won the, just won one or more NCAA swimming championships in the women's divisions.
The New York Times, again I chose the wrong week to switch to Brave and to, oh here it is, here it's gonna be.
Here we have the New York Times.
You can show my screen here.
Leah Thomas wins an NCAA swimming title.
There Leah is.
Before I say anything more about this, I would like to know what the hell the University of Pennsylvania is thinking, and what this person's parents think about this remarkable transformation.
From loser to winner is really what the transformation is, because there hasn't been that much transformation of the underlying maleness of this person.
What we find in this article is...
Thomas' triumph in Atlanta—indeed, her very presence at the Swimming Championships as a contender—came amid a far larger storm, particularly in statehouses and right-wing media about sports participation by transgender girls and women.
It is incredible, it is utterly incredible that recognition of a, depending upon how you count, 500 million to 2 billion with a B year old reality can be dismissed by the New York Times as the purview of right-wing media.
Why?
Why would the New York Times?
The Grey Lady?
Is that what it's called?
Yeah, yeah.
Why would the New York Times, which once prided itself on being the source of news for Americans, at least the source of print news for Americans, pride itself on abandoning all reason?
And I mean, this, the binary nature of sex in our lineage, which is at least 500 million years old, is recognizable by everyone.
It is recognizable even if you're a cat who doesn't have all of his parts anymore.
He's still a boy.
Yeah.
He's still a boy.
And this – oh, sorry, I didn't realize that was still on, but you can keep me on here, Zach.
Let me just read one more excerpt from this New York Times article.
Thomas, again, born, went through puberty, competed as male.
Thomas and her rise, though, forced the typically plodding NCAA to grapple more quickly with a subject that scientists are still examining, and its consequences for sports competitions.
Comprehensive research in athletes is still lacking, but early studies suggest suppressing testosterone in transgender women decreases muscle mass and hemoglobin levels, reducing how much oxygen can be carried through the bloodstream.
I have a few things to say here.
Yeah.
Inclusion should outweigh competition.
but transgender women may still have more muscle mass than their cisgender peers even after three years.
As some insist that no amount of testosterone suppression can undo the physiological changes linked to male puberty, like taller height and larger hands and feet, others dispute that transgender women have a built-in advantage and have argued that inclusion should outweigh competition.
I have a few things to say here.
Inclusion should outweigh competition.
This is sport.
If you want to go swim with your buddies and there's some question about whether or not you want someone to participate, you can talk about whether or not in this case inclusion should win the day.
But in sport, it's about competition.
It's not about, hey, I want to compete because guess why?
I know I will win because I'm going to be cheating by competing in that division.
So here are just a few.
There's abundant, abundant evidence here.
But I happen to have, you can you can show my screen here, I happen to have written an article back in 2019, over three years ago, for my Patreon that I have opened up.
It's publicly available.
Should trans women compete against women in professional sports?
No.
And I joke here that this is a short article.
I did go on, though, to make a number of arguments, and I recommend that you follow them, but one of the things I do is also point to this table, which it turns out—here, let me see if I can find it—is in Okay, Zach, just give me my screen back for a second while I find the table in question.
Oh, boy.
Nothing is working.
Oh, that's snakes.
That's totally different, isn't it?
Okay, well, I don't... unfortunately it got closed when my computer crashed earlier, so I'm gonna go back in here and just show you this here.
I will link to the actual paper that this is from.
You can show my screen here.
Sex Differences that Suggest Male Design for Combat in Humans.
This is from If Memory Serves a Sorry, 2012 paper called The Importance of Physical Strength to Human Males.
And just some of the ways that males and females are different is that males have greater upper body strength, taller bodies, heavier bodies, higher basal metabolic rates, faster reaction times, thicker bones in the jaw, faster mental rotation and spatial visualization.
That's the bit where you get shown something, you're asked what it would happen, what would it look like if you rotate it 90 degrees to the left, something like that.
More accurate throwing, more accurate blocking of thrown objects, more interest in the practice of combat skills, stronger bones, greater bone density specifically in the arms, on and on and on and on.
And more recently, and here you can show, yeah you're still on my screen, good, Here we have this paper published in Sports Medicine in, I think it went online first in 2020 and it was officially published in 2021, a review by Emma Hilton and Tommy Lundberg called Transgender Women in the Female Category of Sport, Perspectives on Testosterone Suppression and Performance Advantage.
A very compelling review of all of the evidence which finds, to no one's surprise if they are thinking carefully about this, that taking a single metric for whether or not you are male or female, which is to say circulating levels of testosterone at the moment, And deciding that that's the thing that you're going to count and use to decide whether or not you're male or female and use to decide whether or not you have any advantage is woefully inaccurate.
I mean, inadequate.
And frankly, if you were born male and if you went through puberty male and you have recently been on cross-sex hormones but retain Basically every other manifestation of maleness competing against women is cheating.
That's just true.
Alright, I've got a number of things I want to add.
Yeah.
One, I always... We are facing an epidemic of sophistry across every domain.
I mean, it really is, right?
And the point is, I hear you making points that shouldn't require, they don't need to be made, frankly.
I mean, look, you can win this argument in one move if you're held to a reasonable standard, right?
Does anything that we do in the medical practice of transitioning males to trans-femaleness Change the height of the individuals who have been transitioned.
It doesn't.
Right?
Or the skeletal structure.
Maybe bone density.
My point is even just one parameter that the fact is, you know, were you a tall guy?
Yes.
Are you going to be a tall woman?
We don't know.
Yes, we do.
In fact, you're going to be an exceptionally tall woman because you were a tall guy and you're not going to get shorter.
I mean, it may be Maybe you get a little shorter, but you don't get a lot shorter.
So anyway, my point is, this is obvious, right?
This is really an emperor has no clothes moment.
Is it fair for somebody to go through puberty as male, declare themselves female, have procedures, whatever they are, and then join women's sports?
No.
Simply no, because one thing we can say is this doesn't fully reverse the transitions that male puberty causes the body to go through, right?
It's a simple, simple conclusion.
Pre-puberty, boys and girls have much more similar both interests and skill sets.
Right.
Now, second thing is, oh, the New York Times is interested in the question about how we, you know, balance the desire to be inclusive in sport with the uncertainty of the evidence as scientists mull over this question, right?
Follow the science, New York Times!
Find better scientists!
Any scientist who's confused by this isn't really good at their job.
Go look at the Hilton and Lundberg paper.
Emma Hilton and Colin Wright and I have written a couple of pieces together, so I know her and she's terrific.
But one of the things that we had talked about behind the scenes was people would ask us, what's the primary literature?
What's the scientific literature on the idea that men and women are different?
Like, it's actually too obvious ever to have been written down that way.
Yes.
What is the scientific evidence that plants are inferior at warfare?
I don't have any.
Well, if you can't produce a piece of primary literature, it must not be true.
It must not be true.
And furthermore, I'm really hoping that you have a randomized controlled trial for that.
You better.
You better have a randomized controlled trial, because otherwise, you know, the trees that are best at warfare could, I don't know, something.
But okay, so, you know, the New York Times is wrestling, it is grappling with the question inclusion versus scientific certitude. - Oh boy are they wrestling. - Which is total sophistry because I would point out that the very nature of women's sports makes clear that inclusion is not the goal, right?
Why are men not ordinarily included in women's sports?
Right?
Because there is a value in having sports in which women can actually compete on a level playing field with other women and not face the biological disadvantage that sexual dimorphism has exposed them to.
What about the woman who came in fourth in the race that Leah Thomas won?
Right.
Why isn't she included on the podium where she belongs?
Exactly.
Now, I'm also, you asked a question about what Leah Thomas' parents think.
Yeah, I did.
And you know, in general, I don't, I don't love that sort of approach.
But in this case, I really do.
I really do wonder actually legitimately.
Well, I found myself in a different place on this story, which was wondering about Leah Thomas.
And here's the point.
Let me just be clear about this.
We have said many times when we have discussed transness on this channel that we do not regard transness as inherently a malfunction, right?
There's too much transness in too many populations And there are long-standing traditions about how it is addressed.
Now, that is not to say anything about medical transition or anything like that.
However... Or the rate at which it is prevalent now in the West.
Right.
Which could be the result of all kinds of disruptive influences.
But it does not inherently malfunction.
Okay?
But here's the point.
What does it say about a person that they go through life male, they go through puberty male, right?
They go through competitions male.
They go through competitions male.
They then, let's say that they genuinely feel they're born in the wrong body.
Fine.
Do they not look at their victory in a competition like this and feel embarrassment?
Right?
The point is, look, okay, so you're trans.
Why are you picking a realm where You have an advantage from your having transitioned rather than having been born in the other body.
Why wouldn't you pick a realm where you're not cheating and everybody knows that you're not cheating, right?
So I guess the question is what is the state of mind of somebody who could actually go home with a medal from an event and feel good about it, right?
I don't understand the feeling good about it and it's not that I, you know, I want people who Experience transness, whatever it is, to find their true selves and to feel good about it, right?
But this oughtn't make anyone feel good, right?
That's right.
This is cheating and, you know, getting a medal through cheating, you shouldn't look at the medal and feel good.
Right.
No, you should not.
And the fact that a good part of the world can see what's wrong here, is one thing.
And then there's another part of the world that is somehow willfully blinding itself because it's been told that in order to be a good person, that's what you do.
In order to be a good person, you move the syringes out of your Twitter bio and move in the Ukrainian flag.
In order to be a good person, you talk about how amazing it is that Leah Thomas beat out a bunch of women.
In swimming, even though it's utterly obvious that this person would do so.
There's no sportsmanship there.
There's, you know, this person was a competent enough swimmer to be doing middlingly well as a male swimmer until basically yesterday.
Of course Leah Thomas is going to win against women.
And if it were true that, it is not true, but if it were true that there was some mechanism for reversing all of the advantages that come through male physiology and male puberty,
Then there would be a well-defined literature that would describe the pattern so that we would know how many years had to pass with what kinds of therapies before the advantage had been neutralized and you could join women's sports.
And the reason that there is no well-defined literature and the reason that the New York Times finds itself Grappling with the question of scientists who can't figure this one out is because this is political.
It is not scientific, right?
The inability to get to the answer is the point and you know, and I guess how many different realms do we need to see nonsense masquerading as science before we say, oh my god, what has taken over our scientific system and what kind of danger is implied by that breakage?
Yeah, and I guess I finished that Patreon article that I showed by saying, also, I will call people trans women.
I have avoided doing that in this particular case, because this looks like transitional sophistry at some level.
But what I won't do is call women cis women.
Or men, cis men, although it's not really that surprising that that's not where this fight is taking place.
And I will also not say, nor do I believe that, given, again, the 500 million to 2 billion years of evolution that is part of our lineage, that the statement, trans women are women, is true.
Women are women.
Trans women is a new category.
And it does not have a 500 million to 2 billion year history at all.
It is a new category.
And we can be kind and compassionate and
and respectful without throwing out reality and being unkind, uncompassionate, and disrespectful to all of the women who are being hurt by this, the children who are being harmed, the, you know, it goes on and on and on, and society, and I just, our reckoning with reality that takes a hit every time we are told to utter one of these completely wrongheaded and insane sentences like trans women are women.
Yeah, now I think I would say my policy is I will treat Trans women as women or trans men as men for every purpose where that does not harm somebody else and the basic point is at the point you get to things like prisons or sports Then we have to we have to look at the reality now.
I would point out I went to Leah Thomas's Wikipedia page and it It has this shocking feature, which I would recommend people go to it and read it.
It's not the first time I've seen it, where the thing is written in such a way so as to tread carefully around the modern convention of not quote-unquote misgendering, right?
And so the point is, it is cleverly written.
Even from before.
It's like the sex equivalent of dead naming.
It's like dead sexing.
Right, exactly.
It's dead sexing.
And so what they do is in places where it would be, you know, obviously this person has a history as a boy and then as a man.
And competed as a boy and a man.
Right.
And so instead of saying, you know... And didn't win races.
He competed, blah, blah, blah, then transitioned, now she competes, right?
That would be a literal, if we accept that she is a she, that is a literal description.
Instead, what they do is where they would say he, they say Thomas, right?
The last name.
Right so as not to be so as to be gender-neutral and then at the point that the person has transitioned they say she and even worse than this in the case of Chelsea Manning Right?
I've seen the New York Times, Rolling Stone Magazine, and I believe Wikipedia all engage the fiction that Chelsea Manning delivered documents to Julian Assange.
Which did not happen.
That is historically false.
Right?
Right.
So here's the question.
If this is all so clear… Because… Because… I can't even remember his name at the time.
Bradley.
Bradley Manning did that, and later transitioned in prison, maybe, even.
Right?
Came out in prison.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, it is… It's like the opposite of reality, and it does, once again, feel very postmodernist.
It's What I currently believe is not only reality, but it has always been reality.
And the fact that I didn't always believe it doesn't change anything, which also leaves me open to changing my mind tomorrow, at which point that has always been reality.
And if you believe me today and then don't update your understanding of my belief of reality tomorrow, in keeping with my understanding, then you've slighted me.
It's a microaggression.
For God's sake, it might be a megaaggression.
Who knows?
It's actually, it's a kind of weird immunity from hypocrisy, or from being, you know, convicted of hypocrisy, right?
To change your mind, you should acknowledge that you've changed your mind.
To be able to go backwards and say, oh, I always, I always believed that, or I always was that, is nonsense.
And this actually comes to the point for me, which is the solution to this problem.
Wikipedia should absolutely be steadfast in being able to write.
I mean, Wikipedia is a dumpster fire at the moment.
Yes.
But Wikipedia of old that aspired to a neutral perspective should simply write stories that track the person's presentation, their gender, at the moment that incidents happen.
Bradley Manning gave documents to Julian Assange in prison.
Bradley Manning came out and said he was Chelsea Manning and has been treated as Chelsea Manning ever since.
That should be what's written.
And the idea that we can't write that because we are treading lightly around sensitivities says that we are not dealing with objectivity.
And I think the solution to this involves rational trans people confronting this.
And actually, we saw this a bit.
Caitlyn Jenner came out against the competition of trans women in women's sports.
And the basic point is, look, I'm defending women.
It's the right thing to do.
You know, uh, uh, why am I forgetting, uh, Buck Angel.
Yeah, Trampaw.
Trampaw has also been very good on this issue, and so, look.
No, there are a number, there are a number of people, most not quite as, as public as them, but I, I know some trans people too who are actively, like, going to, for instance, um, you know, state, um, state hearings, trans people saying, Trans people should not be competing as the sex that they were not born to in sport, trans women.
And it's powerful because these are people who actually do have the, yes, lived experience of the pain and horror of the gender dysmorphia that actually causes some very tiny number of people to transition.
And the people who are abusing the ability to transition and, for example, compete against, you know, women.
Those people are robbing trans people who are just trying to live a life with extra complexities.
Exactly.
Right?
And so I really do hope that there is an emergence of, you know, a wise consensus amongst trans people who spot how crazy this is.
Indeed.
We have gone way longer than I thought we should, but I have one last thing, if I may.
Boy, I actually have five last things, but let's do this one, actually two, very quickly.
Because we take on Woke and COVID-Woke all the time, and many confuse Woke with being on the left, because that is the claim, I found a really stupid anti-feminist right-wing take on Twitter this week that I thought I'd share.
Wonderful.
Because, you know, why not point out the stupid wherever it shows up?
So here it is.
Zach, just briefly, if a woman hyphenates or doesn't take her husband's last name when she gets married, she doesn't respect him.
So you can take that down now so I can have my notes back.
I really hope that's not true.
Right.
There's a lot of places that I could go here, but this feels just as shallow and daft a point as the idea that if white women have a food cart in which they make burritos that they learned how to make when they were in Mexico, they're engaging in cultural appropriation and to be shut down.
And yes, that did happen in Portland a few years ago.
Yes, they did have to shut down their business and they're done, right?
And boy, when I went looking into that story, I'm like, wow, you know, they admitted to looking at what the Mexican women were doing at some points when the women weren't totally interested in having them look, and so maybe they were actually thieving.
It's like, okay, I'd like to know more about that.
How come I'm only finding that in these stories that have already concluded that any time People from a different lineage make food of one lineage, and that's cultural appropriation.
That's dumb.
This is also dumb.
This is shallow and daft.
It doesn't recognize the many, many ways that human beings have lived, have decided to track lineage, And is it true that in a culture that has been patrilineal, which is just to say that we tend to track lineage through the male line, that it is easier if everyone follows the same naming conventions?
Yeah.
Yeah, it would be, right?
However, in an era in which women are recognized as having as much capacity, and always of course have, but actually have just about as much opportunity, if not absolutely as much opportunity, if not in some places more opportunity at this point, than men to actually find the way that they want to make a difference in the world, be it, you know, creative, analytical, exploring, writing, healing, whatever it is,
The idea that one has to change their name from that of their father to that of their husband upon getting married is archaic and is disruptive of a woman's ability to make a life in the world.
It has nothing to do with not respecting the man that she is marrying.
Just as a man taking, you know, just as, well, there's a lot of ways it has nothing to do with disrespecting the man that she's marrying.
It is a recognition of a woman being a complete member of the partnership with goals and values and interests that are independent in the world.
That there are now three entities.
There's the man, and there's the woman, and there's the couple.
In our case, we decided that because of the culture that we live in, it was important and valuable to give our children your name.
I think we may have talked about this before, but I don't even remember that we talked about that.
We certainly talked about our names a bit.
And, you know, even considered at some point maybe combining them, but both of our names are ridiculous enough that that was, you know, we're going to end up with Whining or something.
And, you know, it just didn't make any sense, precisely because the idea is, like, you've always been Brett Weinstein, I've always been Heather Hying, and we were going to continue to do that now also in partnership.
But our children have never been anything.
And furthermore, there is evolutionary reason for a patrilineal naming convention with regard to children, which is that in a situation where the children are the genetic children of the mom, I don't have any uncertainty about whether or not I'm their mother.
And I also don't have any uncertainty about whether or not you're the father, but the rest of the world might.
Hey!
They shouldn't.
No, no.
I take your point.
In mammals, this is just simply the nature of the beast.
This is simply it, and so we are signaling to the world the truth, which is that we are a family.
And yeah, I have the name I was born with, but the four of us are a family, and our children have your name, and that therefore raises no questions as it should not.
So, I take this As a simple example of a canonical problem, right?
Used to be that a household involved a man, breadwinner, went out and did things in the world to the extent that somebody was gonna start a sawmill or innovate.
It was likely to be the guy.
The woman was part of a team, but the element of the team teamwork was largely done on the home front.
That's not a fair thing, but that's the way biology set things up.
The modern world... It's not that old.
That pattern is maybe as old as agriculture.
Yep, I would agree, but these naming conventions are Post-agriculture, right?
There are naming conventions that go before that.
But I guess my point is in a world where biology has settled women with domestic work, What you have is a division of labor and a team, and that team has a name, and it made sense in some ways for that name to be the forward-facing part of the team.
Yeah, namedad.
Public-facing.
Public-facing person was the name of the team that was public-facing, and therefore also the name of the team inside.
Right.
And in modern circumstances, largely as a result of birth control, women have been liberated to participate in the world in, you know, innovation and productivity outside the home.
And that's a great thing.
But the point is, It creates a situation in which we do not have a solution for the naming convention that we inherited.
All solutions are bad, right?
Including the solution of everybody keeps their own name, and then the kids have one person's name or the other person's name, right?
Hyphenating... I find myself when I write to the kids' schools or the teachers who don't know me, I'm like, you know, Heather Hying, Zack Weinstein's mom, just in case you were wondering, you know, like, who am I?
Why, you know, why is this random person writing?
When the kid has a different name.
But that's a tiny little cost.
Well, I think the point is, there's a tiny little cost with all solutions.
They're all bad.
Literally.
All of them.
Hyphenating is a bigger cost, I think.
Because it's not sustainable.
Exactly.
Hyphenating is worse.
Choosing one or the other is worse.
It negates the nature of children.
Right?
How you choose one or the other is fraught.
And so the point is, yeah, nobody's got a solution to this.
And the problem with that perspective is that it basically points to one of the solutions and doesn't recognize what's wrong with it.
And what's wrong with it is in a world where both men and women are building reputations in the world, the fact that somebody has to effectively be nominally trans That's not the way it sounds, but the idea that you have to transition your identity at the point that you marry, A, it's arbitrary because marriage isn't what it used to be, right?
Marriage used to be the point at which you start producing children, and some married people don't produce children by choice, and some people have children before they marry, and so the whole system has come apart, and the fact that- It was also much more widely understood to be a permanent condition.
Yeah.
I do think that part of what underlies that, you know, conservative, that wrong conservative take is a recognition that increasingly people get married thinking, if it works, it works, if it doesn't, it doesn't.
And, you know, really it is supposed to be permanent.
And sometimes it can't be, sometimes it doesn't work out.
But there would be an additional cost, for sure.
There would be additional reasons to stay in a marriage if you're like, and I'm now going to go back to the person that I was then in terms of my name.
There are additional problems with actually becoming independent and having a public-facing persona in the world if you might be changing your name all the time.
Yeah, I don't think of it as a permanent condition.
I think of it as a chronic condition.
Do you?
I don't know.
It seems like something to say, but yeah, one way or the other.
Okay, let's just end.
Zach, would you show the picture that I sent you, which is the sign that I saw in Portland this week?
I was walking around a neighborhood – actually, I guess I can mention – in Selwood, and there were all these – actually, take it off for a second.
I'm sorry.
There are all of these places, as we talked about last week, the mask mandate's lifted a week ago today, and there are still a lot of people walking around in masks, even outside some.
Much less outside, but in a lot of stores, and there are still a lot of signs on a lot of stores, including like coffee shops and restaurants, where you would walk in with a mask, sit down, and take it off.
A lot of signs that say masks still required.
Amazing, right?
And I have complained in this space before that you also have a whole lot of signs about equity and inclusion exactly from organizations that are then saying actually no VACs, no entry.
But this is a sign that I saw this week "In amongst other businesses, we do not discriminate," it says, "against any customer based on sex, gender, race, creed, age, vaccinated or unvaccinated.
All customers who wish to patronize are welcome in our establishment." And it was heartening.
It was beyond heartening.
And it's a terrific story, too.
I'm actually just not going to mention it here right now until I talk to them about whether or not they would like me to.
But really, really heartening to see if you're going to say the things that really shouldn't need to be said.
You know, we welcome both men and women, and people of all genders, whatever that might mean.
People of all creeds, which is more or less religion, and vaccinated or unvaccinated.
If you're going to say all that first part, and if you're actually going to mean it, and if you think that it needs to be said, which I would have hoped by now in the history of humans, we wouldn't need to be saying that now.
But if you think it needs to be said, then yes.
Then yes also to decisions about medical history that really have no right no reason for other people to know, much less ask for and care about, especially given the nature of these particular decisions.
Yeah, that is heartening, especially in light of the rate of voluntary maskness in Portland at the moment.
Yeah.
Anyway, maybe that will change over time.
Yeah, indeed.
All right.
We are going to take a break.
We are going to probably curtail the Q&A a fair bit because we went on longer than we were going to.
So, you know, You can ask your questions at www.darkhorsesubmissions.com.
You can do all sorts of good stuff.
You can read our book, you can find us on Patreon, where you have access to the Discord server.
We start off every Q&A with a question from the Discord server, the Dark Horse Discord server, which you get access to on either of our Patreons.
I would remind you to be good to the ones you love, eat good food, and get outside.
