#145 A Phestival of Phacts (Bret Weinstein & Heather Heying DarkHorse Livestream)
In this 145th 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 begin by discussing the interview between Jon Stewart and the Attorney General of Arkansas. Yes, protecting children does mean overriding the recommendations of several prominent organizations, including the American Medical Association (AMA), and the Endocrine Society, both of which we discuss as well. The Pr...
Welcome to the 145th Dark Horse Podcast live stream from our makeshift, temporary, not-quite-a-studio digs.
I know there was some question in the chat as to whether or not our studio would be set up for this live stream, and I have to say there's much delightful about living where we now live, but it is slow going, getting things accomplished, electrical work, etc.
So it's going to be some time before we're on our Our permanent new digs, but I think it will be well worth it, and thanks for bearing with us.
That's right.
So you are Brett Weinstein.
I'm Heather Hying.
Here we are, top of the hour, dark horse.
Next week we will be coming to you a day late on Sunday, and the following week we're not going to have a live stream at all.
But in the interim, Brett has at least three, maybe more, guest podcasts already scheduled or recorded, and a couple of them at least are going to be on fire.
So stay tuned for those.
The ones that are not on fire, off the hook.
All right.
All right.
Sure.
Absolutely.
Yep.
Yeah.
We're going to start with logistics.
Housekeeping, I guess.
Check out our book, Hunter-Gatherer's Guide.
Oh, we are going to have a Q&A this week, as we usually do, starting 10-15 minutes after we finish this main livestream.
You can ask questions starting now at darkhorsesubmissions.com.
We try to get to as many as we can, and it's kind of an ask me anything.
If you're watching on YouTube, we're also streaming live on Odyssey, and that's where the chat is.
YouTube continues to have us demonetized, and Odyssey wouldn't do any such thing.
So here we are.
Yes, also on YouTube, where if they're showing you ads that we aren't reading ourselves, that's them making money off of us, not us making money off of us.
I think I need to make a correction.
Okay.
You suggested that the Q&A was an Ask Me Anything.
Obviously, it's not quite that.
I would say these are inquiries.
They're inquiring of us, and really anything can be inquired, making it an EUA rather than an AMA.
You think inquire is spelled with an E?
Wow, is it not?
Alright, well, I guess I'm not going to be the official speller of the Dark Horse Podcast.
What was the U in the Imagined EUA?
I'm pretty sure that one does have a U in it somewhere.
It does.
No, there was frankly, in case anyone's really disappointed, there was never any chance that Brett was going to be the official speller of the Dark Horse Podcast, or in fact anything.
Beer Hefe once, yes, of a small tropical island, but official speller, no.
No.
Never.
I think that may be a British spelling.
Inquire.
Am I incorrect that the National Inquirer... Also not spelled with an E. Also incorrect.
Incorrect.
Incorrect.
Yeah, that one I got.
It's spelled with an I. The National Inquirer is not spelled with an E. It is.
It is.
It is, but I think that's like part of the joke.
I don't know.
Is it?
I don't know, really.
Well, they got me.
That was a very long...
A long con on their part.
But anyway, they did get me.
Yeah, they're just that good.
Yes, I think I want a redo on all my correspondence that has involved the word inquire.
Well, I'm super pleased, actually, that your attempt at an almost pun has you hoisted on your own petard over spelling.
Right.
Define petard.
It's a sword?
No, it's an item of clothing?
No, it's not a gauntlet.
What is it?
I don't know.
It's a state of mind.
No, it's not.
Alright, it's not a state of mind.
I don't know what it is either.
Thought I would hoist you on yours.
Okay.
All right.
Back to business.
Indeed.
We have a store.
It's pretty great.
DarkHorseStore.org.
Go there to find lots of cool stuff, and we'll be putting some new stuff up there soon.
I believe, including what's up there already, the most recent addition is KEEPPORTLANDWEIRD, all caps, the acronym, obviously.
KEEPPORTLANDWEIRD, Western Educated Industrialized Rich Democratic.
We are no longer in Portland.
We still have many connections there, and it is not staying weird enough.
It's not.
No.
It's not.
The good kind of weird is not... It's coming apart, basically.
Yeah, it is.
It's really... It's crumbling.
It's really terrible.
It's a beautiful, amazing city with such potential.
Yeah.
Well, I post every week at naturalselections.substack.com.
This week I wrote, What Do Girls Do?
And I'm going to read a tiny bit from that during this podcast, but I encourage you to go there.
Free subscribers get almost all of the text for free.
I do audio reads for paying subscribers there.
That's naturalselections.substack.com.
And a reminder, as I've already said, we are supported by our audience.
We appreciate you subscribing, liking, sharing videos that you see on Odyssey, on YouTube, on Spotify, or the clips at Dark Horse Podcast Clips.
We have channels on both Odyssey and YouTube.
You know, really, if you can choose not to watch on YouTube, we encourage that, because YouTube isn't doing us any favors, and they are, in fact, profiting off of us without cutting us into the proceeds from our own work.
And obviously meddling with our numbers, whether that is by keeping people from watching or not reporting honestly how many people are or both.
Unsubscribing people.
Which is highly likely.
Totally.
They are not honest actors.
Nope.
And, you know, there's a lot of that going around, isn't there?
You can join one of our Patreons.
We are still on Patreon for now, where you get access to private monthly Q&As at mine, or more intimate conversations with Brett on his, and you Can either of them get access to the Discord server, where you can engage in honest conversations about difficult topics, join a book club, unwind with virtual happy hours, karaoke, all the different types of people you might hope to run into in any metropolitan city.
If particular demographic is what you're after, you're likely to find it on that Discord server because you don't get cancelled for looking the wrong way or thinking the wrong way there.
And of course, we have sponsors to whom we are indebted.
We are grateful that they stand by Dark Horse, and we are very choosy in who we are willing to have as sponsors.
So if you hear us reading ads from our own mouths, you can know for sure that we are vouching for those products.
So we have three at the top of the hour, as usual.
Without further ado, here we go!
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We have now heard from several friends about how much they like Element, as do we, for themselves or in some cases for the physically hard-working men in their lives.
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I really think that should say a not-yet-salty friend.
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Alright, our final sponsor this week is Allform, a company that makes terrific custom sofas for live streaming and much else.
We like them so much that we have two of them.
Heather is now going to demonstrate the proper use of the Allform sofa for those of you who are listening on an audio-only platform.
She is now demonstrating the use of the sofa, and she looks very comfortable.
As does the dog.
As does the dog.
I don't know if I look comfortable, but I am also attempting to demonstrate proper use of the sofa.
You look great, man.
Well, thank you.
What makes this sofa terrific?
For a fraction of the cost of traditional sofas, you can customize size, layout, fabric, and color.
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Furthermore, they are beautiful and comfortable, roomy and adaptable.
All-form sofas are delivered directly to your home, free and fast, and assembly is easy.
We started with one beautiful sectional all-form sofa in whiskey leather, which you can now observe.
It's soft and supple and warm, unlike a lot of leather.
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It looks gorgeous and is incredibly inviting and comfortable, a rare combination.
Also, some listeners asked if Allform sofas hold up to pets.
Why, yes, Maddie, they do.
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Awesome.
All right.
We did not start at the top of the hour by talking about what we're going to talk about.
No.
So maybe we should just talk about what we're going to talk about rather than talking about first what we're about to be talking about.
Yes, we skipped the abstract.
We did.
All right.
We did.
Allow me to begin.
Sure.
Is that okay?
Perfect.
All right.
Have you seen the Jon Stewart interview of the Attorney General of Arkansas?
I have not, but I do know who Jon Stewart is.
Yes.
Who is Jon Stewart?
I was not expecting that question.
Well, Jon Stewart is obviously a comic and all-around likable guy who became incredibly famous as the host of The Daily Show, coincidentally with Jon Stewart.
Yeah, he was the original host of The Daily Show for, gosh, I want to say 20 years, but I don't know if it was around for that long.
Maybe that's wrong, but a good long time.
Yes.
And he was a favorite of many on the left, at least, and I thought that he had a fairly good following across the aisle as well, but maybe, I don't know, maybe that's not right.
And he retired from the Daily Show and, I don't know, became a farmer or something, I think, which just went out of the public eye for a while, and is now back.
The show whose name I've forgotten.
Oh, it's a great name.
Yeah, it is.
It's The Problem with Jon Stewart.
The Problem with Jon Stewart, which I thought that all of the tweets about his new interview were accounts that didn't like him because, frankly, the video that is being shown that he's proudly Displaying on his new show, The Problem with Jon Stewart, unfortunately reveals at least a problem with Jon Stewart.
And it's not great, so you're flinching.
Well, I mean, we will get there.
Let's get to the particular interview.
So, we don't yet, in this setup, have an ability for me to show what's on my screen, so I'm just going to summarize.
He's interviewing the Attorney General of Arkansas, Leslie Rutledge, who's a Republican woman, and he asks her why she would go against the medical consensus from these reputable medical associations.
It's the American Medical Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the Endocrine Society, Why she would have moved to have go into law going against the medical consensus that apparently this consensus being transing children is totally fine.
And I'm using... Am I using trans as an intransitive verb?
Is that possible?
An intransigent verb.
Yes.
So Arkansas has said, actually, no, you've got to be an adult before you can have any of these procedures done to you, before you can go on puberty blockers, before you can have cross-sex hormones, before you can have surgery to have healthy body parts removed or created out of other flesh, which are the three major medical interventions that the medical community is currently, in many places, just seemingly quite excited about and fine with.
In this interview, the Attorney General of Arkansas is back on her heels.
She's not a scientist, and she doesn't have all of her sheaf of papers with her in this interview.
doesn't have an answer to his questions.
Which doctors did you talk to?
And why would you go against medical consensus?
But he says, you know, Jon Stewart compares a child declaring themselves trans to a child being diagnosed with cancer.
And he says, if the AMA, if the American Medical Association says, okay, with this type of cancer that your child has been diagnosed with, you really need chemotherapy, Would you, as the Attorney General of the state of Arkansas, ever think to say, actually, we're not going to allow that until you're an adult?
And the correct response there is, John, the belief of a child that they are not the sex that they were born to is not the same as a diagnosis of cancer.
It's a fundamentally and totally different thing.
In what way?
In a lot of ways.
One of them is that cancer is not a social construct.
Okay?
You are the sex that you were born.
Very few people have a very unfortunate and deeply held and long-held sense that they would be better off presenting to the world as the sex that they were not born.
As adults, if they choose to transition to presenting to the world as the sex that they are not, they are free to do so.
It is a social condition that is not the same thing as cancer.
Now, that doesn't even get into whether or not what the AMA or the American Academy of Pediatrics is currently recommending for particular childhood cancers is 100% obviously the right thing just because they're recommending it.
They'll get things wrong.
That's the nature of science.
That's the nature of medicine.
So, A, Don't you dare compare a child declaring himself a girl or herself a boy to a diagnosis of cancer, and b, the idea that authorities who have been respected and are currently making mistakes across the board are the only arbiters of truth?
Well, that is the error of the modern era, isn't it?
It's the error of the modern era.
This is exactly what we're doing.
We are pretending that science doesn't exist, That authority is what exists, and authority is now a replacement for science.
And that is the error that Jon Stewart makes in this interview.
And I have a few more things to say, but I'm sure you want to jump in here.
Yeah, well I wanted to just point out that there are genuinely difficult questions in this neighborhood.
This isn't one.
Right.
What you do when a parent does not believe in so-called Western medicine or is, you know, religiously prohibited from employing it and they have a child sick with a curable disease, right?
That's a genuinely difficult question because really, you know, children are children for a reason and their parents are supposed to look out for their interests and to the extent that a parent has a belief system that prevents the You know, the treatment of a disease that is survivable because of a relationship with a spirit world that we cannot test or verify or any of those things, you know, that's difficult.
In the case where, A, we just know too much about this, right?
We know that lots of people have a period of gender dysphoria that just simply clears up with time.
And even to the extent that there is a real argument, if you're one of the tiny number of people who are actually trans, that actually transitioning early is a good thing to do, the problem is
We don't know who is really truly trans and who is suffering from a temporary sense of dysphoria and therefore the idea that if you're just very compelled that this is where you are that you can transition with the help of modern medicine that is an abuse of the doctor-patient relationship and as you allude to
At this moment, we can see that medicine is not serving us well.
It is not giving us advice that is good about what we should and shouldn't do, and in fact it has been drafted into a political campaign to portray certain treatments as good, even as the evidence mounts that they are in fact net negative.
Yes, a point to which we have talked and we will come back to today.
Yes, but just What is the reasonable thing to do in a world where trans exists?
Yes, trans people often have a strong indication of this early in life, but many of the people who think they have a strong indication in fact turn out not to be.
To be permanently in this state.
What is the correct thing to do?
The correct thing to do is to act with caution.
What does caution look like?
It looks like not making permanent changes.
Those changes include, as we've discussed frequently, hormonal changes, surgical changes.
These are things that shouldn't be done because reversing them is Not possible.
Or not fully possible.
And despite what some medical organizations still contend, you can't just halt puberty and then restart it without any effects.
That's simply not true.
And anyone who gave any thought to what the human organism is would have understood that from the beginning.
So, here's a quote from Stewart in this interview with Rutledge, the Attorney General from Arkansas.
So, I would counter John Stewart with this.
Suggesting that protecting children means overriding the recommendations of the American Medical Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics, and the Endocrine Society.
So, I would counter John Stewart with this: On what basis are those three organizations overriding hundreds of millions of years of evolution?
Where did they get their authority?
Authority is not the basis on which science works, but at the very least, organizations that are pretending to be medical, and therefore ought to be scientific in nature, need to be considering what it is that we are.
We are organisms that have been evolving on this planet for billions of years.
We have been mammals for over a hundred million-ish, something like that, and Our hormonal systems are that ancient.
They're in fact older, but the vertebrate hormonal systems are older than that.
And the idea that people can come in and say, ah, it's fashionable now.
To believe children when they say they're a boy.
A girl who says they're a boy, but not a girl who says she's a turtle.
Maybe it's just because we don't have the facility yet to turn someone into a turtle, but we can make you kind of look like a boy, so let's do it.
This is insane.
So I'm actually going to read the first just couple paragraphs from my natural selections this week, if I may.
This is called, What Do Girls Do?
Subtitle is, Girls Become Women.
There is an eight-year-old girl who likes to play in streams and look under rocks for squirmy critters.
She not only knows how to throw a ball, but enjoys doing it.
She loves math and logic and has no interest in dolls or dresses.
She will grow up to be a woman.
Because that's what girls do.
There was another eight-year-old girl who likes to give tea parties for her stuffed animals.
She likes to dance all the dances, often with other girls who like to do the same thing.
She loves to read and has no interest in trucks or trails.
She will also grow up to be a woman.
Because, again, that's what girls do.
One of these girls may want to be an astronaut.
The other, a chef.
Or a mother.
Or a lawyer.
An actress.
A race car driver.
Are all of these desires equally likely among girls?
They are not.
Girls are likely to want some things more than others.
But guess what?
The girls who aren't girly are still girls.
You can tell in part by the fact that they grow up to be women.
Because that's what girls do.
Sex isn't assigned at birth.
Sex is observed at birth.
So of the three organizations that Jon Stewart keeps coming back to, I spent a little bit of time on their sites.
The American Association of Pediatrics' site seems to be in the middle of maybe trying to put a bunch of stuff behind walls, so I'm not going to spend any time there.
The Endocrine Society has posted a number of things, including its 2017 quote gender dysphoria slash gender incongruence guidelines resources.
And the second of two essential points that they post in this, again I cannot show my screen, but this is again 2017 Gender Dysphoria, Gender Incongruence Guidelines from the Endocrine Society.
The second essential point that they make, what they're calling essential points, is as follows.
Gender dysphoric slash gender incongruent persons should receive a safe and effective hormone regimen that will suppress the body's sex hormone secretion determined at birth and manifested at puberty and maintain levels of sex steroids within the normal range for the person's affirmed gender.
That's incoherent.
And it is trying to point out that actually what you were born as is what your body proceeds to make you out to be.
And we now have the technology to get in the way of that to some degree, not fully and not without a lot of cost.
But people should receive a safe and effective hormone regimen that will suppress the body's sex hormone secretion determined at birth and manifested at puberty.
Your sex hormones are not determined at birth.
Your sex isn't a term at birth.
Your sex isn't assigned at birth.
Your sex, again, is observed at birth.
And it doesn't just manifest at puberty.
It manifests in utero, and in early toddlerhood, and again, in more dramatic ways that everyone is familiar with who's gone through it at puberty.
But there's nothing about a doctor having come in and said, yeah, you, you, you, you.
It's like they've imagined it's like the sorting hat from Harry Potter.
What was their term for what happens at birth?
It's incoherent.
It's an incoherent sentence.
I'm just going to read the sentence again because it really doesn't make sense.
This is, again, the second essential point in the guidelines that are still the standing guidelines from 2017 on how we treat gender dysphoria slash gender incongruence from the Endocrine Society, one of the three main professional organizations that Jon Stewart keeps hammering.
Quote, gender dysphoric slash gender incongruent persons should receive a safe and effective hormone regimen that will suppress the body's sex hormone secretion, comma, determined at birth and manifested at puberty, comma, and maintain levels of sex steroids within the normal range for the person's affirmed gender.
Okay, determined at birth.
This is a scientific slash medical society that thinks anything about that Individual is determined at birth?
There you go.
That is a non-medical, non-scientific judgment that appears to be a way of acknowledging that there is something inherent to this being, but not wanting to raise questions about whether or not there is a being with rights prior to birth having to do with a completely other discussion.
Right?
This is insane, right?
What happens at birth is that the individual goes from inside another body to the outside world.
That's what happens at birth.
Nothing about hormones is determined.
The lungs start working and there's some bawling.
Oh, there's a lot of stuff, right?
It's an event, for sure, but it is not a determinate event in the hormonal life of this creature.
I mean, once again, it's a postmodern view of humanity.
Ah, a doctor, a midwife, a doula, whatever.
Someone came in and said, I pronounce you a boy.
And there they made him a boy.
And if a different doula had come in, or midwife, or doctor, whatever, and said, I pronounce you a girl, boom!
That person would have been a girl.
Not how it works.
Everyone knows it.
Why are we letting these people pretend?
And how is it that the major medical organizations have been so captured that now they've confused one of One of what was once the most important commenters on cultural news of the day, that to resist, to resist the insanity and frankly the child abuse that is happening, is itself anti-scientific.
You got it backwards, John.
You got it backwards.
Well, okay, so I want to come back then to what's going on with Jon Stewart, because I quite like the guy, I have to say, but this is not the first place where we have seen him weighed into the issues of the modern era in a ham-fisted fashion.
So anyway, I want to point out a couple things here.
One, what we know and what anybody who watches this podcast or a good number of other podcasts knows is that organizations are being pressured into saying things that violate their original mission, right?
The ACLU is now a threat to civil liberties because it has embraced a political ideology.
But it can't be because it still has the word civil liberties in its name.
Well... So it can't... But I want to give Jon Stewart his due.
A, there's a reason that he is what he is, which is that he's a very likable, very smart guy.
My sense is he's a very likable... He's got courage.
He does, and he's also earned life's equivalent of tenure where he now is so wealthy that he doesn't really have to worry about what happens to him.
He may not like it if people say nasty things about him, but they can't touch him, right?
So the question is why is he not playing a more useful role given what he is and who he is and what we all think his instincts are.
And the problem Is that if you have been, again I don't know how many years he was doing the Daily Show, but if you have had a gig in which you are adored by millions and you have a great deal of control over what your show looks like, if you've had that sweet relationship with the universe,
Not entirely unlike the sweet relationship that we had with our teaching jobs, where we got to decide what we wanted to teach, how we wanted to teach it, nobody was in a position to tell us differently.
That was a pretty good deal.
If you have a deal like that, and then The world has changed and it intrudes into your life.
You may not understand that the ACLU has gone from one of the, you know, the last fail-safes protecting civil liberties to a threat to civil liberties.
Because of course it still has the same looking website and same acronym and all of that.
So what I think is going on with Jon Stewart is he has the sense That the world that he more or less exited when he went into that sweet gig of his can't have changed that much, right?
The ACLU can't be the inverse of the ACLU, right?
That would be crazy.
Racists may have changed, but the nature of racism hasn't inverted, right?
So if you come back out with a sense that things must be sort of like you remember, And then you try to make sense of, well, who are the people who are being oppressed because everybody's too old-fashioned to accept, you know, the lot in life that biology has handed them?
Obviously trans people.
And I don't even disagree with that.
I think it's even true.
But the problem is, if you think trans people face a very difficult road based on some quirk of biology, And you don't understand that trans activists and trans people are actually two different phenomena, right?
And that trans activism is now orders of magnitude more people than actual trans folks struggling with the difficulties that that situation...
Then you think, well, all right, these people need a defense and I'm going to come out and give that defense.
And it can't be all that unclear what that defense should be.
Let's just look at what the medical science says.
And then you end up with these medical societies and you don't understand that they've been captured by something.
And even if they know better, they can't manage to say it publicly because they'd be destroyed.
So if that world is just different enough from the one that you last had to interact with, then you can't fathom how different things are.
You can't see that, in order to figure out what medical science thinks, you can't go to the medical societies.
Okay.
Yeah, but.
Alright.
There's a reliance on organizations' conclusions.
Over thinking it through for yourself, what your own eyes tell you, what your own logic can reveal if you just think carefully about it.
That's the way of science, and that's the way that all of us, no matter what your degree is or is not or what you call yourself or how bad you think you were at logic or math or whatever in school, all of us I have the capacity for that level of scientific instinct.
I've made an observation.
I'm going to see if I can falsify it.
I'm going to see if I can render it untrue by anything else that I can find out in the universe.
And if I can't, I'm going to continue to think that that thing is true, even if the authorities come at me with bludgeons and hammers and pitchforks.
And instead, from Jon Stewart, and as we're going to see here, definitely from these organizations, including the American Medical Association, what we have is We're sure you... Sorry, my computer is threatening to shut itself down.
I can't take it.
I can't take it anymore.
What we have from these organizations and from the people who are parroting them is we've done the work.
You don't have to.
And in fact, you can't.
We're not going to let you get anywhere near trying to do the work for yourself.
And we're going to tell you you're engaging in misdisc, malinformation, whatever it is.
We've done it.
Trust us.
That's our job.
And you know what?
That's never been the job of anything on behalf of a populace.
A populace all of us have to be able to, encouraged to, and actually feel encouraged in and of our own selves to question any pronouncements that come down from such agencies and authorities.
And having an argument be based entirely on what they said It's not an argument.
And he's smarter than that.
Of course he is.
That's my point.
He's smarter than that, but he's not engaging his intellect in the right way to see it.
And frankly, I don't know that he's going to see this or not.
But if he does, he ought to look at what you've revealed about the claim by this society of endocrinologists that something endocrinologically important is happening at birth that couldn't have been determined seven minutes before, right?
Right.
John Stewart knows enough biology to look at that and say, wait a minute, why is an endocrinological society claiming that birth is the moment at which your hormones are chosen?
And that sentence that I read from the Endocrine Society's 2017 report, which is its most modern report that I've found on their resources for gender dysphoria, they say nothing.
It's like the most clear they get.
They don't go into anything about the sudden rise in transgender identification, whether this might be a symptom, the underlying cause for which it should be addressed, as opposed to, oh, let's facilitate the fantasy that you are something you're not.
That's not what doctors are supposed to do.
Several things are true.
One, there's a clue right here that something has gone on with at least this one society.
And our claim will be, if you look at all of them, you're going to find the same evidence.
You're going to find evidence that these folks are speaking a political truth, and they are disguising it as a scientific truth.
And the point is, what happened, John?
Well, you had societies that Look, they were always a mixed bag, right?
That's what happens when people get together and they have a certain amount of power to declare things.
But what is supposed to be true of these societies is that they are supposed to be taking the information, which is scientifically generated, and the authority that they have is, A, supposed to be limited, Right?
Authority is not how science works.
And B, it is supposed to follow from what is discovered through the scientific process.
What has happened is that somebody has taken the authority that was earned through scientific study and is now using that to broadcast something else.
It is A wolf in sheep's clothing.
It is a Trojan horse.
But the point is, you cannot go to the ACLU and find out where civil liberties are being threatened.
You cannot go to the AMA and find out what the latest medical science is telling us about your well-being and how to cater to it.
You cannot go to the American Psychological the society and discover what the state of gender science is.
That isn't possible anymore and nobody is saying that that's safe.
The absence of functional societies that would allow us to figure out what the cutting edge was telling us, but that's nonetheless where we find ourselves.
And I would offer one other piece of evidence that I hope will trigger Jon Stewart to reinvestigate his position.
You and I have said frequently on Dark Horse, That not only is trans a real phenomenon that a tiny number of people exhibit, but it is also an ancient phenomenon, which we know because it is seen in many different cultures.
And the distinction between what is being said now, right, to have medical societies saying that what naturally follows from the needs of trans people is intervention flies in the face of the truly trans-supportive position, which is, look, this is a real phenomenon that is long-standing and exists in many, if not all, cultures, right?
The fact that these medical societies are claiming something very new, something very aggressive in the intervention is necessary to treat trans people honorably, flies in the face of the history and prehistory of transness, which is not well understood, but nonetheless, Jon Stewart ought to be thinking, well, wait a minute.
If it is true that transness is ancient, why is modern technology necessary to treat trans people well?
Is this a mistake, or is it not a mistake?
And do these people have any idea what the downstream consequences of the interventions that they are advocating are?
You know, do they have a plan for the large number of people that we know experience dysphoria early and end up with perfectly standard gender identity later in life?
Right?
These are all really important questions.
Yeah, and I think actually one of the points, one more point from this Endocrine Society document, is that they say gender dysphoria slash gender incongruence.
And gender dysphoria is a sense that you need to be presenting to the world as the sex that you are not.
Gender incongruence is a regressive idea from the 50s, frankly, not that anyone was calling it then, that if you're a tomboy, or a girl who likes to do boy-typical things, or if you're a boy who likes to do girl-typical things, then that's gender incongruence, and you need medical intervention to cure you of that.
Now, if gender incongruence is being kind of equated with gender dysphoria, at least being lumped in here, that is a regressive, nasty, frankly, not-at-all-until-yesterday, anything close to a left-wing position.
This is backwards.
This is anti-woman, anti-feminist, anti-equality, anti-progress.
For all of us who would like to be able to have ourselves and our children and our children's children make decisions about how they want to be and what they want to do in the world based on their proclivities and their capabilities, not based on the sex they are.
Just because I was a lot more like that first girl in the paragraph of the piece that I read than that second girl, I was much more likely to be, you know, come home covered in dirt and want to talk math than want to have a tea party for any of my friends, doesn't mean I thought I was a boy.
I wanted to be a boy.
Doesn't mean I should have been a boy.
Certainly doesn't mean someone should have come along and said, let's stop puberty for you and see what you're going to turn out to be.
Nope!
Always a girl.
Always gonna be a girl.
Always gonna be coming into a woman.
And yes, some people who experience that do turn out to be gay.
Very, very, very few of them do turn out to be Trans.
Tiny, tiny, tiny number.
And a lot of them turn out to be straight women or straight men who just don't follow the stereotypes.
And the idea that we're medicalizing not following stereotypes is regressive as Yeah, it is ultra-regressive, and actually this ought to be the wake-up call for a guy like Jon Stewart.
The obviously liberal, progressive, open-minded thing is what you are born as does not require you to behave in any particular way.
In a particular way, you should be free to choose those things and we should not be surprised if there are asymmetries in what gets chosen by people of different sexes, but you know, how much better is the world now that we, you know, that the fact that you're born a girl doesn't mean you can't aspire to be an engineer, right?
We all like that world better, right?
You do, don't you Jon Stewart?
So, if you like that world better, then the last thing you want to see is this, you know, spasm of reactionary gender nonsense where, you know, we're going to diagnose you as having a pathology that's in need of medical intervention because you manifest tendencies that didn't match the color that your parents painted the nursery that you spent your toddlerhood in, or whatever.
That's right.
So, switching slightly, but following the same line of thought, I went to look at the site for the American Medical Association, which was a treat, as you can imagine.
One of the top articles... Oh, so Zach, I sent to you an email, not yet, but if you can end up seeing that link, don't show it just now, it's going to be the next thing I want to link to.
Because I didn't send you this one.
One of the first articles on the AMA's site, the American Medical Association... Uh, did you send that?
Or you should have sent it, but I don't have it.
I sent it to, uh, yes.
I sent it both to your, your and dad's at, uh... Okay, yeah, yeah, um... So, uh, you could...
You can send me something from an email account that you would like me to send it to, and I will do that.
Maybe.
We'll see if this can work.
Let's see.
Now I'm thrown by where I was.
Okay, so at the top of, near the top of the page of the AMA, we have a piece from October 5th, three days ago, as we're live streaming, by the president of the AMA, a guy named Jack Resnick Jr., M.D., and the title of this piece is, Turning the Tide Against Medical Disinformation Will Take All of Us.
I'm going to read you a couple bits from this.
Countering anti-science aggression.
Make no mistake, the health of our patients is put at risk by coordinated, well-resourced efforts to mislead the public about medicine and science.
This anti-science aggression, as some have called it, not only undermined confidence in the COVID-19 vaccines, but it has also been used to widen existing divisions on far-ranging issues such as access to safe reproductive care, achieving health equity, and discrimination against transgender patients.
Anti-science aggression.
Undermine confidence in the COVID vaccines.
Yes.
Yes, what undermined confidence in the COVID vaccines is that they suck.
Yeah, it was actually the COVID-19 vaccines that undermined the confidence.
And the nonsense that was said about them ahead of time, which created Which was the actual misinformation.
The actual misinformation.
It's unbelievable.
So there's that, okay.
We know we can, this again from the relatively new president of the AMA, the American Medical Association, we know we can fight disinformation while protecting our cherished First Amendment principles.
We have no interest in policing the open debate of ideas that has been the cornerstone of scientific advancement.
But scientific discourse does not include spreading dangerous, known falsehoods that harm the public health with the intent to deceive.
We are disheartened that a very small number of physicians and health professionals have been among the loudest purveyors of false health information about COVID.
That's why the AMA has called on state medical boards and specialty accreditation boards to respond swiftly when physicians spread disinformation violating the ethics of our profession.
Uh, it...
Yeah.
Yeah, exactly.
Exactly.
No, that is incredible.
I thought so.
The problem is, any rational person knows that we are stuck with a predicament.
Which is, you cannot know in advance what the misinformation is.
That this is something that sorts itself out over time.
Can they hear themselves?
I don't...
It's hard to render you speechless.
It's hard.
Well, I'm trying to not burst a blood vessel in my eye as my blood pressure goes up hearing their ridiculous portrayal where they are in fact perfectly ready to defend freedom of speech as long as we can do away with the people who are saying the stuff that's so bad.
Right?
It's like how How superficial does your conceptual understanding of freedom of speech have to be for you to misunderstand that there's a problem and that we have to protect speech that we do not like in order to protect speech that we need to hear?
Oh my god, yeah.
Okay, so I got two more from this article.
Okay, cool, good.
Three key steps forward.
The AMA House of Delegates, representing every state and specialty, also adopted a comprehensive strategy to address health-related disinformation spread by health professionals at the 2022 Annual Meeting.
We've got a number of them.
The second of three main bullet points is That the AAB, House of Delegates, intends to, quote, address the dissemination and monetization of disinformation by health professionals via social media platforms.
They're going to address the monetization of disinformation.
Right, they're going to address the monetization.
And I'm afraid I have to bring this up.
This emerged, in my world at least, very shortly before today's podcast.
But I have now sourced the proposed, not even proposed, the policy change that will go into effect November 3rd at PayPal.
Uh oh, what?
What PayPal is going to do is they are going to, on a per instance basis, a per violation basis, they are going to avail themselves of the right to take $2,500 out of your PayPal account.
If you... and then you can imagine all of the things that you're not allowed to do, including, say, things that support the oppression based on gender, identity, etc.
Oh, and misinformation.
So, imagine... Yeah, go ahead.
That's kind of all I got.
PayPal isn't a platform that people put their voices onto.
PayPal is a payment platform.
Do you remember when Sargon of Akkad got de-platformed by Patreon?
This would have been like end of 2018 maybe?
Yes, I do.
On the basis of things.
On the basis of things he said in, like, a private video on YouTube that had nothing to do with Patreon.
Absolutely.
I think I got that right.
Yep.
Okay, so, um, and doesn't matter what he was saying.
I don't even remember at this point, right?
Doesn't matter.
Patreon shut down his Patreon account because he said something over there.
Yep.
That they didn't like.
PayPal isn't actually even a media company.
So any time you say anything in your world that they decide they don't like, they could fine you $2,500?
Well, I tried to suss this out because I agree it's conspicuous that it isn't even like Patreon where you could say something on Patreon or on some thing that you were funding through Patreon, where Patreon could convince itself that it had a right to do such a thing.
PayPal, I think, does not even have a place.
There's not a community that they could be discussing.
So it must be your larger social media life that they are intending to police by.
And, you know, of course, as is always the case in these overreaches, authoritarian overreaches by these platforms, what is written is ambiguous.
And it would be one thing if there were a mechanism to adjudicate whether you had, in fact, or had not, in fact, violated their rule and whether, in fact, their rule was clear enough to even follow it if that's what you intended to do, right?
There is no venue.
And so what that effectively...
Well, if you weren't doing anything wrong, I'm sure you wouldn't have gotten fined.
Well, here's the problem, is that all of these policies pretend to be indifferent to who you are, and they are exactly the opposite.
This policy will be wielded against people with certain beliefs, and it will not be wielded against people with other beliefs.
And in this case, it has financial teeth.
That's huge.
So it was Ian Michael Chong, Miles Chong, who alerted us to this on Twitter today and I only briefly looked at what he had pointed to and then Helen Dale responded to him and asked, does that mean that if there's nothing in your PayPal account that they could go to your bank accounts which are connected?
Now I honestly think that that is not spelled out in this document.
It's not clear one way or the other.
But we even have to worry About interacting with PayPal even beyond what might be in our PayPal accounts because they do have these agreements that we've signed up for to link our accounts to other accounts that we might have.
And so if you, you know, if in a podcast that PayPal decides it has the right to police, you've said 11 things that it sees as violations, How much of your wealth are they allowed to drain?
And where do you get to challenge this?
It's some company that you've clicked OK on its terms of service.
So this is absolutely a declaration of war, right?
And I would also point out that if the world worked, anything like it is supposed to work.
PayPal would be bending over backwards to be indifferent to what the people who use its service say or think, right?
It is a for-profit corporation.
Its interests involve getting as many people to use its service as much as possible, right?
That's what's in the interest of its shareholders.
Not becoming the nanny corporation that's going to go and search what you say to figure out if you're violating its terms of service, right?
That is an aggressive... Actually, that's a very interesting... that's sort of an interesting turnaround because part of why we find ourselves in the predicament we find ourselves in, society-wide, Is that people mistake, oh, it's a pharmaceutical company.
It must be interested in your health.
They mistake the type of organization it is for actually what its fiscal responsibility is.
And no, their fiscal responsibility is actually to make more money for their for their shareholders.
And you are arguing that in like a reversal here, that PayPal is actually failing in its fiscal responsibility if it is going to start going after some considerable fraction of its normal audience. - I honestly don't know what to make of this, that PayPal is actually failing in its fiscal responsibility if it is going to start going after some considerable fraction of its normal It's cannibalizing its core competency over political ideology.
It is bizarre as hell, right?
Twitter, even if Twitter has deeply held beliefs, Twitter as a business should be absolutely interested in getting everybody to use the service independent of what it is they're trying to say.
You wouldn't expect a company that makes paper to suddenly start trying to nanny Who can buy it to write what on it?
You would imagine that that company would be exactly the opposite.
That they would be trying to ignore all of the despicable things that are being written on the paper that they produce so they can sell more of it.
Why are these businesses going after their core competencies?
Why are they throwing off users who actually represent revenue?
Why is this happening across multiple industries now?
It's a genuine mystery and it could have lots of different answers.
It could be that these things have been captured from the inside and the terror of being torn apart by these political ideologies that You know, have control over the levers internal to these corporations is causing them to cannibalize their audience, you know, in fear the same way universities have upended their truth-seeking mission out of fear of, you know, motivated mob.
That's possible.
It's also possible it's something else.
Yeah, it is.
Well, I'm thrilled.
That's huge.
Well, thank goodness it isn't November 3rd, because this policy doesn't go into effect until then, so.
Yeah, small favors.
Okay.
Gives us time to find an alternative to PayPal.
I guess.
Wow.
Okay.
One more quote from this letter.
From the President of the American Medical Association, published on October 5th, the headline of which is, Turning the Tide Against Medical Disinformation Will Take All of Us.
Zach, at this point, have you received that link from me or not?
Okay, so be prepared, not just yet, but almost.
So here's a paragraph from a little bit earlier.
Okay, just don't, not yet, okay?
I recently, he, this is Dr. Resnick, the president of the AMA, writing, I recently participated in an annual fact-checking festival.
Let me just read that again.
I recently participated in an annual fact-checking festival hosted by media organizations Pointer and PolitiFact called the United Facts of America, where I explained the impact of unchecked medical misinformation to a diverse audience of journalists, policymakers, and pundits, and also the responsibility physicians have in policing it.
An annual fact-checking festival.
So we're going to talk about festivals, actually, because this got me thinking again about festivals and what they are and are not.
And fact-checking and festival don't go together.
Fact.
I recently went to an accounting festival.
Conference.
You could call it a conference.
We have a word for that.
A fact-checking festival.
Okay, well, I'm going to read from the site that I am now at, the United Facts of America, a festival of fact-checking.
It was on May 10th through 13th, and the sub-headline is, join us live on May 10th through 13th for a virtual festival of fact-checking with Dr. Anthony Fauci.
Wow.
There it is.
There it is.
Wow.
And one more.
They have the ticket prices, the VIP experience.
Members of PolitiFact's Truth Squad are offered discounted tickets.
Is that a fact?
It's the United Facts of America.
How can that be a fact?
I think we're not.
I will link to this in the show notes, all these things.
Wait, this is not a joke?
It's not a joke!
It's not a joke?
It is not a joke.
It happened.
The now president of the AMA is pointing to this with glee in his op-ed, whatever it is, letter from three days ago.
Get tickets now to access four days of forward-thinking conversation about the role of facts in our lives.
This virtual fest—virtual festival, even!
Wow!
This virtual festival is for everyone interested in fact-based expression, civic engagement, and the role of facts in a free society.
Come celebrate facts with us!
Oh, and Anthony Fauci is the Fact Czar.
He's factsy, that's for sure.
Oh my goodness.
Yeah.
Oh, also, this sent me down a little bit of a rabbit hole.
I got no resolution, so I'm not going to spend much time on this, but over 10 hours of virtual program, you'll hear from expert fact checkers from PolitiFact, The Washington Post, and factcheck.org.
Do you go to school to become an expert fact-checker?
What defines expertise in fact-checking?
How do you do that?
I get no resolution, actually.
Google failed me.
I spent, you know, not a long time, but, you know, 20 minutes, like, okay, what makes an expert fact-checker an expert or a fact-checker, in fact?
My very first substack, I went after PolitiFact for being Facebook's arm of Of misinformation, frankly.
But this phrase now is showing up all over the place.
Expert fact-checker, expert fact-checker, expert.
Says who?
This is very much like Jon Stewart saying, well, the AMA says, well, and the president of the AMA went to this virtual festival of fact-checking where Fauci was, so we know that's all good.
I have the solution.
Do you?
Good, because I don't.
No, I got it.
All right, here it is.
The solution is proper spelling.
And it works like this.
Do you remember back where the concept... You remember how we started the show, right?
Oh yeah.
I'm trying to... Redeem yourself.
Redeem myself.
Redeem.
R-E-D-E-A-M.
But it's close.
It's close.
Everyone knows what you mean.
Well, I feel my job is done here.
No, here it is.
Do you remember back in, I don't know, was it the 90s?
Oh, God.
When the term fat speciated and there was traditional fat, F-A-T, and then there was P-H-A-T.
I wouldn't have never thought of it as speciating before, but yes, sure, it was perhaps cladogenesis.
Sure, okay.
It is time.
We now, the gap straddled by the concept of fact is so large that it must now... Fact now, not fat.
Fact, yes.
We now need fact.
P-H-A-C-T.
Yes, exactly.
That's these fact checkers.
P-H-A-C-T.
Festival of facts.
Of facts, exactly.
And now, if that's true, if we can define these things based on whether or not you were accused of being F-A-T or P-H-E-T.
A-T.
A-T.
I actually know that one.
Yeah, you caught that one.
As in that case, we can distinguish facts from facts, in this case, by the way they are spelled.
Then what makes a good fact checker is the ability to straddle the largest gap from the actual facts, you know, things that are, you know, true, right, to what is being claimed as a fact P-H-A-C-T, right?
The bigger the gap you can cover, right, where you can claim that the P-H-A-C-T is in fact just simply true when it is the farthest distance from what is actually true, then that puts you at a high status within the realm of the P-H-A-C-T checkers, right? then that puts you at a high status within the And you probably get invited to all the P-H-estibles.
Right, exactly.
Yeah.
And the rest of us can tell you to P-H-U-C-K-R.
From them?
Gladly.
Yeah.
Okay, this is perfect because I think we also now need festival p-h-e-s-t-i-v-a-l um but they had a fact-checking festival which in fact had no relationship to as far as I could tell facts or presumably Festivities, in any way.
And I have been wanting for several weeks to come back to Barbara Ehrenreich, who died in the very beginning of September, as we were sort of mid-move, and I couldn't find my copy of one of her excellent books, Dancing in the Streets, at that time.
So we just spent a little bit of time talking about her.
And this is perfect, because Dancing in the Streets, a history of collective joy.
It's a 2006 book.
It's a book that I actually used in some of my curriculum when I was teaching with a linguist.
We were teaching both animal and human communication.
And she, Erin Reich, much missed.
So we mentioned her in Livestream 140 and then also a year before that in Livestream 95.
As it turns out.
But I want to share two excerpts from this book, Dancing in the Streets, beginning, just the very beginning of chapter one, in which she effectively defends the idea of festival, of actual festival.
And this chapter one is called The Archaic Roots of Ecstasy.
And it's a page and a half or so here.
Let's see if I can find it.
And then a much shorter, a very short excerpt from later on in the book to give us a little food for thought as if we need more.
Okay.
I can't find, I did, I did use one of my fancy book darts.
There we go.
Okay.
The Archaic Roots of Ecstasy from Chapter One of Dancing in the Streets, A History of Collective Joy by newly departed Barbara Ehrenreich.
Go back 10,000 years and you will find humans toiling away at the many mundane activities required for survival.
Hunting, food gathering, making weapons and garments, beginning to experiment with agriculture.
But if you land on the right moonlit night or seasonal turning point, you might also find them engaged in what seems, by comparison, to be a gratuitous waste of energy.
Dancing in lines or circles, sometimes wearing masks or what appear to be costumes, often waving branches or sticks.
Most likely, both sexes would be dancing, each in its separate line or circle.
Their faces and bodies might be painted with red ochre, or so archaeologists guess from the widespread presence of that colored ore in the sites of human settlements.
The scene, in other words, might not be too different from the savage rituals encountered by 19th century Westerners among native peoples of the world.
We can infer these scenes from prehistoric rock art depicting dancing figures, which has been discovered at sites in Africa, India, Australia, Italy, Turkey, Israel, Iran, and Egypt, among other places.
Whatever else they did, our distant ancestors seem to find plenty of time for the kinds of activities the anthropologist Victor Turner described as liminal, or peripheral, to the main business of life.
Festive dancing was not a rare or incidental subject for prehistoric artists.
The Israeli archaeologist Yosef Garfinkel asserts that dancing scenes, quote, were a most popular, indeed almost the only subject used to describe interaction between people in the Neolithic and Chalcolithic periods.
When such danced rituals originated is not known, but there is evidence they may go back well into the Paleolithic era, or Stone Age.
At one recently discovered site in England, drawings on the ceiling of a cave show conga lines of female dancers, along with drawings of animals like bison and ibex, which are known to have become extinct in England 10,000 years ago.
So, well before people had a written language, and possibly before they took up a settled lifestyle, they danced and understood dancing as an activity important enough to record on stone.
It is not easy to read the excitement of a danced ritual into prehistoric drawings.
The figures are highly stylized.
Many of those catalogued by Garfinkel are little more than stick figures or silhouettes.
Few possess facial features or anything like a facial expression.
Even the identification of them as dancers takes some interpretive work.
The figures have to be using their limbs in ways not associated with normal activities.
Holding their arms up, holding hands in a circle, raising their legs, or leaping, for example.
Yet even in these crude, two-dimensional depictions, some of the recognizable ingredients of more recent festive traditions shine through.
Masking and costuming, for example.
Some of the male figures wear masks in the form of animal heads or abstract designs.
Other dancers wear what archaeologists interpret as costumes, such as levered skins.
In the clearest sign of motion and possibly excitement, some of the figures have long, flowing hair standing out from their heads as if they are moving rapidly and tossing their heads to some long, silenced drumbeat.
Clearly, danced rituals did not seem like a waste of energy to prehistoric peoples.
They took the time to fashion masks and costumes.
They wantonly expended calories in the execution of the dance.
They preferred to record these scenes over any other group activity.
Thus, anthropologist Victor Turner's consignment of danced ritual to an occasional, marginal, or liminal status seems especially unwarranted in the prehistoric case, and more representative of the production-oriented mentality of our own industrial age than of prehistoric priorities.
Surely this people knew hardship and were often threatened by food shortages, disease, and wild animals.
But ritual, of a danced and possibly ecstatic nature, was central to their lives.
Perhaps only because our own lives, so much easier in many ways, are also so constrained by the imperative to work, we have to wonder why.
Fantastic.
Fantastic.
Yeah, she's brilliant.
And I recommend the whole book as a history of sort of ecstatic ritual and festival.
And I would say embodied engagement with other individuals in real time and space is festival.
Put virtual in front of it, and it's no festival.
Put fact-checking in front of it, and you're really far afield.
And you can use words any way you want, because the First Amendment does guarantee us that, but it doesn't mean what you think it does.
It really doesn't.
So, later in the book, halfway through or so, She builds a compelling argument, and it's not one that she is certain of, and she quotes various historians, but posits as a real possibility that apparently there's a fair amount of historical evidence for a rise in what we now understand to be depression, but what would have been called melancholia in early modern times, in like the Middle Ages and even the Renaissance.
And she posits that the rise in melancholia, the rise in depression, may be connected to the disappearance of traditional festivities, specifically festival.
And she points to various historians' discussion of the rise of subjectivity and the discovery of the inner self.
And she summarizes several concrete changes that occurred in the early modern period, first among the upper middle class, because these were things that took some money, and then And then, of course, came into all of our worlds and helped create this modern idea of the individual as a walled fortress, which answers neither to others nor the laws of nature.
That latter bit being my addition.
So here's what she says.
There's historical evidence of shifts in the early modern period.
Mirrors in which to examine oneself became popular among those who could afford them, along with self-portraits.
Rembrandt painted over 50 of them.
and autobiographies in which to revise and elaborate the image that one has projected to others.
In bourgeois homes, public spaces that guests may enter are differentiated for the first time from the private spaces, bedrooms for example, in which one may retire to let down one's guard and truly be oneself.
More decorous forms of entertainment, plays and operas, requiring people to remain immobilized, each in his or her separate seat, began to provide an alternative to the promiscuously interactive and physically engaging pleasures of carnival.
Wow!
Yeah, so she's got mirrors, self-portraits, autobiographies, the separation of public from private spaces within your own structure, and a movement from entertainment in which you are physically embodied and moving and interacting, to one in which you are mostly still and receptive.
So there are really two things in there, as I see it.
One is a sort of precursor to the obsession with image that social media then brings.
Yes, very much so.
The sort of sense of your public self and your private self being potentially very, very different.
And that, to me, ties back to the transgender stuff.
That we have people who are so concerned with their sense of self that what they actually are takes a back seat.
Right.
And then the second thing in there, something I've pointed to, the radical shift in our relationship with music in particular, maybe all art, but music in particular, where we become consumers of something that every single human being would have been a producer of until fairly recently.
Or at least interacting with.
Even if not everyone drummed or sang or played a string instrument, everyone would have been dancing with the music at some point.
I believe there's actually no distinction there.
That every single person, every single healthy person would have participated in the group music.
The scene.
Yep.
Singing, dancing, otherwise keeping time.
And the idea of, oh, we're very compelled by music, right?
It drives us, we want it.
But we want to consume it.
It's somebody else's product and it's foreign to us and some of us can't produce it, right?
It's a very odd relationship.
And it's a new one.
So anyway, I don't see them as exactly the same thing, but I do think she's pointing to a radical change In our relationship to the entire realm, and it's a really, it's a really subtle and important point.
And can you imagine someone at Carnival, which we have interacted with some in Ecuador and I in Panama as well, or one of these older rites from, say, Greece, which became ecstatic in the original sense of the word.
Can you imagine any of any such people being invited To the Poynter Institute's fact-checking festival.
Eager for a festival that wasn't otherwise on the calendar and arriving and finding Well, reason for melancholia, honestly, right?
The hypothesis that as festival, as interactive engagement with your body and your community on a regular basis, at regular moments, as seasons changed, at regular holidays, became less and less a part of the world, so too did melancholia increase.
I like this as a hypothesis very much.
Yeah.
Anthony Fauci is just the cherry on top of that sundae.
I mean, the idea that at a fact-checking festival a guy who has literally out loud said and then not been horrified that he made some sort of error that to contradict him is to contradict science, I mean... Yep, I am science!
I am science!
Yeah, ignore the man behind the vaccine.
Well, I don't know.
Words used to mean something.
It was cool when they did because you could use them for stuff.
Here's to a re-opening of Real Festival.
All right, yeah.
And the president of the AMA referring delightedly to this virtual fact checking festival suggests that he may not really know what either festivals or facts are.
That's it.
Yeah, that's mind-blowing.
I cannot believe that that's not a joke.
It's not.
If it turns out to be a joke, we will have to accept that they got us good.
Yes, and great.
Please make it have been a joke.
Please let it have been a joke.
On the other hand, guys, it supposedly happened in May.
I imagine some people were there who can vouch for the fact that, I mean, it's not even there, though.
It's virtual.
So I imagine a bunch of people were sitting in front of their screens feeling super festive about this whole thing.
Oh, so festive.
So festive.
But I have to say, in an era of P-H-A-C-T-S, what does it mean that it happened at some moment and is now over?
Right, or that it was virtual, right?
It can change, it can be anything it needs to have been.
Yeah, it was virtual and now it's what?
And now it wasn't virtual, right?
Oh, I see your point.
Yeah, I mean, let's put it this way.
It is a festival of safety and effectiveness in the truest, is there some other way to spell true?
Um, T-R-U-S-T.
T-R-O-O, how about it?
T-R-O-O-S-T.
True.
Sense of that term.
Yeah, the truest.
True.
Truest, exactly.
Um, yes.
Zach is not pleased with us on that one.
No, I like this tremendously.
Okay.
Okay, um, did you want to talk about either cars or, um, or... Yeah, I had two things.
I had two things.
We could save one of them.
We've been going quite a while.
It's two.
We started almost on time.
Let's start with the...
Let's start with the observation I wanted to make.
And actually, my friend Jared Stroat, who I was very close with in high school, deserves a shout out here.
Because, anyway, what this is... I don't know what's coming now.
...is a discussion of a life hack.
It is one that I think our listeners ought to consider at least before rejecting.
And it works like this.
My friend Jared used to love in the winter, now mind you.
You were in LA.
We grew up in LA, so the winter was less brutal than... I don't know what's coming, but... Well Jared used to, after he had a car, he used to like to roll down all of the windows.
He had a car With a sunroof, but it was a manual sunroof.
And he used to vigorously open the manual sunroof and roll down all the windows.
I think they might have been manual too.
He manned it down.
He manned the windows down and the sunroof open and would drive around with the heat on.
Which was odd.
Nobody did this.
The sunroof open?
Yeah.
It's wonderful.
Now here's the thing.
I will just say without any further analysis that it is actually quite the innovation.
You don't think of it because in general what we do as moderns is we try to perfect the temperature of our environment so that we are comfortable.
And we're trying to be efficient in our use of resources.
Yes, although I would point out that the heat in your car is free.
We're very close to it.
So this is an important point.
Explain that further.
So the point is that your car generates too much heat.
Because it would appear that this is ridiculously wasteful.
Even if it was wasteful, I'd still be an advocate for it.
But it's not nearly as wasteful, at least in a gas car.
Yeah, and that's true.
The logic of this does invert a little bit in an electric car, but electric cars are so marvelously efficient anyway.
But the point is... The heat is just recovered from what is being generated by the engine.
Right.
The engine is generating far too much heat for anybody's good all the time.
Even in LA.
Right.
And in fact, back in the day when cars weren't quite so good, those of us who were a little adventury knew that if your car was in danger of overheating, if you were in the desert, for example, and it was very, very hot, and your car was showing the temperature gauge, which cars used to have, and your car was showing the temperature gauge, which cars used to have, showed that you were in danger of boiling over and melting your head gasket and all sorts of terrible things that could happen to you, one of the remedies was you would turn
Our producer has had all of these things happen to him.
Well, of course he has.
He's a young man, he pushes limits, and he's blown out a head gasket or two.
They're all two cars on the same mountain.
That mountain is probably trying to tell you something, but in any case, the point is it is not your instinct in a hot car in danger of overheating to turn the heat on, but it's exactly what you should do because it effectively adds a second radiator to the vehicle.
It blows the heat into the car, which is not fun.
You might want to open your windows in that case.
Right, in that case you definitely want to open your windows.
But in the winter, Opening your windows and your sunroof, if you've got one, and turning on the heat.
Just at the level of the experience actually is quite interesting, right?
It creates a kind of swirling mixture of hot and cold that is very invigorating.
And anyway, it's something I've been doing for some time.
Both our sons now engage in this behavior and it... Let's put it this way.
There was a time when all cars did not have air conditioners, right?
They all had heaters for obvious reasons because the heat's generated automatically, but it used to be that air conditioners were an option.
Now that air conditioners are effectively on every new car, at least in the US, people in general, if you watch people driving around, they almost always have their windows up, right?
You drive around in this sealed box and you get the temperature to be as you like it.
And you do so without thinking about the possibility that you have a choice and that maybe what you actually want is a higher variance experience.
In other words, are you more comfortable at a level of temperature consistency, or does the fact that you net out to a temperature that's comfortable, but it's in a swirling mass of warm and cold air, and of course if you have heated seats you can add another element to this.
You can, you know, drive around with no heat coming in a heated seat and the windows open.
Anyway, it's something that gives you a lot more sense of your drive.
So I have two reasons that this is not all that appealing to me.
One is that I have long hair.
And you talk about the swirling mass of cold and warm air.
Well, your hair stays more or less in place and you talk about it showing signs of having been in such a car afterwards.
It never ends up restricting your vision, or getting tangled into knots.
Right.
So our producer, who has not had a haircut in a long time, but does not have hair the length of mine, has something to say.
- I would say. - I would use a combination of windows that you can have open that leaves your hair perfectly in place, but it may be front left and back right, you have to-- - You do have to, so what Zach is saying-- - It does not allow you to retain the hair that you walked into the car with still having I'm not arguing.
The other second point is sound, is noise.
Well, I was going to get that.
And, you know, maybe if you're listening to music, you can just crank it up and you're not going to get some of the treble bits so much.
But if you're listening to words, like I've been listening to a lot of audiobooks lately, it's going to be really tough to hear.
Right.
Over the noise.
I mean, depending.
It also depends.
Like, are you talking about at highway speed?
You're talking about 80 miles an hour?
Well, there's a lot of caveats that I haven't gotten to yet.
One is you have to think about the quality of your air, and frankly, I don't know.
You're outside the car.
Right.
If you're on a highway, if you're on a freeway, right, you are in a corridor of a mixture of air and exhaust.
Totally.
How good for you is it to have the windows open?
I don't know, because If your windows aren't open but your vents are open, it may be that you're breathing the same stuff, right?
Or it may be that there's some rate at which your air in the car goes bad as you get on the highway.
I don't know what those considerations are, but they're certainly worth thinking about.
If you are on a lonely country road, it's a very different phenomenon.
As far as sound goes, I think there's even a worse caveat.
Not only does it get in the road from the point of view of listening to whatever you're listening to, but it may be a danger to your hearing.
It's really loud.
If you're going fast, it's really loud, especially if the surface you're on isn't totally smooth.
Yep, and in part it depends on your vehicle, right?
A vehicle that is very well thought out with respect to turbulence near your ears may be a lot quieter with the windows open.
A vehicle that isn't so well thought out, not so much.
I will say from taking up motorcycle riding that the danger to one's hearing posed by wind noise is a big topic of discussion in the motorcycle world.
And helmets block some of that now?
Yep, and helmets vary tremendously in quality.
One of the things that I think it's absolutely worth spending hundreds extra on a helmet for.
is one that blocks much higher quantity of the noise, but no helmet is thought to render it safe.
And so the advice is that you wear earplugs.
In addition, so those little foam ones.
The foam ones are lousy, there are better ones, but yes, that you're supposed to wear something.
If you're going to be at highway speeds, you're supposed to wear something in addition to your helmet.
And so I don't know that driving around with your windows open in the car is safe for your hearing.
It's worth considering.
I'd love to know if somebody has looked at the decibel levels.
Undoubtedly they have.
But in any case, the point I want to make though is that we have defaulted into Two things.
We have defaulted into riding in closed cars.
And there are lots of reasons to question that, right?
It divorces you from the distance that you're traveling in a way that isn't obvious to you if you always have the windows closed.
You know, when we were in Portland at the beginning of this summer, and summer came late, I began seeing, I think it was just a couple of people who had actual convertibles, like there was a Miata, and I don't remember what the other one was, who were driving around with their convertibles as convertibles in like April.
And there was a freak snowstorm in April.
It was not convertible weather.
And I so respected it.
It's like, okay, you're just, you're feeling it.
Here you are.
And you know, these weren't people on the highway.
This is going around town and, you know, it's pretty low noise, low speed.
You know, it's always a risk, the Pacific Northwest, except for maybe in August, September, it might start pouring on you at any moment.
Well, you know, it's more of a risk in a convertible.
I will say that the more I do this, you know, I do it in the winter.
One definitely has the sense of very chilly air, but you're not net chilly, right?
Well, there's a lot.
I mean, I think maybe we'll come back to this.
I think maybe your intention was to come back to this question of thermoregulation.
You know, cold plunges, cold showers, cold sleeping.
You know, all of these things where you shock your body into something that modernity has rendered us able to fully escape.
Yeah.
Most moderns never actually have to be shocked by cold anymore.
And it's quite possible that being occasionally or even fairly regularly shocked by cold In a way that you know that you can get out of it safely may actually be extraordinarily good for you.
Yeah, this is kind of where I'm headed here, is that because our ancestors were, as Aaron Wright points out, stressed for resources, we have a built-in obsession with things like thermal comfort that results in us taking the variance out of our environments at a level that is
Probably not good for you, and the ways in which it may not be good for you are a little hard to define fully.
And I would say one thing that is true is that I do have the sense that driving around with the heat on and the windows open It gives you a sense of being alive.
I would say that in general, the sense of driving around with the windows closed is almost the opposite, right?
You can drive and just almost not be cognizant that you're even doing it if you're on a familiar road, and that the question is, you know, maybe there are psychological benefits to introducing thermal chaos into an otherwise mundane activity, and in any case, I think The upshot of all of this is, hey you, whoever you are, this is a very cheap experiment.
Are you overlooking something that would enhance your life?
You could find out in a couple of drives, and it might be that it changes nothing about what you do, or it might be that it changes everything about what you do, and what do you have to lose?
Awesome, okay.
Did you want to go to your other item today?
You want to save it for next time?
Um, I think it's probably best saved for next time.
All right.
Excuse me.
Well then, we're going to take a break and we'll be back with a Q&A.
We'll be back next week, eight days from now.
Same time, different day, probably same place.
So 12 30 Pacific on Sunday.
That'll be October 16th, must be given how math works.
Yes.
Um, You know, math doesn't have to work that way, given the invention of P-H-A-C-T-S.
No.
No.
Oh, we can spell math differently.
M-E-T-H.
Oh, God.
I went too far.
No.
I'm aware that I did.
It's fine.
I mean, I feel like the world forced you to it.
Thank you!
Yes, the world did force me to it.
I don't know if it forced you to that particular one, but in general?
I'd like to think it did.
I know you would.
I would feel better about it if that's what happened.
Okay.
So we're going to take a break.
We'll be back.
Ask your questions at darkhorsesubmissions.com.
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You can find us on our Patreons.
And, boy, I feel like there was something else I was supposed to say at the end of the hour here, but I've forgotten.
So, until next time, be good to the ones you love, eat good food, and get outside.
