In this 123rd 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 Elon Musk’s twitter play, and the implications for censorship, and the new public square. We discuss the modern impulse to make binaries of things that aren’t (e.g. political opinions), and to reject binaries that are real (e.g. sex). We talk about puberty blockers, and their non-reversibility, a...
Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse Podcast live stream number 120 something...
123. 123.
123.
123.
123, that's a lot.
And you are?
Oh, I am Dr. Brett Weinstein, and watch this, you are Dr. Heather Hine.
Indeed.
Rhymes with flying.
We are here today, your friendly neighborhood evolutionary biologists.
Friendly neighborhood, maybe not your neighborhood, but somebody's.
Yeah, and maybe not friendly to you if you're actively not making sense, but there you go.
All right, yeah, but these people, they make sense, so we're friendly to them.
Yeah, so today we're going to talk a little bit about Elon's Twitter play and creeping hospitalization as predicted by the late, great evolutionary theorist W.D.
Hamilton.
Whether puberty blockers are actually temporary and therefore harmless, and related to that, why we're tolerating porn, and maybe other things if we get to it.
Yeah, other things.
Maybe other things if we get to them.
But let us start with some logistics here.
We have a lot of craziness in our schedule upcoming, and soon, hopefully, there will be a better way of communicating such things, so you can go and look and see what's coming up, but that's not happening yet.
Our next Dark Horse livestream is going to be not this Thursday, but the following Thursday on April 28th, sometime in the afternoon, probably around 4 30 p.m pacific, After that, we'll miss the following Saturday as well.
We'll be back on Saturday, May 7th, and then away for a couple more weeks before coming back to you for nearly back-to-back episodes on Thursday, May 26th, and then May 28th.
So it is Thursday, the 20... April 28th.
April 28th.
is the next time we'll be coming to you.
We got some good stuff coming in that time.
However, we will actually be live streaming to our patrons in the private Q&A before that, so we'll be back on our private Q&A a week from tomorrow, Sunday, April 24th at 11 a.m.
Pacific.
And both of those are going to be off the hook.
That is on the schedule.
Both of what?
Those streams.
The private one and the public Thursday.
Yeah, there were a lot in the public list.
So all of those.
Yes, yes.
I was trying to say something.
All right.
Okay, so next Sunday, if you want to hear from us next weekend, please consider joining me at my Patreon, where we have the Dark Horse private live streams.
And that too will be improved in coming months, but we're not going to say anything more about that just yet.
Now, if you want to riff on something, go for it.
No, no.
Remember the song by the band X, Your Phone's Off the Hook But You're Not?
No.
It's one of the great song titles of all time, and it's lost because we don't put phones on hooks anymore.
But, you know, it is what it is, I guess.
Yeah.
It's kind of harsh, isn't it?
Your phone's off the hook, but you're not.
It's really to the point.
X did that well.
Yeah, they did.
Yeah.
They did.
Yeah.
Harsh.
Harsh, but true.
But fair.
At least clear.
Yeah.
Harsh but true.
All right, so we are, of course, streaming on YouTube and Odyssey.
The chat is live on Odyssey.
You can ask questions for the Q&A to follow this at www.darkhorsesubmissions.com.
Because our schedule is so odd coming up, there may be some of those non-Saturday episodes where we're not doing Q&As, but we are today.
And as always, we will start with a question from the people on our Discord server.
You can get access to that community, which is thriving and lively, by joining either of our Patreons.
And also, Brett has a couple of wonderful conversations each month on his.
So, this last week on Natural Selections, my sub-stack, I posted something that I alluded to last week on Dark Horse about coming of age and what it means in modern times and how Margaret Mead understood it, how many years later Michael Moffat, an anthropologist,
At Rutgers understood it, who was doing kind of a participant observation, acting as an undergraduate, even while he was actually in a tenured professor at Rutgers in a professional, non-awful way.
And I encourage you to go there.
And then, so we're going to be Hopefully not on the internet for a little while here, but I have already posted to land in subscribers' inboxes this Tuesday.
This is free if you want to join me at Natural Selections.
Some of the questions that we alluded to, I think last week as well, were not... yes, actually the next Friday is Earth Day.
And we, not related to Earth Day, but we did a workshop in our Evolution and Ecology Across Latitudes year-long program, which included a lot of domestic fieldwork and also an 11-week study abroad through Ecuador.
And we basically asked students a whole slew of questions, many of which are simple, once you know or once you have derived the answers, and some of which are so complex that no one has the complete answers yet.
But they are all questions about the Earth, questions about the seasons, and the sun, and the moon, and the biota, and the hemispheres, and the tides, and all of this.
And so I have, um, those will, those will, for free subscribers, um, half of those will land in your inbox, um, to, for natural selections on Tuesday, and then I posted, um, a little bit less than half of them for paying subscribers for Wednesday.
They're the kind of puzzles that make your brain last longer.
Exactly.
They're the kind of things, even if you know, like, why are the phases of the moon what they are, figuring out how to describe it, right, will reveal things about what you don't know, or things like, you know, if the moon is full, when does it rise, that kind of thing.
Exactly, and as I was reminded actually looking over those questions that we had given to our students early in this year-long program back in fall of 2015, that we specifically said, You should aim to be able to have an understanding sufficient and a communication style sufficient such that a very smart and curious sixth grader should be able to understand you.
Yes.
And that is an honorable goal.
When you hear people talking Um, about complex things, or about things that they tell you are complex, and you can find no way in.
Sometimes it's because you don't speak the language yet, and you should be able to do some back and forth in order to learn the language that they are using.
And sometimes, too often, it's because they either haven't bothered to or they actually have an interest in not actually speaking in a way that you are capable of understanding, that other people outside of their little tiny intellectual tribe are capable of understanding.
Of course, this is a form of gatekeeping.
This is a form of making sure that the people with the credentials and the authorities can sort of stand over, lord over, tower over everyone else, and thus make decisions on our behalf.
And this is anti-democratic, it's anti-scientific, it's anti-humane, and we of course at Dark Horse are exactly trying to do the opposite, and we did in our classrooms, and we do in our book, Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century.
It's dense sometimes, it's tough going sometimes, but we try to make it accessible because accessibility is not a sign that you're not doing important work.
In fact, failure to be accessible can be a sign that you actually don't really understand what you're doing.
Yeah, it's actually also a great way to make enemies.
Being accessible?
Yes, making things perfectly clear, right?
There's a way in which... Most people aren't seeking to make enemies, though.
That's not really a selling point.
Well, you know, it depends.
You make your own choices in these regards.
But yes, it does make enemies, whether you like it or not.
And, you know, the intelligent six-year-old is actually a higher bar than you would think.
I mean it's high.
Sixth grader.
Sixth grader.
Six year old is a little tough.
We did that with our kids sometimes.
Of course we did, but that's not what we established.
But a kid is prone to hold you to a high standard of clarity and they will find things that you might elide.
You know, in your explanation things you're a little vague on that they will force you to describe.
That's right.
Now we also, while we are not live streaming the following Saturday, at some point in that general milieu there actually will be a Dark Horse episode that drops you with a guest.
We won't say more about it now, but it should be excellent.
It has a little extra complexity in the editing, so I don't want to promise a particular date, but there's one coming.
Keep your eye out.
And I actually wanted to give a shout out also, as you were mentioning, Discord.
We were invited, we can't go, but we have been invited to a gathering.
There are apparently gatherings that are happening.
Our Discord people are arranging to meet in person, which is so cool.
And I ran into somebody at the supermarket and they invited us.
So anyway, here in Portland, there's apparently quite a community.
And we actually, we had dinner with a couple of people who we did not previously know, and I didn't ask in advance, so I'm not going to say anything more about them, but really extraordinary men, and we were just, we're very grateful to so many of you for your being here with us, for being grateful, and for, in this case, allowing us to learn from you as well.
Yep, absolutely.
We should endeavor to stay on their good side, by the way.
I guess without further ado, we have, as usual, three sponsors.
We do not take sponsorships from products that we cannot either personally vouch for or have a particular personal attachment to in some way.
So you can be sure when we are, when that green perimeter is around the screen or you hear that tone leading in and we are actually reading ads, we actually do speak on behalf of these sponsors.
All right.
All right.
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Now this is a weird sponsor for us.
It's a bit of an odd sponsor for us since we don't have any reason to use the product.
So why are we here talking to you about it?
We are proud to be sponsored by Bright Move because it was co-founded in 2004 by the current CEO, David Webb.
Brett's experience with David was that during Unity 2020, He showed up to volunteer, took on a great deal of responsibility and initiative in planning and crafting the technical aspects of the Rank Choice voting platform, which was fantastic.
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Actually, it raises a pretty interesting question, which is how do you know what to trust?
In the case of something where you can't assess the product directly, but you do know that it's produced by somebody who is a stellar human being who has displayed high competence in a similar realm.
Competence and integrity.
Competent, yeah, of a high-quality human being that was wrapped in there.
But yeah, anyway, it's, you know, that's exactly the kind of evidence that I would take as a strong indicator if I was looking for some kind of product I knew nothing about.
Excellent.
So anyway, thanks David.
Okay, you wanted to talk about what you called Elon's Twitter play.
Yeah, Elon's Twitter play.
So there's been a lot going on in the land of Elon, and Elon is a very interesting person, obviously.
He has gotten where he has gotten through some very unusual personal characteristics, but in any case, in recent weeks he has become obviously and publicly interested in the state of Twitter and potentially doing something about it.
So he initially took a substantial stake, became its largest A shareholder was apparently headed to the board, decided not to get on the board, which was interesting.
There was a reason for that.
I'm not sure he has said this exactly, but there was a limit to how much Twitter ownership he could have and be on the board.
And so he decided not to join the board and then announced a plan to effectively acquire Twitter by buying up stock.
43 billion dollars worth or something like this.
In any case, the reaction to this was an all-out freak-out by many, many people and Twitter itself responded by announcing what's called a poison pill strategy.
And the poison pill, so taken from the idea of somebody who doesn't want to be captured, would rather die than be captured, who might take a poison pill so that they can't be tortured and give up information.
The poison pill is a business strategy they started in the 80s or several different flavors but in this case basically it's a a plan in which the acquisition of stock above some threshold will trigger Twitter to issue to stockholders except the one in the triggering position
Stock at a greatly discounted price thereby driving up the cost to acquire it and this is a very effective strategy to Prevent an acquisition.
I will point out.
I don't know if you will remember this but our good friend Mike Brown former CEO of the Nasdaq and CFO of Microsoft Is an accountant.
In Microsoft's early days.
Yeah in Microsoft's early days He is an accountant by training, and he once told us a story of an accounting ploy used to prevent acquisitions.
It went by a very different name, which I remember to this day, which is a prickle ball.
And the idea was a prickle ball was an financial structure that would cause the swallowing corporation to gag and cough up the corporation that had been acquired.
Somewhat slimier, but otherwise intact.
Otherwise intact, which actually reminds me a little bit of your poison frogs that you studied, which also on occasion would be swallowed by something that would then think better of it and cough them up and they would hop away.
I saw this precisely once, a boa took in a poison frog and chewed on it for a while and finally spit it back out and she went on to become a successful mother, the frog did.
Yeah, which is an amazing, amazing to have seen that even once.
Yeah, extraordinary.
Yeah, especially if you can track the animal and know that in fact it goes on to reproduce, thereby telling a rather complete evolutionary story.
Luckily for me, I had already tattooed this particular frog, so I did not have to hassle it right then.
Yes, you heard her correctly.
She tattooed the frog.
Yes, yes.
Yep.
These were not gorgeous tattoos.
No, I never got... I mean, they're small.
Frogs only have two layers of skin to R3, so you have to be really careful not to go that deep.
And I didn't get to, like, mom with a heart or anything.
They were alphanumeric codes.
A1, B2, C3, etc.
Yeah.
Well, in any case, there's a lot we could... I don't know how we got there.
Well, this is why these people tune in, because there's often a hidden evolutionary connection.
And tattooing frogs is the hidden evolutionary connection.
Yes, to this counter-hostile takeover strategy.
Anyway, there are aspects of, as I said before, I think there are multiple different kinds of poison pills.
The poison pill that Twitter deployed was this particular, I think it's the most standard poison pill that is typically utilized.
I don't know a ton about it.
Even though I'm, you know that I'm actually quite the investor?
The investor?
Yeah, I'm a very good investor born into the wrong portfolio.
That's pretty much what I've concluded.
Is that right?
Yes.
So you've invested in...
Well, not the right stuff, but I would natively invest in the right stuff is kind of the implication.
I see.
I don't think I know what we're talking about.
No.
I don't know.
I was just off in a cul-de-sac.
But the point is, or the point that I wanted to make about this, is that the whole question about why Elon would acquire Twitter, why he would seek to acquire it.
He made it very clear as he ran his poll on Twitter about whether or not we users felt that speech rights were properly protected there.
And in comments since, he's made it quite clear that his purpose isn't exactly about the financial potential of this investment, that he is actually concerned about what is happening on Twitter that affects what we do in what is clearly our new public square.
Which is a really interesting phenomenon.
He, you know, the wealthiest person on Earth at the moment, is in a position actually to move pieces on the chessboard of planet Earth that others simply couldn't.
I wanted to connect it though to a concept that we have talked about here on Dark Horse many times.
The tagline is zero is a special number and what we have meant by zero is a special number is that there are lots of places where you, in order to engage in a certain strategy, need exactly zero alternatives to be present.
So, the idea is if there was a American university, for example, that had declared itself
Immune to wokeness and intent on simply continuing the practice of teaching people to think scientifically, logically, reasonably, teaching them about important facts of history rather than indoctrinating them into the belief that all white people are racist or that the reason that men outcompete women athletically has to do with the patriarchy or something like this.
If a university declared itself interested in teaching in the way universities used to attempt to teach, it would obviously be the place everybody who wanted their children educated would send them.
And so the point is, that's the obvious strategy.
Why aren't there any?
And the answer is, there have to be none.
If one university declared that strategy, and suddenly it was the new Harvard, because everybody who had the ability to choose where to go would go there, so they would not suffer the cost of paying for their own indoctrination, but would actually enhance their minds, then of course that strategy would spread, and university after university would pick up the strategy.
So there have to be zero, because if there was one, it would win.
It does raise the question of what kinds of mechanisms are involved to keep it at zero.
And I'm thinking within the university question, and we will come back to exactly this question in our next couple of episodes actually, but there are some new initiatives in higher ed that look promising.
And until, I don't know, three, five years ago, the University of Chicago seemed to be holding strong and saying, you know, we have the Chicago principles and we are not going to succumb to the crazy, basically.
But they stopped.
Right.
So, you know, why did they?
Given that it seems like, just at a fiscal level, the existing, in this case, elite university that said, not us, come to here if you don't want any of that, would just be drawing so many students that they'd suddenly have resolved any, you know, lingering economic issues that they have.
Right.
So, we can't, you know, we can talk a little bit about all that we've seen that has pressured People into embracing idiotic policies at their university or wherever else.
But the basic point is there is so much at stake, right, for the woke revolution.
And the woke revolution really is about certain people making a move, right?
They want to change where they are and they may be justified in wanting to change where they are in civilization's hierarchy, but they're doing it by a legitimate means.
And the point is there's so much at stake for them in keeping the number of universities that you can send your kid to at zero that the point is you should expect them to spend an ungodly amount of effort or resources to intimidate anybody who
Attempts to evade this puzzle and create the first you know You know To put down a flag that declares independence from from the movement so the point is zero is a special number because zero has to be the number if there was a Newspaper that was reporting reality right we'd all subscribe right so there can't be a newspaper that reports reality they all have to suffer because zero is a special number and
The corollary here, though, the reason that I think this is important in the current question about what Elon is up to and where we are, is that zero is a special number, and the implication of zero as a special number is that one is an equally special number.
So, this is a bid to get us a platform that works.
Now, is it possible that Elon is not being straightforward and he has some other reason to want us to think that that's what he's doing?
I guess.
But he has been very clear and I don't see any real reason to doubt him.
He's a guy who's made enough resource and he's clearly having fun doing things that a person might Choose to want to do, choose to want to be remembered for, and this sort of fits with that ethos.
I think that's part of what angers people, frankly, that he's having fun at it.
Well, and I think it also scares them, because one of the things that works in favor of those who wish to hold the number of functional entities to zero is that in general people who get control of one of these things are subject to the same incentives as everybody else, and so
It doesn't mean that anybody's lost control, but in the case of somebody like Elon who can throw, you know, a vast sum at the problem and still not compromise his ability to do what he wants in the world, that's a frightening prospect, especially if what he wants to do is protect
Free speech rights, because think about all of the stuff, I mean, given the last two years have been a marvelous example of the importance of Twitter not being a free space, right?
All of the things that we have false consensus on, right, become very different if suddenly, you know, you can speak openly on Twitter and nothing bad happens to you.
Let me actually just point out that we're not going to show the video, but there's a video from Morning Joe this week, and you can show my screen briefly if you want here, in which the hosts are talking about the bid and they are not pleased.
Again, I'm not going to play this through, but one of the quotes, the salient quote from in here, is the female host, whose name I've forgotten, says, Elon could actually control what people think.
That's our job.
Well, probably not.
And, you know, there's going to be a lot of arm waving, I'm sure, to explain this away.
But this is precisely the problem, right?
When you reveal the man behind the curtain and you see that they're doing exactly the thing.
That they're claiming they're afraid that someone else is going to do.
And it seems more likely, actually, that indeed that was a reveal of how many in the mainstream media view themselves.
We are here to tell you what to think, because you plebs are not smart enough to understand yourselves.
And if someone else comes along and says, I actually I am interested in not letting you do that.
It's as if the only possible reason they can imagine for someone to behave this way is with the same ill intentions that they have.
Yeah, exactly.
Now, what we think we are looking at here, let's put it this way, because we don't know what he's actually up to, this could be Very negative, right?
In other words, there may be some, as bad as Twitter is, maybe it could be worse.
On the other hand, it's hard to imagine how it could be, right?
And when I say worse, I don't just mean unpleasant and nasty and slanted and all of those things.
I mean actually dangerous.
And, you know, Elon has alluded to this, but think about the things that have been contentious on Twitter.
I mean, for one, it occurs to me right now, Articles of Unity, right?
Articles of Unity was important, potentially.
Even if it didn't stand an important chance of succeeding in its objective, the point was, it was about, hey, we've got a fundamental problem.
We've got two broken political parties, and they have frozen everyone out.
We've got a duopoly that we need to deal with, and this is becoming more lethal by the decade.
And grassroots works, and this was, Unity was very grassroots, in large part by spreading via social networks until yesterday, effectively, through actual social networks, not virtual social networks.
Such that people became aware that there were other people who were interested in solving a problem that maybe they had a little inkling of but couldn't quite put their finger on, or they knew very well that there was a problem but didn't think that anyone else saw it like them.
So this is in part, you know, the tamping down of projects like Unity.
The importance of that, as you just said, is not necessarily in the, you know, but we could have won.
Almost no one expected that there was a real chance in that first iteration of, you know, unity going to the White House.
It would have been lovely, but much of what it was doing was revealing to as many people as possible.
We are out here.
There are people who are thinking carefully and consciously and conscientiously and morally and compassionately and rigorously and logically about the same issues that all of you care about, and if you feel like you haven't seen anyone on the mainstream media about whom you can say that in forever, well, you're right, and here we are.
In the context of the last election, the ability to say that was all the more important because the critical thing, at the point that you have two parties who nominate people as old as Joe Biden and Donald Trump, the question is, well, at the point that you have two parties who nominate people as old as Joe Biden and Donald Trump, the question is, well, why would a party not be able to
Are there no young people as competent as those two?
That seems really unlikely.
And in fact, if you look deeper, you look at highly competent people who couldn't get through the primaries because that is, after all, how the duopoly maintains control for their real constituents who are the corruptors of the system.
And so the ability to simply have a place where you can speak the obvious or you can say, look, we have a corruption problem.
This isn't new.
Yes, you're being told you have no choice but to vote for Joe Biden because Donald Trump is that much of an existential threat to humanity, but you were also told that about Mitt Romney and now you love him.
So, you know, the ability to say that is important.
If Elon were to succeed in saving one platform, then effectively he saves social media.
Because once there is one platform in which you can say real things, how do the other platforms continue their campaign of suppression?
Right?
Because the fact is, if you can't say real things on Facebook, and you can on Twitter, then people are going to flood to Twitter.
Because in general, this is about people wanting to hear things, and the way to prevent them from hearing them is to stamp them out.
They're just not sayable.
Which, I don't know what order we were planning to go here, but I would point out that among the things that Twitter blocked the discussion of was Hunter Biden's implication that his father's influence was for sale, right?
Specifically with reference to Ukraine.
Our ability to talk about the decrepitude of Joe Biden was also not permitted on Twitter.
And so the point is, well, you can say, you know, it was an election, there was chaos.
But the point is, these things are central to the issues of our current moment, right?
We had a right to discuss it then because we are now suffering the consequences of not having discussed it.
But don't you think it's good for democracy that we aren't allowed to critique our dear leader?
Well, I mean, I can't believe that we are placed in the position that we are in.
And actually... Hold on.
Obviously that was sarcasm.
But the flip argument is also made.
Back when Trump was president, It seemed to be the case that many people thought it was bad for democracy if you didn't critique the then person in the executive branch, which no one was imagining.
Well, you know, some people on the right maybe imagined Trump in the same sort of, you know, dear leader role, but the, you know, the dear leader reference there with regard to Biden is, you know, this is not what democracies do.
Leaders that you cannot criticize when they make errors or when they appear to not be up to the job is indeed, and this harkens back to what we've been talking about in the last couple of weeks, that's what happens under totalitarianism, not under democracy.
Exactly.
Now, I want to go back to an error that I made during the election, which I have already acknowledged and pointed out, but I am reminded of it this week.
I said during the election that I didn't think Joe Biden would be sworn in.
I thought that this was effectively a ploy, that he was the person who was going to win the election and then there would be a shuffle.
Now, the reason That I thought that was that, you know, I sometimes say, no matter how cynical you are, you're still being naive.
I was being naive.
I thought there was no way that whatever runs inside the Democratic Party, I thought there was no way that the DNC would put us in the precarious position, in a world this dangerous, in the middle of a pandemic, with as much at stake in the world and as many hot spots, that the Democratic Party would put us in a position of having a person who is clearly losing their mental competence at a rapid rate.
Have that person be in the role of the presidency?
That's so mind-bogglingly dangerous that I couldn't imagine that they were going to let it happen, and so I thought they were going to do a swap with Kamala Harris.
Now, I will say, and I can't believe that I'm going to say this out loud, given what we are seeing with Joe Biden, I actually think as terrible a president as I think Kamala Harris would be.
I don't think we have any choice.
I think the incompetence, and I don't like... I don't know what you mean.
We don't have any choice about what?
Zach, could you play the video of Joe Biden from this week?
So this is one of many versions of this.
I think this is the New York Post's version.
All right, what we are going to see is at the end of a speech here, Oh, here we go.
All right.
Now, that was an obviously confused old man.
I take, as I keep saying, I take no pleasure.
I think he's a corrupt politician.
So some people couldn't see that.
You want to describe what you mean?
He is a confused man at the end of a speech who turns around.
And has apparently forgotten what he's supposed to do, reaches out his hand to shake the hand of someone who isn't there.
So he shakes the hand with the air, and then he kind of stumbles around and finally exits the stage incoherently.
And you know, if this happened once, that'd be one thing, but we have so many instances of this sort of thing, and it was so evident during the election.
It's sad, and it's dangerous.
It couldn't be more dangerous.
It couldn't be more dangerous.
So what do you mean by we don't have a choice?
I don't know what choice you're talking about.
An incompetent president has to be replaced and the chain of succession goes through Kamala Harris.
Okay.
And I don't want Kamala Harris as president.
I think it's a terrifying prospect.
And were she to become president, I think the other branches need to check her.
She effectively needs to be kept from exercising power, and her purpose therefore would be to be a coherent person who can have somebody call them up in the middle of the night and say, "We have a problem.
We don't know if nuclear this, that, or the other.
We need a person whose mind is still functioning to be able to answer a basic question about what we do on behalf of the American public." And Kamala Harris is in a better position to do that than Joe Biden. - Yeah, if she's kept from acting as an ideologue.
Right, and you know, that's not unprecedented that you would have somebody step into the role and that they basically would be there as a caretaker rather than as somebody put in place to enact imaginative policies or whatever.
But we are just, it's hard to believe that in a pandemic with a A war by Vladimir Putin in Ukraine that we could possibly tolerate a charade where the person in power is clearly not mentally capable of making difficult decisions and therefore we don't really know who is in power, right?
We have an unaccountable structure supposedly protecting our interests in an extremely dangerous moment of history.
How could the Democratic Party do that to us?
How have they not taken Joe aside?
I mean, in his interest?
In the country's?
Whose interest is it in to keep him in that position at this moment?
And so this is coming up here because you view, I believe, although you haven't said this here explicitly, Elon Musk's bid, which could be cynical, which could be about something that we can't see, but it has the potential to be a patriotic act.
Well, what I know is that during the election, when it was the right time to talk about this, when the answer is no, actually we can't elect Joe Biden because even if you would have wanted him in his younger, more competent state, at this point he is not qualified because he is not mentally there.
That was evident during the election.
And the point was, Twitter was not a place that you could openly discuss it, right?
So, you know, having been on the wrong sides of those discussions trying to point out, hey, we can't do this.
It's unacceptable, right?
This was taken as support for Trump, right?
You have a choice between A and B. I don't think so.
I want a choice beyond A and B. I don't like A, and ah, therefore you're for B. I was about to tell you that I like neither option.
Nope, that's the choice.
If you don't like A, then you must like B. We are forcing you into not just choosing B, but liking it.
Right, and so I guess what I would say is that this has been an interesting week because we have the platform, or one of them, that did so much work to prevent the free exchange of obviously important ideas like is this person mentally competent enough to be elected to this important office, right?
We have that question reopened by Elon Musk's move, but we also have vindication, even if I wasn't right, that he wasn't going to take office, which obviously I wasn't right, but I was right that his level of enfeeblement was significant enough that that was an obvious question.
Right?
It has now become all the more obvious.
And so we have to be able to discuss the obvious in everything that is like the public square.
We therefore need to go from zero platforms, which tolerate it, to one.
And I think what Elon is gambling on is that if we go to one, it will go to many.
Right?
Once you have rescued one platform, people aren't going to stay where they're infantilized on Facebook or Instagram or wherever.
They're going to go to the place where they can have adult conversations about important things.
And, you know, I appreciate whether he succeeds or fails.
I appreciate that Elon is trying to do that with Twitter, and I really want to see it succeed.
Even if it's a disaster, it is essentially certain to be better than it is.
It's hard to imagine how he could make the situation more dangerous.
Well, that actually, I think, this idea that the duopoly in the, at least the American political system, which enforces winner-takes-all and has seemed to trickle down, if you will, into enforcement at the individual level of if you're not A, then you are B, and not only are you B, but you're going to like it.
This is a social construct.
This is inherently a social construct.
There is absolutely no reason for there to be two and only two options in any political sphere.
And everyone above the age of five knows that, right?
There are not just two options.
And so there is this simultaneous, I will say, and here's the segue, move to force social things, which not only have fuzzy borders, but tend to have lots and lots of instantiations and far more than two categorical states, into a binary, and thus force people into sort of blustering and getting flustered as they say, no, no, no, just because I don't like Biden doesn't mean I like Trump, that sort of thing, right?
And simultaneously, there is the opposite thing.
Where there are some things in the universe that are binary, and we've walked through it lots of places in our book, many many places, but sex is one of them in animals and in plants and in other lineages on this planet as well for reasons of anisogamy, of intermediate sizes and shapes of gametes not being stable.
We have males and females okay and this binary is being up overturned as if it is the social construct at the same moment that we are seeing the binary imposed on a political sphere where it has no place so there's there's something very Bizarre and so backwards in both directions there.
Like, can you just flip your assumptions?
You know, reduce your assumptions as low as possible.
But in this case, the entire foundation that you're building, both your sort of political understanding of the world and your understanding of the sexual world, and therefore relationships and everything else, is backwards.
Completely backwards.
Yeah, it's interesting.
It's almost the same phenomenon that we saw with pandemic policy, where it's like at some point you realize this isn't just nonsense.
It's upside down.
Right.
It's everything you shouldn't be doing.
And so I guess what I like your point here quite a bit.
If it's binary, we're going to pretend it's a continuum.
And if it's a continuum, we're going to insist that we describe it in a binary term.
Yeah.
I was also reminded, I've been watching Andrew Yang do what he's doing, and I was reminded, you know, we had People who I am certain are competent, are young enough that they are not going to lose their marbles in office, who like America, right?
That simple, those three things, I mean, you know, during Unity we laid out three characteristics, but this is even simpler.
What were the three again?
The three characteristics just now are Competent.
Yeah.
Young enough.
Young enough that they're not going to lose their marbles.
And they like America.
Patriots enough.
So my feeling is if you approach Andrew Yang, right, and you say, Andrew, I got an idea for how we could make stuff better.
You know, here's what I know.
A, he'd like to make stuff better.
B, he's going to ask good questions.
Like, well, here are some downsides that might accompany such a plan.
Are they worth it?
Right?
I just don't understand a universe in which you had somebody in that office.
Forget political spectrum, party, ideology.
I don't care.
Just anybody who can think and likes America and is trying to do the right thing by it would be preferable to somebody who's losing their mind, is corrupt, and has higher priorities.
And ideological.
Beholden to a belief system that is not, we are all Americans.
I am the president of you, the other Americans.
And you know, we have we have audience all over the world.
So I'm not pretending that everyone listening here is an American.
But if you are the President of the United States, You need to have a kind of patriotism.
You should not be a nationalist, and this is a distinction that you have made very, very often, very clearly, but you need to have an appreciation of the country that you hope to lead.
Because if that isn't true, there are a whole lot of us I hope still a majority who think that there is so much worth saving here that if really what you're trying to do is overturn, you don't have any place in the executive branch.
And I'm not saying that that's what Biden is or Harris or any of the rest, but the ideology underlying so much of recent policy on the left.
Um, does look like that.
And when you look at the, you know, when you go in deep on some of the sort of founding principles, not of the Democratic Party, but of places of organizations like Black Lives Matter, you find precisely that.
Well, I think what we also find is, and I don't like using these terms, I don't want it to be inflammatory, but I think the point has to be made very clear.
If you leave a guy, as compromised as Joe Biden obviously is, in that office during a moment like this in history, You are telling us that you don't love your country, that you are about something else, and that this is a means to an end for you.
There's something Machiavellian about a party, about the DNC, about whatever it is.
I mean, we literally don't know who to call in an emergency, right?
Somebody might know, but we don't know.
We, the public, do not know who is acting as our president, because our president obviously isn't.
He couldn't.
And if he is, that's even more terrifying.
I guess I'm giving them the benefit of the doubt and I'm imagining there are other people making decisions and they're just telling Joe where to stand and what to say.
But it's got to end.
It's got to end.
Somehow, somebody who loves America and is capable of responding logically has to be in that office, even just for emergencies.
So the segue is to the actually binary system.
Oh yes.
Of sex.
Which, if you're done.
Yep.
And we have here, this week, not working.
Nope, nope, nope.
Please Zach, please take it off.
Thank you.
Please don't put on my screen until I say so.
All right, so we have now you can now you can show my screen.
We have from 4th Wave Now, which is a reference to, we need a fourth wave of feminism because the third wave is destroying us, the Twitter account 4th Wave Now, which is terrific, has tweeted a video, which we will show you a little bit of, called Puberty and Transgender Youth from a
An organization called Amaze.org, which sells itself as a sex education for young people, although when you look deep into their site you find them interested in speaking to people younger than young adults.
As 4th Wave now says about this video, this is one of the vids that a New Jersey school district is considering for 5th grade sex ed.
And then we don't... I won't read the...
Description here, if I may have my screen back, Zach, and I'm going to ask you to show the video in just a minute.
Boy, what has happened?
Here we go.
The YouTube video in question has a... actually, if you could put it up, Zach, I just want to read the description before Yes, please, if you could put it up and not play it yet so that I can show the description on the video.
I don't know what you want to track.
So I'm going to read the description on the video, which you guys can't see yet.
Oh, there it is.
Everyone has a gender identity, a feeling or a sense of being male, female, or somewhere in between.
Sometimes people's gender identity matches their bodies, and sometimes it does not.
Someone may be born with a penis and identify as a girl, or born with a vagina and identify as a boy.
This person may have a gender identity that is called transgender.
What's important to remember is that people deserve to express themselves in ways that feels right for them and to be respected no matter how they identify, look, or dress.
So we haven't even watched the video yet, and we're not going to watch the whole thing even though it's short, but they begin with a premise, and so many, so many of the arguments over in trans activism land and in let's-teach-little-children-sex-ed land now are just making claims that aren't true.
And they say them as if they're the most obvious thing in the world, and then they connect them to things that are true.
And it becomes hard for people who are embattled or in any way just tired of it and don't want it to be their main thing to separate these things out.
So this begins with everyone has a gender identity.
Really?
Like, that's a new concept.
That's a social concept.
Gender, as we have talked about in the past, we understand it to be the human equivalent of what in non-human animals is called sex role, which is variously the software to the hardware of sex, or in animals, the behavioral representation, the behavioral manifestation of the sex that you are.
Gender identity is, frankly, if it exists at all, is certainly not intrinsic and fundamental and basic.
It is regressive and, you know, usually it's going to be, frankly, misogynistic if it's going against any particular sex at all, in that it basically says, if you are interested a child in things that traditionally have tended to be the the wheelhouse the bailiwick of the other sex well then your gender identity is the other sex so if you're a mathy little girl your gender identity is male
well this is sexist and regressive and backwards and horrifying all right two two critiques of it one One, the problem is, it basically is promoting a wish, which may be transient.
To a state of being, right?
In other words, you might want to be the other sex but it doesn't mean that you are the other sex.
Identify as the other sex.
It could be a legitimate want or it could be a passing phase but it doesn't really make any sense to promote it.
You know, as you point out, it's either the behavioral manifestation or the software of sex and so the point is gender is but gender identity is like a step further in terms of craziness it means if you wish it then it is right and that does if it's something internal which right it doesn't it does not um add up that you would promote it and the other thing is the need to have this conversation right
The you-may-wish-that-you-were-the-other sex-and-not-be-and-then-essentially-you-are has never been less, because the freedom to be whatever you want to be, to do in the world what you want to do, to fall in love with who you want to fall in love with, that freedom is essentially total, at least in the West.
Or at least it was becoming so, and I feel certain that this begins to undermine and reverse many of those games.
So before you keep going, let's just show a little bit of this video.
Zach, I think I told you how much of this video to show, okay?
Hi Fish, come here.
Oh, you need a name.
Let's see.
Wait a second.
What gender are you?
A person who is transgender is someone whose internal sense of their gender, being a boy, girl, or something else, doesn't match their physical body.
People who feel this way sometimes feel anxious when they begin to reach puberty and their body starts to change in ways that don't match their internal sense of their gender.
These feelings are totally normal.
If you feel you want more time to explore how you feel about your gender before your body starts to change, it's important to talk with a parent, counselor, therapist, or doctor about the feelings you have regarding your gender.
After some discussion and counseling, you may be referred to an endocrinologist.
Endocrinologists specialize in hormones, and they are the most likely to prescribe puberty blockers for someone who wants them.
Puberty blockers are medications that will stop your body from changing.
They are usually given as an injection or an implant.
They block the production of hormones to stop or delay the physical changes of puberty.
The effects of the medication are only temporary, so if a person stops using puberty blockers, the physical changes of puberty will begin again.
Whether you identify So the effects of the medication are only temporary.
So if a person stops using puberty blockers, the physical changes of puberty will begin again.
This is a claim with no connection to reality.
And put that together with the claim that was made on the banner, but not spoken in the video.
So for those just listening, there was a banner across the top near the end of what we just showed you that said, unfortunately, not all health insurance covers the cost of puberty blockers.
We are experimenting with children.
Those children experimented on will never be the same.
Some of them will be okay.
Many of them will not.
And they will have every right to come asking of the adults, of all of us, what it is that we were doing.
What it is, how it is that we allowed Giant numbers of children to be halted in their development, pretending that you can do that with complex physiological, anatomical, yes, endocrinological systems, and that it will all be fine, that you can just say, stop for a while, and then if I decide I'm fine, I'll go back to it.
And you do that, furthermore, to a child who is already feeling anxious.
and confused, and maybe hopeless, and maybe a lot of other things.
But no child who's feeling awesome about things and is going through a developmental period in which things are going smoothly decides, actually, I'm the other thing.
So, these are children who, maybe for completely normal reasons, and maybe because they are undergoing other trauma, or they have other mental health issues, have decided that they have found the solution.
Or maybe even worse, that they don't even know what the solution is, but what is being sold to them is, if you aren't sure, here's what we're going to do for you.
Having done that to them, they are guaranteed not to be able to walk back into a normal development or a normal life ever again.
Yes, it is a case in which we are Falling down on our most fundamental responsibility to children, right?
We are supposed to give signposts and beacons that lead children into the state of being that is most likely to be one in which they can be effective and feel fulfilled and rewarded and find companionship and instead we are telling them things that we know aren't true right there is no reason that it should be true that you can start a puberty blocker and if you change your mind stop the puberty blocker and just pick up where you left off
Yeah, that was quite something.
So for those watching and listening, our lights just flickered.
Hopefully we can finish the podcast.
Hopefully we can carry on.
That was quite the lightning strike, I assume.
But anyway, the point is, you're talking about a radical intervention into a complex system.
In which we already know that it's not a stop it will start it will system.
We have the evidence of that.
How bad it is, we couldn't possibly have the evidence.
We'll find out when hundreds of thousands of people have had their puberty stopped and restarted and we see what the full effects are over the course of a lifetime.
But it is radically misinformative.
And then we are also, just even the way that video starts.
Right?
Everybody has a gender identity, and sometimes people's gender identity doesn't match their sex.
And the answer is, look, kids, part of what being a child is, is getting enough experience, and where you can't get enough experience, getting enough information from people who have seen a larger part of the world about how common things are, right?
So imagine a child Lying in bed, looking at a shadow in their room and imagining it might be some terrifying thing, right?
And the adult's job is to come in and say, nope, there aren't any terrifying things here.
In fact, in my whole life, I've seen seven things that are terrifying and they were, you know, they were grizzly bears in Glacier National Park or whatever.
They were never in your bedroom.
Right.
They were never in your bedroom.
The thing is that those things don't exist.
And so when you tell a child, Those things aren't here.
They're not under your bed.
They're not on the wall.
They're not in the closet.
They're not in the neighborhood walking the streets, right?
They're not.
They don't necessarily get it right away, but the point is their experience begins to match what you've told them, and they will, over time, become an adult who knows that those things aren't there, right?
Whereas if you tell them, oh yes, having a gender identity that is out of phase with your morphology is something that happens to lots of people.
Right.
You are giving them the exact opposite of information so that to the extent that they have a stray thought that doesn't feel like it fits somewhere, they don't gravitate to.
Aha.
This is the thing I saw in that video.
Right.
If I'm a girl who wants to have short hair, I must have I must be a boy inside.
Right.
This is I mean, at the moment I've been I've been flabbergasted and angry at many aspects of this for a for a long time now.
But at the moment, it's the explicitly anti-woman, anti-female sex.
sexist, misogynistic, regressive part of it that is just amazing, because it is coming from the people who brought us the Me Too movement, who brought us, who are supposedly the standard bearers of feminism, but it is this third wave feminism, which is regressive, which I have for many years called
You know, faux feminism and which for which we have fourth wave feminism, you know, fourth wave now accounts and others, suggesting boy do we need a fix boy do we need to get back to thinking about you know why?
how it is, for instance, that straight couples can live together in love and harmony and not try to make each other into the other thing.
Right.
Because men are not women and women are not men.
And on average, men do tend to, for instance, be better at just style of things.
And females, men, no.
Women tend to be better at detailed styles of things.
And there are some amazing, brilliant women at jest and amazing, brilliant men at details, but pretending that if we're going to live together as equals, in which we both respect one another, we have to be the same thing?
is backwards, and imagining that what you can do is say, Oh, well, I'm actually good at some of those things that have traditionally been and may be more likely to be in the domain of men.
Maybe I'm a man.
No, no, I'm not.
And neither is any other woman who has ever been good at math or sports or, you know, anything, science, like all of these things that are so powerful.
And what crazy world would say, if you're interested in those things, you're actually a dude.
I can't believe we're having this conversation in the 21st century.
It's unbelievable.
It's crazy.
And the fact is, you know, the facts They're plenty good enough.
Yeah.
You know what?
There are trans people.
They are very, very rare.
The chances that you are one are very low.
The fact is, some trans people may not have come out because there was a lot of pressure not to do so.
Back in the day.
Back in the day.
That has become much less significant.
If you think you might be trans, you ought to wait a whole bunch of time and figure out if it clears up, because it does for most people.
And that's certainly the simplest way to go about it, rather than doing some radical medical experiment on yourself that will probably leave you infertile and disrupt who knows what other processes at the same time, right?
There's nothing wrong with the facts here.
The facts are conveyable.
In the rare case where those facts are salient, they can be conveyed.
We don't need to pretend, right?
It's preposterous.
Are we where we're going on this?
Because something...
Well, you wanted to also talk a little bit about pornography.
Before we do that, before we do that, I want to do one other thing that just... Yeah, wow.
More lightning.
That's not so common here.
That's thunder we're hearing.
Well, we're hearing the thunder, but I'm thinking it's the same phenomenon.
What did you say, Producer Zach?
It is.
It is.
Producer Zach is 18 now.
Yes.
He had a birthday this week.
Our firstborn is now an adult in the eyes of the law.
Yes, we can literally not tell him what to do anymore.
We have to ask nicely and, you know, let the chips fall where they may.
That's not a match for anything in our family.
No, none of it is.
So I wanted to... I had this incident on Twitter.
I think it may even have been yesterday.
There was a hashtag Game effectively.
People start these things.
They start a hashtag.
People respond to it and it trends and anyway you see what the... Is there a game to it you said?
Kind of yeah the idea is so this one was stupid thing women stupid things women do which is not the kind of hashtag I would usually respond to but in this case an amazingly good evolutionary joke occurred to me it was perfect in almost every regard but one all right very very deep Um, and educational.
And the one way in which it wasn't such a great joke is that I knew nobody was going to get it.
That doesn't always stop you.
No, no, and in this case it didn't.
What did you do?
Well, here's the thing.
Should I go look?
Yeah, you got, you have it Zach?
I can't read it.
Uh so the hashtag is stupid things women do and my response is meiosis which you now you know so here's the thing all right making a joke that nobody's going to get isn't the best thing but not making that joke and living the rest of my life knowing that I failed to make it how was I going to do that?
See, that's frankly a male brain condition right there.
How will I live not having made the joke that no one was going to get?
Well, anyway.
Just fine, I think.
I'm pretty sure it's not going to get funny for my explaining it, but I do think so that people will get the next such joke when somebody else has such a great opportunity, I think I should.
Because it was interesting what unfolded, right?
I don't know.
I don't know what unfolded.
Several people corrected me and they were like, Men also do my obscenities.
Sure.
Right?
Of course.
Of course, of course.
Of course that happened.
Right.
So anyway.
God, does he not know?
Does he?
Oh my god.
Um, so I, here's the, but I think you'll see why this is relevant to this conversation.
I mean, we already kind of did.
But, um, here's why the joke is Hilariously funny if you're- And therefore what it means.
Right.
Yeah.
So meiosis is the process by which a diploid individual, that is a person who has two versions of every chromosome, produces a sex cell that has only one chromosome of each type and then two sex cells from two different people get together and they restore that diploid state and then the zygote turns into a- Or two different zebras.
Zebra?
Well, we're just talking about humans, right?
No.
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Definitely.
This does apply to zebras.
I should have said that.
Thank you.
Sorry, but that's what meiosis is.
Somebody responded to me, which obviously males and females equally engage in.
Somebody responded to me, men also do meiosis, and I responded to them, yes, but what choice do they have?
Which is really the key to the joke, because women do have a choice.
Now they don't individually have a choice, but Here's the amazing strange counterintuitive weird evolutionary underpinnings of the whole crazy state of affairs is that females Could clone themselves instead of going through meiosis, and they could produce an exact copy of themselves.
And although that seems weird to us, in fact, it has a huge evolutionary benefit to it, which is that if you produce a clone of yourself instead of dividing your genome in half and only passing half of it on to each offspring, it is evolutionarily twice as fit.
There's a question about why, given that females can effectively double their fitness by cloning themselves rather than engaging in sexual reproduction.
As these fancy lizards have done.
Yeah, Zach, do you want to put up those fancy lizards?
My screen.
Yeah, so these are whiptail lizards.
This is Nemidophorus uniparens is the species.
It's all female.
They actually continue to have to engage in pseudocopulatory behavior in order to get their eggs to drop, basically.
There's some complicated endocrinological explanation, but they are an asexual species, which descends from a bisexual species, which has males.
But all females lay eggs that are 100% related to them.
Now, they actually do engage in meiosis, and so it's complicated.
But they also occasionally get input from stray males, and that keeps things interesting.
At some point we will go into the details of that story and how it is the exception that proves the rule, but the basic point is there is a mystery, a big evolutionary mystery.
It's not a little one, it's a giant one.
Why females, who have the capacity, probably more easily than they do, to produce a sex cell and join it with some Half genome from somebody else and hope that this brand new combination never seen on earth before of genes is going to function well.
That's a big gamble.
And their immune system isn't going to respond badly to it.
Right.
That's a big gamble.
Whereas I've made it to reproductive age.
My genome obviously works.
Why don't I just copy it?
100 percent, right?
That's liable to be a much better bet.
So why do females in no animal species do this without something?
And we have to go back to the whiptails, the occasional copulation with males.
But the point is why, given how much evolutionary benefit comes from dispensing with males entirely and simply cloning yourself, why is this not constantly being attempted by females in every animal species, right?
So.
And just to go back to the distinction between the sexes being the gametes that they produce, Females producing large gametes that are full of the cytoplasm that is going to be needed to make a new life and also fairly sessile, fairly immobile.
And males producing small gametes that have been stripped of almost everything, but basically half a genome and a motor, and therefore being small and zippy.
And they do the job of finding And females do the job of bringing all the stuff that's necessary except for that half of the genome that the males bring.
We have long since defined that sex which brings the large immobile gametes as the females, and that sex which brings the small zippy gametes as the males, and therefore there are no all-male species because male gametes can't develop into young because they don't have the cytoplasm in the cell.
In the sperm or the pollen required.
Alright, so now the punchline of this whole discussion is that males and females aren't remotely alike, right?
It's not this whole Contagious idea that we are the same and it's arbitrary and all this is nonsense in many ways we are opposites and the the point is Females doing meiosis and therefore condemning themselves to having to interact with males in order to produce offspring, which puts them in one of two conundrums, right?
Females can either attempt to compel males to participate in raising the offspring so that they are not costing themselves by raising half a genome that isn't related to them, right?
Or they can accept the cost of raising a half a genome that isn't theirs, which is a giant cost in evolutionary terms.
That's the female predicament.
So when this person responded, yeah, but males engage in meiosis too, it's like, yeah, of course males engage in meiosis, but it's not a stupid thing they do, right?
It's a screamin' great deal because they can't reproduce otherwise, right?
The point is females have a choice, which they don't take, which is interesting, right?
That's why the joke was hilariously funny to me.
I think it's good, actually.
Yeah, it's a pretty good joke for the, I don't know, few hundred people who get it.
But anyway, I thought it was, it's instructive seeing that even something like this where people who obviously know the term meiosis don't necessarily spot the asymmetry between male meiosis and female meiosis in terms of whether it's, you know, an obviously great idea or a paradox.
Right.
Or, you know, inherently obligate.
Or, at some level, not for mammals at this point, but facultative at least if you go far back enough.
Well, another way to put it is, it is a choice, but it is a choice that is always a loser if you make what seems like the better choice, and therefore Selection has stopped experimenting with it, right?
The point is, Asexual species don't persist.
We will end up just saying a little bit about W.D.
Hamilton at the end here.
He was one of the greatest evolutionary theorists.
He died young, too young, at like 63 in 2000.
And some of his great contributions to evolutionary theory involved the evolution of sex.
And specifically, he and it was Marlene Zuck, right, who proposed the idea that this was about evasion of parasite loads.
Yep.
The Hamilton-Zuck hypothesis.
Alright, so one thing before we move on from my hilariously funny to a tiny number of people joke.
Yeah.
Which, what was it?
I lost it.
Oh, yes.
Another person commented, and I feel because they were not wrong, that I do not want to dismiss their observation.
Somebody commented that women do not do meiosis, that meiosis is done, the eggs are produced before females are born, which technically is largely true, not 100% true.
The jury's still out on this one, actually.
You know what?
I've got to stop saying that about science, because it mixes the scientific and the legal as if that's fine, and I've taken issue before when a headline said that some scientific result was effectively like a legal standing.
It's not the jury is still out.
It's that reasonable scientists disagree about what the evidence means from, it might even be Drosophila, like some other species which seem to have the ability to continue to produce eggs into adulthood, and it's not clear exactly what is true for humans.
All right, so the jury has returned on the question of whether it is all right to say the jury is still out within science, and the jury has decided it is not acceptable to say the jury is still out within science.
That's certainly true.
And the jury has now exploded in a puff of smoke from being too reticulative or something.
Yes, exactly.
But nonetheless, the point about when meiosis is done in females is a fair question.
But I will just say that it is, in some sense, the ancestral femaleness that has decided to continue engaging in meiosis, despite the annoyance of having to deal with men.
And so the joke still stands, even if there is that technical caveat.
I rather enjoy it.
And I rest my case.
Continuing to enjoy, continuing to engage with men.
Yes, and I'm very pleased with this paradoxical as I find it.
All right, did you, before we finish up talking a little bit, just a little bit about W.D.
Hamilton, want to say anything about porn or do you want to save that?
We can save that one.
Okay.
On the hazards of, right?
Okay, which we also give just a couple page section to in our book.
So, you know, the position that we understand porn to be bad for people is not one that we are producing today, but one that you will say a little bit more about in a future episode.
Okay, W.D.
Hamilton was, as I have said, one of the great evolutionary theorists.
He had many, many contributions.
He died at 63 after having gone to Africa in search of the closest living relative of HIV, and he was looking at chimps and collecting chimp poop, and he contracted malaria, and after many weeks in the hospital back in the UK, after he'd come home, he died.
And at that point his collected papers were being, or his scientific papers were being collected in volumes.
So Nara Rhodes through GeneLand?
In GeneLand.
I've now forgotten and I was looking at it I was looking at these I'm embarrassed that I don't I was looking at them so often this week and I've now forgotten which what the I think it's a letter is there and what the word is there but they were being collected so you can look it up and tell me once you find it The first volume was already out, I think those are the papers through 1980, and the second volume through maybe 91-something, I may be getting the dates wrong, was in the editing mode at the point that he went to Africa.
And so for each of these published scientific papers, he was writing a preamble introductory essay, and sometimes the preamble introductory essay was far longer than the paper that it was then introducing.
And then there was a third volume that came out, obviously without any of his input at all, that completed the set.
So is it Narrow Roads?
Of.
Narrow Roads of Gene Land, volumes 1, 2, and 3.
And the second volume, which focuses on the evolution of sex, he writes an essay introducing a paper on evolution of sex called The Hospitals Are Coming.
Now, I was not able to get my hands on the book yet.
It's still on its way to us.
But I actually came to know, to be reminded of this.
By this, you can show my screen for a moment here, Zach.
This psychology today...
Christopher Badcock, PhD, writes something called The Imprinted Brain, and I actually, I came to find him, I'm just going to walk you through a little bit here, because he had written a piece that I found a little bit, actually a lot, dismissive of Margaret Mead, but it was his understanding of what her informants had done, his reporting of someone else's findings of what her informants had done, that really helped clarify for me what some of the arguments in the anthropological literature were something I talked about last week.
So I went looking at some of his other stuff, and it's actually often quite good.
And so he has this piece published March 20, 2021.
So we're a year into COVID at this point, called Global Medicalization Has Come with Selfish Herd Immunity.
And you can give me my screen back here now, Zach, but I am going to read two paragraphs, I guess, from W.D.
Hamilton's essay, The Hospitals Are Coming, which was published as an introduction to one of his other scientific papers, and it was published after his untimely death, W.D.
Hamilton's untimely death in 2000.
But written in the late 90s.
So this is a piece written in the late 90s.
Over the years of my working life, W.D.
Hamilton wrote, I have been slowly developing a paranoia about hospitals.
The growth of hospital buildings and all the infrastructure of clinics, pharmacies, the increasing domination of our universities by medical schools, associated with huge hospitals all over the developed world, the unending love affair the public have, or are browbeaten to have, with medicine through the TV screen plays on doctors and on hospital life, Accelerant birthing by caesarean section.
The indefinite increase of pharmacies even in the third world.
The accompanying increase of our everyday pills that tumble from every bathroom cabinet.
All these matters combine to tell us how we are heading.
Happy in our progress for the present.
Nope, that says castles, but it looks like casties, which isn't a word.
I'm gonna start that sentence again.
Happy in our progress for the present, like children on a fairground roller coaster, prattling of the genetic castles to come, we skim onward, uninformed, into the bowels of a great planetary hospital of the new millennium.
My dread is even worse.
It concerns how, by the time our joyride ends, we will realize that we have come into the concrete heaven of our TV dreams, But only at basement level.
That's one.
Let me read the second paragraph.
Again from W.D.
Hamilton.
Written in the late 90s.
Increasingly electronic upper and admin levels in my hospital would look after us in much the same way as the genome of the karyote of the eukaryote maintains a remnant genome sufficient for the purposes of the overarching nuclear ruled whole requires in the form of its one-time bacterial allies now going by names such as mitochondria and chloroplasts.
Were the bacteria perhaps lured into the eukaryote cells by chemical temptations analogous to our hospital TV dramas?
Were promises held out to them how grand, dramatic, and safe life would be once they are inside?
Promises of how wonderful would be the biochemical machines they could play with, and what dizzying and expert communication they would see flying by them on all sides?
Were they told how they would be born aloft in moving palaces, humble denizens of soil and slime, no longer nor even of merely stationary stromatolites?
There in the new palaces they would be fed, advised, and cosseted by the wisest of guides and companions, chromosomes out of nuclei.
Wow, all this for free!
A millionaire's life on a cruise ship and all for nothing!
So the offer to the Symbiont may have seemed at first.
So he is arguing that the Symbiont, which may not have gotten quite the deal it was hoping for, may be seen as analogous to the world we are being offered with the increasing hospitalization.
But he further argues, of course, that our hospitals, the promises of the Western medical system, can't do what it is promising.
It's an odd argument, because I agree with him about the hospitals and all of the things associated with them.
I don't agree with him about the symbionts.
About there being an analogy?
That I think they got a good deal.
Yeah.
And... Yeah, I do too.
Yeah, so... Anyway, yeah, I mean, I think it's almost actually... It's so clear that they got a good deal that it's almost a tautology.
Right?
Because the fact is it's not like they're...
relatives, now their ancestors, did not get to continue on absent their partners.
So let's talk about, briefly, because we're going long here, what the distinction is.
Because it's not, you know, and he doesn't say it is analogous, but he says, you know, maybe this is like that.
So in what way do you see the increasing hospitalization?
Hospitalization is the wrong word because that's already a word in use, but the increasing medicalization of human health as clearly being an offer, as if an offer by a would-be symbiont, that is one that we should be denying, refusing.
I think my concern about it is that the hospital is part is a in large part a Parasite and to the extent it is not a parasite.
It is a moron because It is not paying sufficient heed to the downsides It'll give you a pill that may indeed have a positive effect on whatever your condition is and it will fail to measure all of the downsides that you will experience in other words If you measure the effect of this pill on that condition, you may see a reduction in pathogenicity, but if you measured all-cause mortality, mysteriously the person might die early, right?
And the point is, until you get to the all-cause mortality measure, you don't know that actually you came out ahead for doing away with your disease, and you don't know about the collateral damage of, for example, prescribing antibiotics and creating superbugs that wouldn't otherwise exist and are much harder to get rid of, and so you solved the problem in the short term.
And you created a problem in the long term.
Right.
Well, I mean, one of the obvious distinctions to my mind is that before two things were symbiotes, were in mandatory symbiotic relationship with one another, they both existed.
Right.
They both had the ability to exist and persist.
Right.
And they may well have, if the symbiotic relationship has itself persisted, then that is presumably better for both of them.
But when you're talking about humans being medicalized by being sort of ever pushed towards greater medicalization, that thing that is medicalization, that is hospitals, that is pharmaceuticals, that is whatever it is, doesn't exist outside of humans.
So we are being invited, nay forced in many cases, To accept as a potential symbiote, if you will, something which we ourselves created, which cannot exist without us, and which does not have the insight or the complexity to do our bidding, especially if we imagine that we are subservient to it.
Right, now I would argue another way to put that is that at best a hospital is a necessary evil and the problem is that the route from necessary evil to self-elaborating parasite is a very short road and especially when you have a profit-driven
Entity the point is the perverse incentive incentives make it all but certain that it will make this Transition and the point is the cost will be to your health, right?
It doesn't mean that the hospital isn't something you should be tremendously grateful for at the point that you've been in an accident and you're you know, Internally bleeding and there's somebody there who knows what to do about it, right?
You should be tremendously grateful.
But the point is To have that thing, that there is somebody who knows how to save me from my internal hemorrhage, transmuted into this gigantic conglomerate that will cause you to make Faustian bargains you don't even know you're making.
And which further would have you believe that you unto yourself have no ability to heal yourself.
Right, right, exactly.
And, you know, we talk about this in our book, even simple things like, I broke my arm.
Am I better off going to my doctor or avoiding my doctor, right?
You know, and at the risk of having the usual things befall us.
There is a question about vaccines, right?
There's a long schedule of vaccines that we give to very young children who are still involved in development, and the point is I'm not saying vaccines are bad.
In fact, I think they are fantastic in some cases, and in some cases they are by far our best approach to numerous diseases.
But that doesn't mean that inherently vaccine is the right tool for every disease, and it doesn't mean that there aren't important costs.
And so really the question is, Is this one justified?
Do the cost, benefits, and unknowns add up to this one being something that I should, you know, accept for my child, for example?
Yeah.
No, I mean, it's a category error, and it's the intentional, I think in some cases, abuse of the category to confuse people has worked.
It's like, well, vaccine is an amazing concept, and some vaccines are brought into the world and are amazing.
Therefore, the implicit part of the argument goes, as it squirrels away underground, if you critique any vaccine, you're anti-vax.
And this is like saying, I like dinner.
Cause dinner nourishes me.
And now it's nine in the morning and you say, I need some nourishment.
You're going to need dinner.
Dinner.
But it's not, nope, you're going to need dinner because dinner is the thing.
Actually, I feel like this is a category problem again.
And this is, that would be one with, you know, no ramifications that matter at all.
But indeed, it's like saying, also, I like dinner.
Oh, you're saying all dinner is good.
And if you're not saying all dinner is good, therefore you're anti-dinner.
You're an anti-dinner.
Actually, I've had bad dinners, and that doesn't mean I don't like dinner.
Right, right.
And so it is this way with all of it.
And of course, If you're going to have a prayer of making the right choices in a landscape in which you have a tremendous number of medical things that you could accept or reject, if you were going to make good choices, A, you would want an expert working on your behalf, you would want a doctor, and you would want that doctor informed by a system that did not have perverse incentives in it.
Yes.
And the point is, you know, Our system is so riddled with perverse incentives that why you think you're getting anything like information in the first place is not clear, right?
That's right.
It's a system so broken it's guaranteed to fail, as it does repeatedly.
Indeed.
Well, have we arrived?
I think we have arrived.
I think we've arrived, and the sun has come out-ish.
Oh, it was out for like a minute or two there.
Yeah, and our cat here was watching intently out the window, actually, Fairfax.
Went to the edge, and I thought I was concerned that maybe he was seeing a coyote out there.
It was a bunch of deer.
He was watching deer, and he was not able to tell how far away they were, and so he had this thought of I'll bet those taste really good.
I'll bet I could catch me one of those.
He was having a delusion of grandeur.
Yeah, yes, exactly, exactly.
All right, so we, for those of you who are listening and won't be hearing the Q&A, we will be on next again on Thursday, April 28th.
We'll be missing next Saturday, but we'll be back middle of the following week.
And for those of you who are interested in the Q&A, if I can find it again, we'll be back in about 15 minutes on Odyssey on YouTube.
You can ask questions for that Q&A.
We'll get to as many of them as we can in about an hour.
We won't get to all of them, we'll get to many of them at www.darkhorsesubmissions.com.
If you have logistical questions, like I have a thing.
I want to send them, and it's nice.
You can ask darkhorsemoderator at gmail.com where you might send that.
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And until we see you next, be good to the ones you love, eat good food, and get outside.
