In this 160th 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 why sport has different categories for men and women, and actors and actresses are up for different awards, but sculptors, scientists, and screenwriters aren’t assessed by sex. What is the difference, and why does it matter? Should music awards be divvied up by sex? How about surfing competitions? Then...
Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse Podcast live streaming.
It's number 160, isn't it?
It is.
It's number 160.
Is that prime?
That is not prime, for at least one reason.
I asked our producer, our son Zach, this morning if it was prime, and he said not for like a million reasons.
And then we started trying to figure out exactly how many reasons there are that it's not prime.
Yeah, it's either one or a small handful.
It's a handful.
It's more than a handful.
Yeah, as is he.
All right.
I am Dr. Brett Weinstein.
You are Dr. Heather Hying.
Yes, we are.
And we are the dark horses in residence of this podcast.
Indeed, we are.
And today we're going to talk just a little bit about the moon.
We're going to talk about categories, sex categories, in things like sports and awards for things.
And we're going to talk about how to not let what has happened over the last three years, or depending on the framing, 10 years, 20 years, 30 years, happen again.
And so we're going to finish with that.
We might actually finish with dogs, but we're going to... I'm not finished with dogs.
No, no, no.
For all their uncouthness.
Indeed, actually, we're going to lead with this.
We're going to lead with dogs.
Leading dogs, that's a natural.
Our people have been doing that for 30,000 years.
Right, right, exactly.
But first, some logistics for top of the hour.
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I thought about putting the epic tabby in the tote bag because like some cats he actually enjoys doing that sort of thing, but I didn't have my act together enough.
It's very hard to fold the sheets after you have laundered them because the cat likes to get in the sheets and be... And be rolled around.
Agitated.
Yes.
Do not ever put your cat in the dryer, but if he likes to be agitated, consider putting him in your sheets.
Yep.
Yes.
Find me at Natural Selections.
I wrote this week something I call Draw Blue.
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when you do like what you are hearing from us.
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Top of the hour every week.
We have three sponsors who we have vetted carefully, and if we're reading scripts for sponsors, it means that we actually really do vouch for these products, and there's lots that we reject because they're just not right for us.
I believe it is still true.
It is more than we have accepted.
Yeah, that's right.
That's right.
Okay, so without further ado, we've got three ads for right at the top of the hour here.
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They are generally high in fat and low in carbohydrates, and they are increasingly understood to be both satiating and good for you.
Incidentally, I was thinking about tree nut is a weird category.
It's not a biological category.
It's more like a growth habit than it is.
It's more like a growth habit because peanuts are legumes and they do not grow on trees.
But tree is a habit.
Tree is not a single evolutionary thing.
And so referring to something as a tree nut is a little bit of an odd category anyway.
You ever kicked a tree?
Yeah, I think I probably have.
Take the habit.
Oh, terrible.
Sorry.
Apologies to all.
Are you though?
Are you sorry?
A little.
House of Macadamias doesn't deserve this.
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Again, with my footnotes here.
I've got the reference if you guys want it.
And have some...
The only podcast with footnotes in the ads.
Yeah.
No, I found some good sources.
Like, these nuts are great, but I also went deep into the, like, and what is so special about macadamia nuts in general, anyway.
You went deep into the weeds looking for nuts.
I did.
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Be good to the ones you love, eat good food, and get outside.
But a lot is hidden in those words, of course.
What is good food, for instance?
Good food is real food, whole food, food that has been alive recently and was grown with care and conditions as ancient as possible given the constraints of the 21st century.
But even many people who eat such a diet are missing something, due to things like soil depletion and the ways that pesticides and herbicides travel, even if you're eating food that was grown without those things.
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All right.
I am a double dyslexic this morning with dirty glasses and, you know, symbol processing problems.
So we'll see how this goes.
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It's February now.
Did you know that it was February now?
You probably did.
Yeah.
Time for you... Did you not?
No, I knew.
I knew.
I've known that since the 2nd of February.
That sounds about right.
Right.
It does, doesn't it?
It's February now.
Time for you to have realized what resolutions... hmm, this is not written correctly.
It is time for you to have a reckoning with whatever resolutions you are still following, and if you have abandoned resolutions, well, there's always next year.
I'm gonna skip to the next sentence.
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Alright.
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Mudwater also makes a non-dairy creamer out of coconut milk and MCT, a sweetener out of coconut palm sugar, and lucuma, the fruit of an Andean tree used by the Inca in the subjugation of their neighbors.
I don't know if they used Kuma to subjugate their neighbors.
No, no.
They used it in the subjugation of.
They used it while subjugating.
That's not in.
Yes.
They used it near.
You know it's February now?
I was aware of that, yeah.
That sweetener that Mudwater makes is actually really good, and I, having spent some time in the Andes as you have, had never heard of Lukuma before.
You went to the Andes and resisted the urge to subjugate anyone, so I appreciate that.
Yeah, thank you.
You're welcome.
Thank you for something.
Or you can mix and match.
That is the Creamer and the Sweetener and the Chaga Rishi in February.
They all go great together.
All right.
Mix and match with actual cream from a cow.
There you go.
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Any number of things.
Yep.
Can all be mixed and matched.
This is the worst ad ever.
Yeah, but the thing is, the product is actually really, really good.
It is.
All of them are.
Both the Mudwater itself and the Lukuma-based sweetener and the, I can't remember, it's like MCT and coconut oil-based creamer.
It's really good.
Are you okay?
No.
Okay, you want me to finish?
Yeah.
Okay, where are we?
February.
Oh wow, it's March already.
If you don't, mm, okay.
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That is not what's going on here, incidentally.
Nope.
It does not cause this sort of thing.
This morning we actually both had coffee, maybe that's the problem.
That could be the problem.
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Yeah.
All right.
Well, Goliath is having a terrible time getting rid of us, but the giggles might do it.
One of those things.
I fear it.
Yep.
So you were saying, February.
That was you.
Oh, yeah.
All right.
I recall that.
OK, so.
The full moon is imminent.
Yes.
Those of you who live in a place where you can see and don't have to work that hard to see it will recognize it has been waxing now for close to two weeks.
And maybe you didn't notice, you know, two weeks ago because like I think we've said this before, but like the solstices and the equinoxes, at the solstices, the day length is relatively stable, even though there is a day in the Northern Hemisphere in June 21st-ish, where The sun is above the horizon for the longest moment of the year, and a day either side of it.
It's shorter, but the change is slow.
The change is slow at the winter solstice as well, whereas it's really fast at the equinox.
We're getting into the time of year now, getting to a point where the rate of change is happening faster.
In the moon phases, I feel very similar, that at new and full, they kind of stick.
There's no moon at all for some days, and there's a really very very close to full moon for four or five days.
So anyway, the official full moon is tomorrow, February 5th, but it is so close to full now that it is there.
That's interesting.
That raises a point though, because You correct me if I've got this wrong, but the rate at which the, what is the line at which the dawn or dusk line on the moon must move at a perfectly regular or a near perfectly regular rate Around the moon.
It won't be perfectly regular because the orbit of the moon isn't perfectly circular, but it ought to move at a consistent rate.
But our vantage point here makes it look like it is moving slower as it approaches fuller new, right?
Oh boy.
Well, but it's also, it's, but our view of it is not just about us and the moon.
It's also about us.
It's also about the sun relative, the sun's position relative to it.
Oh, I think that's actually going to be a very tiny contributor here.
I agree it is a contributor.
But, and actually that predicts it ought to be different in the spring and the fall.
But I guess my point would be if you were to count The number of miles per Earth day that the position of the transition from light to dark on the moon moves, it should be about the same each day.
But the point is when you are looking edge on, that motion across a fixed number of miles on the surface of the moon looks like it is not very much change at all because you're looking at an angle.
I'm not sure this is the explanation.
And here I am using data from others, which is to say a moon app.
And the moon app that I like shows the percentage of fullness of the moon each day.
And while it is at 100% tomorrow, it's at something like 99.7% today.
And the day after it's at 100%, it's again above 99%.
And, you know, it's only a 28-day cycle entirely, so it's only a 14-day cycle to get from completely full to completely not full, and it's incrementally a much tinier change near full and near new.
Right, but that is from our perspective.
Yeah.
And so I think actually it's going to be Almost perfectly regular.
If you were to look down on the moon, for example, then you would see it as a perfectly regular or an almost perfectly regular cycle around the moon.
Around the moon?
If you were looking down, and you were looking at, so you've got half the moon is lit.
And the degree to which that swings across the moon and thereby changes our perspective, that rate is constant.
But it looks to us like it's not constant because a swing of that fixed amount, when you're looking at the edge of the moon, is not going very far from your perspective, from your two-dimensional perspective.
It's the two-dimensional transition that causes that, I think.
Maybe.
I'm not convinced of this because I did not model out in my head the three bodies and also the different elliptical orbits of both the Moon around the Earth It being tidally locked also will change what we see.
We're always seeing exactly the same view of it, right?
So tidally locked means that its day around the Earth is the same thing as its year.
Its actual day is the same thing as its year, if we count the year as one full rotation around the Earth.
And I don't know the different ellipses and where they are relative to one another of the Earth's orbit around the Sun or the Moon's orbit around the Earth.
So there's too many variables here for me to be certain that that explanation is right.
I think, yeah, I don't know.
Well, people seem to find every single thing we get wrong plus a bunch of stuff that we didn't actually get wrong.
So we are liable to get feedback that will tell us one way or the other.
Well, I don't know, but I just, I'm not sure there's a one way or the other here.
I think it's, even if what you said is true, it's not going to be the only thing that's, that is contributing to how it is that we perceive the universe.
Well, I agree.
There's a slight difference because... I can't quite do it, but yeah.
Sorry, I've disrupted your flow.
Yeah.
I just wanted to talk a little bit about how you tell time on the moon, which is actually kind of deep in the weeds.
Maybe we just shouldn't do it at all now, because I feel like this has gotten already way beyond... No, no.
I want to know how to tell time on the moon.
We don't know.
That's the point.
I think we should probably skip this.
Are we ready to go into the story that you wanted to talk about?
Okay.
Well, I have something if you... Let's do... Yeah, go for it.
So, an odd story that I don't want to focus on led me to something that I think we ought to talk a little bit about.
The odd story is somebody erroneously accused me of plagiarism on the internet.
They tried to coin a hashtag and then it turned out that I had in fact said the thing that they claimed I had copied from them before they ever said it.
So not only did I not get it from them, but the order was reversed.
The reason I mentioned it... It was an unwitting plagiarist claiming that you had plagiarized them?
Or were they unwitting?
I think it was a canonical.
The phrase was, I had said that the Omicron virus had appeared to be frozen in time.
And the person concluded that I must have gotten that from them.
They had another piece of evidence which also doesn't establish this, but it turned out I had said it online before they had, before the point at which they pointed out.
But it doesn't really matter.
That's secondary to the important consideration here.
The person in question, I don't have any reason to believe that they are A white nationalist or anything like this.
But they do seem to have some followers of this nature, which I discovered because in interacting with their claim that I had engaged in plagiarism, these people showed up and my being Jewish was important to them.
Oh, good.
So anyway, that's always fun.
That was disturbing.
Yes.
But then the really disturbing thing happened.
Something about my having interacted with those people online kicked me over into Nazi Twitter.
Something that I did not know existed.
So some algorithm starts showing you Nazi tweets.
Yeah, and I ain't talking about white nationalist stuff.
I'm not talking about race realism, right?
Those things are bad enough.
I'm talking about actual Nazi Twitter.
I'm talking about fawning videos of the Fuhrer Making nice with children that have been put together with soaring, wistful music.
Really?
Didn't know it was on there.
Shocked to discover it.
Yeah.
So anyway, on the one hand, my point would be, oh, Nazi Twitter exists.
Real Nazi Twitter.
Real Holocaust-denying, viewer-loving Twitter is a real thing.
But the more important thing, I thought, even beyond that shocking discovery, Was that it exists, and the way Twitter functions, I was completely unaware of it.
Yeah.
Wasn't surprised there were white nationalists, but I was surprised to see the depth of this.
And so I do think it raises, there are several things that have worked this way.
Right, so Elon did a bunch of work to get rid of, um, pedophile Twitter.
I don't exactly know where that stands because pedophile Twitter isn't something I was aware of until that, uh, furor erupted.
Furor is a bad term in this discussion, but... It's spelled differently.
Oh, good.
I'm rarely thankful for such things, but in this case I am.
I think really it's pronounced, you know, Yeah, differently as well, so.
Furor versus furor, yeah.
Yeah.
But anyway, okay, I wasn't really- Furor is yet a different word entirely.
Wow.
Yeah.
Yes.
But, okay, so the point is there are aspects of Twitter that would cause a normal person to absolutely shudder in horror.
And these things, it's as if, you know, you are riding on the bus with You know, murderous thugs who you don't know are there, and they're making eye contact, maybe they're smiling at you as they're plotting whatever it is they're plotting.
And I'm not making an argument here for what should be true.
I don't know what should be true.
But I am making an argument that it is vitally important that to the extent that these communities arise and live in our midst, it's kind of important that we know that they're there.
This is true.
Yep.
This is absolutely true.
Um, is that that we got?
Yeah, I mean, that's... So, um, we were going to talk about, um, different award categories, um, by sexes.
Uh, if our producer is trying to get my attention.
Yes?
Ready.
Just whenever.
Okay.
Um, it's just not going well today.
I don't know what we're trying to do.
Um, should we talk about this or do we want to talk about what he's doing?
Okay.
Um, So this, and you can unfortunately, we're in Twitter again.
Zach, you can show this for a moment, my screen.
This is actually from a few weeks ago.
This is a tweet about a Guardian article.
I look forward to a time where award shows can be reflective of the society we live in, is a quote from the Guardian article.
That's Sam Smith saying that at the Brits in 2021, wish granted?
This year our sexist society is reflected so brilliantly that no women are nominated for Best Artist.
Bravo genderists.
Okay, if I may have my screen back for a moment, Zach.
Actually, no, I'll just hold on to my screen.
So the article that The Guardian has written then has this quote.
The award ceremony, this is, I don't remember what it's called, it's not in this sentence, it's not in this paragraph, The awards ceremony run by the British Photographic Industry, BPI, did away with the Best British Male and Best Female awards in 2022 following criticism that the non-binary pop star Sam Smith would not be eligible for either prize despite their massive commercial success.
And apparently for two years running now, One of the downstream effects of that has been that there have been no women among the finalists in a number of categories.
And so there's concern, obviously, that out of deference to the new fiction, which it is, of non-binary, which like, you know, go for it, abandon your gender norms, but you're still male or female.
So this new fiction of non-binary as a meaningful descriptor of identity is replacing male and female, which are biological realities, people.
Women will once again get less recognition for their work.
Right?
As NBs, as the non-binary people sometimes like to be called, begin to take spots that would have been spots that women are getting.
So I see this as a concern.
I do see the The people who think that gender is more important than sex and are making up categories and obliterating reality as very, very much so, basically coming in and taking some of the many hard-won rights of women.
That is absolutely true.
But this prompted me to think more, actually, about categories of sex in the first place across various domains.
So, in sport, We have male and female category.
And yes, obviously, actually.
And there are still a lot of people fighting this fight.
And, you know, I'm in that fight sometimes.
And somehow this isn't totally obvious to everyone.
But if really, unless you were born yesterday, this should be obvious, right?
There is a reason there are different categories for men and women in sport.
No amount of hormone disruption, blocking, enhancement of cross-sex hormone, surgery, kind of race, elite male advantage if you went through puberty as a male.
Right.
So that's that's one thing, at least in competitions of physical prowess and strength.
Right.
So and, you know, that doesn't mean that you can't have co-ed sports.
And I've I've written about and we've talked about, for instance, how much we both loved and we sometimes played competitively co-ed ultimate ultimate frisbee.
And of course, there's mixed doubles in tennis.
You know, there are co-ed sports where this where they can make sense, but it has to be an explicit expectation.
Right.
So, okay, so sport.
Different categories for male and female in sport.
Yes.
Well, I want to pause you because the question is, I do, I am obviously a, uh, an advocate for the same thing, that such a category should exist, but the question is really, um, why do we do that?
Okay, but I'm getting there.
Okay.
So different categories in sport.
Yes, male and female.
Different categories in acting.
Actor and actress.
I think so.
For different reasons, right?
Which is that male and female are fundamental realities of humanity and indeed of all vertebrates with a couple of weird little exceptions where it's still male and female are realities and just a few species have ditched the males and are all female now but they're still female, right?
But for humans, male and female are realities and have has been for the hundreds of millions of years of our lineage that we've had, we've been reproducing sexually, and maybe again, that's closer to 2 billion.
And some roles, some acting roles may not be sexed.
And those are some of the most interesting roles, honestly, right?
Like, oh, that story could be embodied by a man or embodied by a woman, but who is embodying some story, some character arc, some narrative arc does then somewhat change.
You know, how that story plays out and how that character develops and what the risks are and the realities and the history and, you know, all of these things, right?
So there are different ways of manifesting in the world, even though you can have very sort of male-like female approaches to the world and very female-like approaches to the world that are in the opposite sex bodies of which they are.
But in general, I would say that categories by sex for acting make sense.
But how about sculptors?
No, right?
Like even though you may have, on average, a different approach to sculpting based on your maleness or your femaleness.
How about for screenwriters?
Well, no.
And we don't, right?
We don't have different categories for male and female screenwriters or for sculptors.
How about Nobel Prizes?
No, right?
So why music?
Is music more like acting or is it more like screenwriting?
Right?
And I think I can see an argument, kind of, for both.
If it's an historic artifact, then it's kind of affirmative action for women in music, right?
If it's an historical artifact in which it's a recognition that female musicians didn't really have an ability to get recognized, to get seen, and so we're going to create an award category to help Women get seen?
Well, that's different from, it was necessary that men and women had different categories for music awards because male and female music is different.
And so that brings me to exactly what you were going to jump the gun here on, which is that there are at least two reasons, two distinct reasons to have categories by sex.
And I think there's actually a third, but the two main ones that are detailed in the sort of list of like, you know, yes for sports, yes for acting, no for sculpting, no for Nobel Prizes, no for screenwriting, music is a questionable one.
One of the reasons to have different categories by sex is because men and women are different, and their skills and talents manifest differently in the world, and so they're judged on different Scales or variables.
Yes, the different ways that men and women manifest in the world is a distribution rather than a binary.
Male and female are binary, and the ways that maleness and femaleness manifest in the world are more or less finite normal distributions in terms of how it is that we show up in the world.
But It's about physical and biological and, frankly, sort of population-level statistical reality.
And then the second reason to have categories is, again, to fix an historical wrong, to recognize that women have been historically underrepresented or discriminated against, and the categories serve to right historical inequality.
A, if that's the case for a particular thing, as women reach parity or it's clear that in some particular field it's not going to happen for reasons having nothing to do with bias, those categories should be disappeared.
And they certainly shouldn't be clung to because it's always the way we've done it.
If they were about fixing an historic wrong as opposed to about recognition of an underlying reality that isn't going to change no matter how many people walk around saying that they're pansexual envies or whatever it is that they're claiming. - So let's unpack a couple of those.
- Yeah. - And I wanna add an example that I'm frankly not even sure how it works, but billiards.
Competitive billiards.
Is there men's and women's billiards, or do men and women compete on the same playing field in billiards?
I do not know the answer to that.
My guess would be same, same playing field, but I don't know.
Yeah, that would be my guess too, but I'm not 100% sure of that.
I'm not even 60% sure of that.
Billiards competitions, male versus female, something like that.
And I also want to add an odd exception.
Maybe it's one of several, but American football, right?
There is no women's American football, right?
There's men's and women's soccer, interestingly.
I would guess rugby is like football, and that there's no women's rugby?
No, no.
There's college-level women's rugby, I think.
But anyway, it is interesting that... Well, and then you have baseball and softball.
Right, like women's baseball.
I mean, certainly some women play baseball sometimes, but I don't think that there's professional women's baseball.
If you're playing that kind of a game as a woman, professionally, you're playing softball.
And men also play softball, but women don't also play baseball, I think.
Right.
Now, I don't think I ever saw a league of their own, but am I right that women were playing baseball during the war?
I thought it was softball, but I don't remember.
Well, in any case, there's an interesting landscape here.
Why don't we have women's football?
Why, you know, why is the logic of soccer not the same logic as American football?
There is a question about whether or not.
So if men play at a higher level in sports that are physically, that physical prowess is the question.
Then it's interesting that women's sports work, and I want to point out why I think they do.
What do you mean, they work?
What does work mean?
If no woman can compete with the top men in a sport, like let's say tennis, Then the question is, why if people are going to see the top tennis players, does women's tennis make sense?
And the answer... So you're talking about as a spectator sport, not as a sport.
As a sport, there's... I don't... Oh, right, right, right, right.
No, I am talking about... You're talking about the spectations.
Yes, I'm talking about why it makes sense that we have, you know, a men's and women's division at Wimbledon, for example.
And I think the answer... Expectation is not a word, incidentally.
What?
That's the word I used.
Expectation.
Expectation.
I like it.
Well, you can be very persuasive.
Precisely.
Yeah.
So I guess my point would be, one of the things about, you know, what is a sport?
A sport is a physical game in which the obstacles faced by the competing parties are the same.
Right?
So they, you know, you can't play soccer on a slanted field.
Or if you do, then the point is each side spends half... You can't play soccer in a V-shaped field in which the goals are at the end.
Yeah.
A little bit like Ulama, the Central American ball game.
Oh yeah!
Yeah, with the slanted sides.
But anyway, put that aside for a second.
The game neutralizes... Now extinct.
Like Aztec, I think, or Toltec or something.
I believe it was actually passed down.
The Olmec, the Toltec, the Aztecs all played Ulama.
And Ulama still exists.
It's just such a hard game When it's played now, though, it doesn't end in human sacrifice?
No, not of either the winners or the losers, which I understand different cultures did it differently.
But this is a game in which there's a tiny little hoop, like a basketball hoop, but it's up on edge and the ball, I think, can only be passed around and launched with the hip.
It's a very crazy game.
But anyway, the point is, top women competing with each other is not inherently a much worse game than the top men pitted against each other, because they're even with each other.
If you're interested in physical skill and prowess, if you're only interested in speed and force, then the women's sport is not going to give you as much of that as watching men's sport.
But in general, sport is not just about, you know, sheer, you know, speed and force, right?
It's about skill, and frankly, and this is, you know, as I have said before, back when we were playing a lot of Ultimate, I played on the University of Michigan women's team for a bit and then we played a lot of summer league and captained co-ed teams and also went to some day-long tournaments and such and watched a lot of men's games.
Played in a certain number of women's games and played way, way, way more co-ed games and captain co-ed teams.
And by far, for me, now obviously I never played in a men's game, but by far the most interesting of those was the co-ed games.
Because men left to their own devices on the field, we're much more likely to just like, huck it long.
One guy runs down, you know, maybe he gets to lay out and, you know, it's, it's awesome for those two guys.
And it's pretty great for the other, you know, depending if it's a full, you know, thing, other five people.
Five?
It's been a while.
Seven.
Yeah.
Right?
Seven people on a team?
Don't recall.
Oh, goodness.
Been that long.
Yeah.
The other people on the team, but the points are short and it's, you know, to the victor go the spoils sort of thing.
And by contrast, the women's only games are much more likely to involve very short passes, much more cautious, less risky short passes.
It takes forever to go down the field.
The person who does want to huck it long or run and run and dive into the end zone, Is much less likely to have the opportunity.
And there's also more, much more of a focus, and this will come as a surprise to no one probably in our audience, even if you have no idea what Ultimate Frisbee is, is that on women's only, in women's only games, on women's only teams, there's much more of a focus on like, let's make sure everyone gets to handle the disc.
And let's make sure that everyone ends up getting to play.
Actually, this is competition here.
That's not supposed to be one of the main things.
You have these slightly too much, almost caricatures of maleness and femaleness in an all-male game of Ultimate and an all-female game of Ultimate.
Because this is not supposed to be a contact sport, and it really does work as a co-ed in a co-ed game, usually 5-2, 5 men, 2 women, 4 men, 3 women, something like that.
You've got to be matched up pretty well.
You actually reduce some of the silliness of the extreme all-male and all-female exigencies when you're playing together.
And it's fantastic.
But it is neutralized structurally as part of the game.
Ultimate is a strange game because it actually builds into the structure of the game.
uh inclusiveness and fairness they're like the game actually has the rules written in that somebody doesn't understand a rule play stops and the rules explain and all that so anyway the point is structurally in ultimate right you wouldn't pick teams and have an uneven number uh you wouldn't have you know the preponderance of of women on one team uh that would be an unfair game
there is a tendency to balance the number of women on each side and there is a tendency for players not necessarily by sex but players to match up with a player of similar skill and speed so that one person is not fully shutting down the other person's So the point is the game... And if you don't have that, then you do a different kind of defense.
You don't do a man on defense, you do a zone defense or something.
Because if you don't really have roughly... I mean, you know, this is more in a non, you know, strictly competitive situation, right?
Like, OK, are we out here?
Are we doing pickup to have fun or to brutalize the other team?
And the other team, we're going to swap it up in 15 minutes.
And some of you people who I was just trying to brutalize are going to be on my team.
Like, yes, I'm on a team right now and I want to win this point because that's fun.
And that's kind of why I'm out here.
But I'm also not interested in like, oh, let's line up with you, who I know I can take and outrun.
And then the point's going to be over really fast.
Yeah.
It's not interesting.
Not interesting.
Yeah.
Um, so, well anyway, look, I think, I think the really interesting one here is the acting one, and your question is a great one about why the acting... Before we go back to acting though, because I actually, um, you kind of predicted one of the other places I wanted to go, and maybe we'll end on acting.
I actually found, um, in the Seattle Times, uh, a couple weeks ago, January 22nd, there's an article called, headlined, Renowned Hawaii Surf Contest The Eddy Plans Return After 7 Years.
And I don't surf.
I've never watched a surfing contest.
I don't know very much about it, despite having grown up in Los Angeles.
But one of the things that they say in here, in this article, and I have failed to mark where it is, is that for the first time, I believe, ever, they're inviting women to compete.
So this is this is not going to be the Eddie, and maybe this has already happened at this point.
I think this has been long enough.
For the first time, it's not going to be just a male-only competition.
And I thought, OK, so we have as the reasons that I had come up with for why there need to be categories by under what conditions there should be categories by sex.
Um, in those situations where men and women are just fundamentally different enough that, um, combining, um, you know, combining the sex categories would mean that women wouldn't get to play, basically.
Um, there is the historical reason for like, oh, we're gonna write some wrong, um, and so make sure that, uh, you know, women get, um, get, get voice here.
Uh, and then there's, um, This is about human versus nature.
I looked into how it is that surfing contests are judged, and it's a little figure skating-y.
It's judges, and the top and the bottom scores are mostly dropped, and I'm sure it's different in different competitions.
They're assessing on a number of things, like how many maneuvers they use, and obviously, If they wipe out, that's not good.
But there are measures of apparent power, apparent strength, apparent fluidity on the wave, which is going to give an advantage to male surfers.
But if a competition is on a particular day, at a particular break, and apologies, I'm probably not using exactly the right words here, but there will be different waves that happen at 10am versus 2pm, of course.
But if it's your turn to go out, part of what you're being assessed on is like, which wave did you choose?
And the waves are the waves.
Then it's, you know, it's human against nature, which is remarkable.
And in this case, like, well, Um, you know, men may have a little bit of an advantage, but really, like, what are you going to do?
If you're going to make, if you're going to call surfing a sport, and this gets back to the question, like, what is a sport?
If you're going to call surfing a sport, just like if you're going to call figure skating a sport, you're going to have to introduce some social means by which you're assessing.
Whereas if it's, you know, it's Ulama in Mesoamerica, or Ultimate Frisbee, or American football, or, you know, what everyone else calls football versus the world soccer, where there are, you know, formal rules.
It's, you know, there is, you know, there are dimensions and specificities around the court or, you know, or the field and the size or shape and density of the ball or the disc or whatever it is.
And how it is that you score and what the conditions are, then you can control everything.
And it's a little bit like human versus nature, but controlled.
It's like we've domesticated war at some level and been like, okay, now let's play at this.
It's a laboratory sport in the sense that the laboratory purges all of the extraneous influences as much as possible so that you can see the effect.
And the tennis court is similar to this.
Whereas, you know, it's like the difference between gymnastics in the Olympic sense and parkour, which makes use of things that are non-standard.
But I did want to... You wanted to go back to acting.
Well, before that, I wanted to point out that there are two reasons, there are two male-female asymmetries that could result in the need for a female category in sport.
One of them might have to do with the fact that males have an advantage because the sport depends on strength and things like that.
And my guess would be this is somewhat relevant to surfing, but you know, there's a question about if you scaled the board down so that it was the same ratio of person to board.
Maybe it's not.
On the other hand... I don't know.
On the other hand, to the extent that something is highly competitive...
It might be that if you didn't have separate male and female categories, and you were looking at elite players, that women would not get there because a much smaller pool of them would ever have tried the sport.
And so the point is the tails of the distribution that show up would be much smaller.
And so the number of people who would be able to do it at an elite level, having nothing inherent to do with their capacity, just having to do with the fact that the competitive modality would tend to census more widely amongst men.
Well, as you know, I don't buy this line that is very common in the psychological and other literature, that women aren't as competitive as men.
I think it's total crap.
But men and women compete differently, it manifests differently.
I think you're reading something into my point that's not there, because my point is, in the athletic modality, you would have had fewer women attempt this, and so we'd find We wouldn't find that many who have that elite capacity, so I agree with you.
Yes, women are equally competitive, and it's different, but the sporting modality leans in the direction of men.
Yeah, I think it would depend on the sport, but that's interesting.
It's a different selection bias.
It's a selection bias about choice in advance, and this is related to some of the Some of the correctives that people are trying to put into place, not in sport, but in things like, you know, equity in, you know, software engineers, you know, the sex ratio of software engineers.
Whereas once, you know, equity has been achieved and actually, like, flown past, now you have more women in, say, medical school than men, apparently.
I saw this recently.
No one is saying, oh wait, maybe we should slow this down.
If what we were seeking was equity, which is to say, and I don't think we should be, but if what we were seeking was that, then it's supposed to match the sex ratio.
of the population that we've got a problem.
We do have a problem.
We've got too many of our institutions favouring sort of female style of learning and making their way through the world such that increasingly a lot of really, really great men are like, not for me.
This is not doing anything for my brain.
I'm not going to be able to manifest myself here, so I'm going to go do something else.
And that's bad news, and we don't see that very much being recognized.
Yeah, we don't.
It's arguable that it's correcting a long-standing wrong, and that's why they don't respond.
I think it's nonsense, but it's possible.
But let's go back to the acting question, because I think it's really where the rubber meets the road here.
In some sense, and you mentioned that there are characters that aren't sex-specific, I must say I'm struggling to think of one.
I've seen plays put on in which a character that is traditionally male is played by a female or something.
No, that's different.
That's obviously sexed enough that it's playing with gender expectations.
Well, okay, so the first thing that came to my mind is not great because I've actually never seen the movie, but how about something like Forrest Gump?
Which character?
Forrest Gump character.
Isn't it inherently a guy?
Why does it have to be?
It's a character who is, again, this is a weird example to be choosing because I haven't seen it, but isn't it Tom Hanks playing someone maybe strongly autistic?
Autism does manifest differently, typically, in men and women, but going through the world without some of the editing that might keep this person from interacting with other people in the way that they might normally do.
I think there are definitely possibilities for people to, you know, just like children characters, you know, prepubescent children characters are often not inherently sexed.
Well, I think I saw Forrest Gump many years ago, and I think it is a very... it is a sexed role in the sense that a lot of the stuff that takes place in the movie is not interchangeable.
But anyway, let's put that part aside.
Let's just say there is something that I think we all intuitively understand, and then some fraction of us are going to deny it because we're involved in a political and ideological move.
But we all understand that actually being male and being female, even if you are a female who has many male gender attributes, still the rules are so different.
That the question, the reason that we would have different categories with acting awards for example, is that there's a question, it's not a question of how good an actor you are, it's a question of how well you act in a particular role and because at the very least it is true that we are struggling to find examples where a role isn't explicitly sexed, the point is
The best actress on earth or the best actress in a movie role in the last year is a different question than the best male actor because inherent to virtually any role are things that, you know, my guess is the best
Actress on earth will portray a wide range of female characters wonderfully and struggle to plausibly portray most male characters, right?
Because the point is, the thing, the court is different in some sense.
Yeah, although this then feels like it's skirting close to the, I believe, nonsensical argument that if you aren't the thing, you can't play the thing.
Oh, no, no.
And so, you know, we certainly see this over in, like, trans space, right?
Like, oh, well, you know, we've got trans characters.
You can't have a non-trans actor play a trans character.
Well, no, That's what acting is.
Right.
Right.
Oh, we have a Native American character.
It has to be a Native American person playing that role.
Like, well, if what you're saying is to right an historical wrong of Native American underrepresentation in roles in Hollywood, then whenever you have a Native American character, you should have a Native American playing it.
That is one argument.
That is an argument that we can talk about.
If the argument is, as it is generally stated, it is, you know, it is, I don't even, I don't even know how it's stated, but it's, it doesn't, it doesn't go there.
It's just like, you can't, you cannot.
I mean, that's what it is.
It's just, it's not even an argument.
It's an authoritarian, like, you cannot have a role of someone who's disabled played by a non-disabled actor, of someone who's trans played by a non-trans actor, someone who's Native American played by a non,
Native American actor and you know actually what acting is is being able is having such remarkable theory of mind that they really can inhabit someone else's being and if hopefully it's written well enough the character is written well enough that they really can go into that and and be it and You know the example that everyone knows of like in Shakespeare's time women weren't on the stage and so men played both the male and the female actors.
That was presumably not because you know it was it was more like oh it's the slight guy who's like it's the it's the it's the guy with the slight physique who's going to play the woman as opposed to the one who sort of has more of a feminine nature.
But I think, and I'm not coming up with examples at the moment, but I think that there have been compelling renderings that make you think about what it means to be feminine, to be masculine, not to be male or female.
Right.
Now, I am of course not making that argument.
And I would say that the correction we can see because the idea that a woman can't write a male character compellingly is insane, right?
Women do this all the time.
Men write women characters maybe less often compellingly, but it happens.
Um, and so anyway, it's not, it's not a theory of mind issue.
It's a question of how compellingly can you represent and let's be honest, this is sort of the proof of what we've been saying.
You can identify somebody's sex very frequently by their gait, you know, at a hundred meters, right?
Occasionally you're wrong, but very, very rarely.
And that's the way they're moving their arms.
Yeah.
Right?
And, you know, the voice.
It's an octave off.
Oh, interesting.
Right?
That is an interesting fact, that it's an octave off.
So, anyway, the point is, it makes sense.
Because these roles, we can't help it.
That's the thing.
You can be a leftist activist as much as you want, but we cannot help but categorize this stuff, because we're built to, because literally millions of years of evolution has driven us to Pick this up as one of the first characteristics we identified because everything that follows from that is different depending on it.
Yeah.
And there are good ways to play around with gender roles and gender norms and not deny reality.
And in fact, actually I wasn't going to say anything about this, but I was in Portland for a few days this last week, as you know.
That's why I wasn't here.
Was that where you were?
I thought it was because it wasn't February yet.
Right.
And while there, I saw this fantastic piece of live theater called something like and I something like Ms.
Holmes and Ms.
Watson or Miss, I don't remember, Ms.
or Miss, Ms.
Holmes and Ms.
Watson.
And it's a modern day reimagining of Sherlock Holmes and John.
Watson?
Yeah.
Yeah.
As female characters in, like, 2021.
And I must say, in advance of the play, when they started doing the land acknowledgements and the talk about all the people that we have to make sure to include in this, that, and the other, it's like, oh God, what have I gotten myself into?
But the play itself was exquisite.
It was really excellent and especially, you know, more than the writing actually, more than the screenwriting, but the four actors involved, three of whom were women, one of whom was male, were extraordinary.
And none of them were doing caricatures of one sex or the other.
They weren't pretending that it's nothing.
to have Sherlock Holmes now be, actually, I think they kept the name Sherlock.
I think it's still Sherlock Holmes, but as a woman.
And it just, it worked brilliantly.
And I thought, oh, here it is.
Like, here is a case where it can be done really, really well.
And no one is being forced to say, actually, yeah, those clothes that the emperor is wearing are really, really nice.
Like, no one had to do that for the show.
So let's, I confess, I am not able to quickly spot why music is different.
It's clear that it is.
Different from which?
The rule that I'm arguing is pretty much a rule.
Acting male and acting female are sufficiently different that Joan of Arc would not be well played by a man.
Even though she was a masculine woman, right?
So anyway, there's something about, in acting space, there appears to be a very significant, based-in-ancient-stuff reason for that sexual distinction.
That sexual distinction existed in music, and it has broken down in our lifetime, I think much to our benefit.
It is somehow a more flexible, and I've seen it break down in a couple ways, actually.
There are a lot more women making compelling rock and roll, or some derivative of it, right?
There's a lot of good bands that either include women, you know, the AAAS, for example, Metric, or, you know, are female in nature, the bands themselves.
And there's been a lot of exploring.
They're pioneering in ways.
They're not just sort of doing what the guys do.
Yeah.
There's also— And it's not the music equivalent of, like, romance novels.
Yeah, right, exactly.
That exists, right?
But, you know, pop exists in both sexes, and, like, that's not what you're talking about.
They're pushing the same—they're pushing the edges of the same envelope, I would say.
There is also a Slight change in what was effectively a rule about sex and gender in music, where it was okay for a woman to sing a man's set of lyrics, but a man couldn't really sing a woman's, right?
That has broken down.
There's some famous examples of men singing a song that is clearly from a woman's perspective and it working very well, like Jolene, right?
The White Stripes version of Jolene is one.
And what's another?
There's, oh, the Lumineers.
There's a song, actually it's a fascinating song, written, I think the lead singer was in a taxi in Europe somewhere and the taxi driver, he was driving a taxi, had lost the love of her life or Timing was bad.
Anyway, she had kind of a tragic story.
And so he wrote it as a song.
And anyway, it's quite a good song.
But again, it's a guy singing as if he were a woman.
And it works, you know?
Yeah.
Now, I feel like some of Bonnie Wright's music has been covered by male singers.
That's right.
I can't think of particular examples.
But yes.
And that is That was a norm that, you know, I think, I never heard anyone say this, but I think it was imagined that male singers embodying female thoughts and voices was somehow emasculating.
Yeah.
And so this is one of the wins.
This is one of the wins of feminism and of 20th century liberalism.
Like, you know what?
It doesn't need to be that way.
No.
And if that's not your thing, that's cool.
But this actually can free the creative mind to say, you know what?
I've got a take on that.
And I know, I understand that that is written by and from and of a female perspective, but I have something to add.
And I'm not going to pretend that this is now the only way to do it.
Right.
That's not the way to go.
But hey, guess what?
There's another way to do this.
Right, and it opens up, so two examples I've given of men singing lyrics written from a woman's perspective, they portray it from a woman's perspective, and then there's the cake rendition of I Will Survive, which actually turns the song on its head.
I'm not sure I know that version.
Oh, it's wicked.
It's really good.
But anyway, it takes on an entirely different character.
You know, in the original version, it's sort of this woman who's been in, I don't know if it's a physically abusive relationship, but she's clearly been in an abusive relationship and she's standing up for herself.
But, you know, abuse works differently depending upon who's meeting it out.
If it's, you know, the physically weaker sex, the abuse is of a very different nature.
And so all of the lyrics to I Will Survive Become something else.
Anyway.
So they don't change the lyrics.
Right.
But they also don't pretend that they're not male singing it.
Correct.
And it is a very different song at that point.
You know, and of course, the White Stripes version of Dolly Parton's song is also quite different.
And apparently there's a famous correspondence between the two where Dolly Parton is not Compelled by Jack White's version, and Jack White makes the argument that actually he's staring at the deeper meaning in the song.
Well, that is an argument that is unsexed, right?
It's an old and abiding argument in literature, but I mean, I think maybe in any kind of creative space, but specifically in music and in literature around like, well, maybe not literature so much.
Oh, well, playwrights, playwrights.
I created the thing and the way that you have manifested it is you've missed my point.
And to which the director and the producer and the, you know, all of the actors and everyone else involved in the production can say, you know what?
You put this thing out into the world, and you can have your understanding of what that is, but you put it out into the world for us to now do with what we want.
With a play, this is an obvious argument to be made, right?
The play doesn't have that much meaning.
I happen to love theatre enough that I have a shelf of books of plays, but really reading a play is a very weak way in to what a playwright's mind was trying to accomplish.
And music even more so, that if you understand yourself to be, well, especially like a singer-songwriter, right?
If you're successful at all, probably some of your songs will get taken and adapted and transformed and understood differently.
And how amazing that you have the potential to say, you know what, you got that wrong, and have the other person say, You can say that.
You can believe that, and you do believe that, but I think differently.
Yeah, and then there's a third possibility, which is the teleportation of some sort of a canonical idea into a new realm.
So, you know, we keep Having to reinvent Plato's Cave because Plato's Cave is so archaic.
But the Matrix is very vivid to us Gen X types, right?
It has a deep meaning.
Or West Side Story and its relationship to Romeo and Juliet.
But there are things which need to be Updated.
And the point is, how much of the original you keep, you know, Heart of Darkness and Apocalypse Now, right?
There's very little that's maintained.
There's sort of a basic, you know, descent into a place beyond.
The metaphorical truth at the heart of Heart of Darkness is there, but I mean, it's even transformed.
You know, Heart of Darkness is Africa, and Apocalypse Now is Vietnam, right?
But the, uh...
The white man explorer who loses his mind and wreaks chaos and havoc and destruction on a native population and needs to be stopped by, you know, more later white explorers is one of the points of connection between those two renderings.
Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
And then I'm thinking of another version, which I can't remember the name of the second movie, but do you remember that there is a This movie, along the same plot as Dr. Strangelove, actually released at approximately the same time.
I don't.
But it's a serious version.
Really?
Only the Kubrick version lasts in people's memory because, you know, it's so remarkably different from anything else that had ever been made.
But there was another version that had the same, you know, nuclear Nuclear narrative that has run away and the bombs can't be recalled.
And anyway, it's a deadline.
I think, I mean, this is maybe part of the point to sort of come full circle, is that these questions of adaptation, The particulars may be sexed, and occasionally an original female creator may feel that her work was not honored appropriately, was not taken seriously enough, and she may be right because she was female.
That will more rarely happen for original male creators, right?
But barring those incidents, which must exist, but I would argue will be a small fraction of the cases where there's disagreements about the quality and the mode of the adaptation, that it's about creativity.
And yes, creativity will maybe tend to manifest somewhat differently in male brains and hands and female brains and hands.
But the question of, no, actually I had something different in mind, you didn't get it.
No, what was in your work that you didn't know was there, was this.
And that's a staggering thing to be told as a creator.
You think you found something that In what I did, that I don't know was there and that you're seeing my work more clearly than I did, that's its own philosophical conundrum and has nothing to do with male versus female.
It's funny, you know, I can imagine being affronted by such a thing, but in science it's so much the regular phenomenon and it's actually a hallmark of a kind of success, right?
You found an idea so deep you don't see to the bottom of it.
Which is actually one of the things I was trying to tell Richard Dawkins about memes that he doesn't get.
Right?
He sees them as trivial and parallel to genes.
And it's like, no, no, no, no, no.
You don't understand how much of the magic that is the unique status of humans as an evolutionary phenomenon is the result of the fact that the relationship between genes and memes isn't the one you've spotted.
Right?
So, I mean, this is fantastic.
Science and More completely creative work, because science is very, very creative, of course, but are different in this regard.
And just like, and maybe this is a decent segue to, you know, science and journalism are not the same thing.
They don't follow the same rules.
They don't follow the same expectations.
And people in journalism who say, oh, follow the science and, you know, like, who think that they know, even though they recognize that actually they're innumerate and don't know what they're talking about, are making a tragic and profound error by imagining that science and journalism are the same thing, same thing science and the law.
Totally different expectations, you know, in basically every regard.
And so, yeah, for me, as both a scientist and someone who is an active creator in non-scientific creator space,
Uh, I can, I definitely feel the like, oh boy, if I've, if I've written a thing that is just explicitly creative, that is not nonfiction, um, the idea of it being grabbed by someone else and turned into, uh, you know, something in a different medium, uh, would feel like, oh God, you know, can you, like, what, what are you going to do to it?
That thing was mine.
Whereas with science, uh, you know, there are Ideas, there are formulations that are yours because you came up with them, but they don't belong to you, they belong to the universe, right?
It is discovery.
It is discovery rather than creation, and that is a fundamental difference.
What journalism is doing, what journalism and law are entirely human constructs, as is the human creative process, whereas science is about discovery and the humans don't come first.
Well, so let's draw the distinction.
The stuff, the model that you happen onto is a feature of the universe, if your model is accurate.
Yeah.
The process by which you come by it may be just you.
And frankly, you may not even know what it is because, you know, as we have pointed out multiple times, you can tell a student, oh, you make an observation about a pattern and then you come up with a hypothesis.
What you can't do is then explain, oh, here's how you're going to come up with your hypothesis.
That's what I'm saying.
coming up with the hypothesis is the core of the creative part of science.
That's what I'm saying.
And it's not even something that those of us who are good at it can explain how we do it.
No, because you can't.
You can't.
Right.
Nor can the sculptor looking at the stone describe to a mentee, like, this is what you're going to do to find the inspiration in the stone.
Yeah.
And, you know, there are bits and pieces and, you know, and you could practice and you can watch the person learning to hypothesize or the person learning to sculpt.
And say, oh, I wouldn't, you know, see that there's that crack there.
And if you do that, it's likely to cause this problem over here.
But you can't.
There is no recipe.
Yeah.
There is no recipe.
The only thing I can do with hypothesis is show you how I come up with one.
And then you can see.
See if you can find your way to something that does the same job.
Yeah, let's play.
Let's now go outside into the complexity and look around and wait for the questions to occur.
And then play around with the ideas that show up and see which of these are hypotheses.
Oh, some of them aren't hypotheses because they're untestable.
And in fact, one of the pickles that we find ourselves in in the present is that because the science is no longer taking place in the university, right?
Some simulation of science is taking place there, but it's obviously pretty feeble given what it's incapable of doing.
We are now doing this stuff In the open, which is kind of not the way it's supposed to be.
And it means that, you know, in order to come up with a hypothesis, you have to entertain a lot of things that don't qualify.
Right?
Right.
You have to, you have to free yourself enough that you're not constantly shouting at yourself that that's an irresponsible idea to traffic in, right?
So anyway, you play with these ideas and then hopefully by the time you get around to voicing it, you've edited down to something that you can make some kind of defense of.
But, you know, there's no defending the thought process that comes up with a viable hypothesis because it considered 40 that weren't viable.
You have to try out everything possible.
Yeah, and anybody who thinks that they're going to micromanage you and keep you away from bad ideas is also keeping you away from Useable ideas because you can't get to a hypothesis without that license.
And they've demonstrated that they don't do science and they don't know what science is.
Yeah.
Yeah, that's about power.
Or at least, at best, it's about confusion about a process that they are not able to do.
Yeah.
Power, confusion, censorship.
One or all of those.
Yep.
So speaking of which, why don't you take over?
I've got some things to add.
Sure.
So I wanted to talk a little bit about something that I actually encountered two different versions of it in the last week and a couple of days.
But I want to explain why This is worth doing at all, because I think it could easily be misinterpreted.
So I want to talk a little bit about an interview or a discussion that took place on Barry Weiss's podcast, Honestly, with a woman named Helen Lewis.
And the problem is that the two of them
Specifically take me to task and we will come back to the meaning of that But I'm not interested in talking about this because they take me to task Though it does mean that I am expert on some of the things they say and I am in a position To comment on the veracity or lack thereof of those things But here's what I'm concerned about and I think we've talked about this at least once before at the moment you have a scientific establishment that has a
To put it gently, completely fumbled the ball on COVID.
And having fumbled the ball, it has put a lot of people in a very compromised position.
People who aren't professionally involved in science, and some of them don't really have a deep relationship with science at all.
They trusted people who should be trustworthy, and it turned out those people are terrible at what they represent themselves at being excellent at.
You and I are in an interesting predicament because we have a Large number of places where we challenged the official narrative and now it turns out that we were correct.
Now, as I said last week and have said many times before, we did not start out correct.
What happened was we started with educated guesses, hypotheses, and got more and more correct over time as we built up a model.
How do you do that?
By monitoring how predictive it is of phenomena in the real world.
So your model gets better and better.
It gets more and more predictive.
Maybe it assumes less and less, right?
That's the process we went through.
The problem is that creates a challenge to all sorts of powerful forces going forward.
Because if you and I actually succeeded in doing that, right?
In out thinking the experts, not by using anything fancy, without their advantages, without any inside information, without the ability to commission experiments, or any of the things you might do in order to really be at the cutting edge.
If we were able to do it just by talking it out, Then something is really wrong.
That should not be possible, right?
Fine to outthink a certain number of But it shouldn't be possible to just beat them across the board.
To the extent that it is possible, yes, it's nice that you and I have those capabilities.
Yes, we studied a topic which puts us in a good position to do it because it has a generalist toolkit that comes along, because evolution is relevant to many of the sub-questions that are involved in this.
But it is also evidence that something is desperately wrong with the institutional world.
Right?
So, my claim is the institutional world has to find an excuse to discount what our viewers and listeners know happened on Dark Horse.
It has to find that.
Now, if it just had to find that and it was alone in the universe, fine, it would have a hard time.
But it actually has a corresponding group of people, a large audience of people who were taken in by the CDC, by the New York Times, by all of the official outlets that were supposed to be doing the work of curating the information, seeking new data, right?
all of the things that were supposed to work to tell you what to think about COVID, right?
The failure of that thing resulted in a lot of people whose worst error was just simply to trust that the experts probably knew what the hell they were talking about, right?
Those people got burned.
Now, some of them got injured, right?
Some of them just got humiliated, and hopefully they haven't been injured.
But the point is, you've got a large audience of people who got suckered by something, and are now trying to figure out how to go back to living a normal life.
And you've got a whole bunch of people who screwed up, who don't want to be displaced over the fact that it is now evident that they do not know what they are doing.
And those two things are now searching for a narrative in the middle.
And that narrative in the middle is kind of a negotiation, right?
The powerful people don't really want to be vindicated.
They can't be.
They got it wrong.
What they want is to be slapped on the wrist in a way that does not threaten their position of power.
And the people who got suckered Would like to be relieved of that sense of a, oh, there are no experts.
That's a problem.
How am I to live?
Am I just going to wake up panicked every morning?
Right.
They would like to be relieved of that.
They would like not to feel so much like suckers.
They would like to have somebody put into words the mechanism by which they followed what should have been true and reliable instincts and ended up in danger.
Right.
And so my claim is that there is now a struggle happening Where influencers, some of them humiliated, are now seeking to provide a sow for that sense of discomfort.
And the powerful, who do not want to be displaced over their failure, are interested in the same thing.
And the confluence of those two things is a very powerful draw that is going to pull people in if we're not careful.
Is it petty to be focused on the fact that this viewpoint that they are erecting is nonsense?
No.
In fact, the future depends on us not falling into this trap.
And I will say, at the beginning of COVID, what I said, at least to those close to me, was that this was likely the best opportunity That we were ever going to get in our lifetime to reveal what was taking place in the system.
The dysfunction that you see inside of a university, right?
The failure of journalism to find obvious stories and to report them.
These things are our system.
Coming apart.
Our very lives depend on it, as we are now learning with the various failures of supply chains and, you know, scarcity of various kinds of foods.
Our very life actually depends on a system most of us do not understand, and that system is showing every sign of coming apart.
So my sense is, we either take what we just learned from the failures of COVID, And use it to motivate us to figure out how to repair the system well enough that we can depend on it, or we are going to not only suffer the equivalent of COVID again in some new context, maybe having nothing to do with a pathogen, maybe it will be a different pathogen, who knows, but that same collapse, the same inability of the experts to figure out which way is up, that thing is putting us in danger and it will continue to do so.
So we have to get in the way and block that middle ground scramble for that narrative of comfort.
Yeah, for sure.
I think, as you would predict from what you just described, that middle ground scramble seems to be made up
Almost entirely, if not entirely, of people who are very educated, who have viewed themselves as heterodox on something in the past, and who reveal from things that they're saying that either they can't or have stopped being willing to engage in logical arguments.
And if you are going to take a everything is socially constructed view of the world, you can't also claim to be on the right side of history.
And so I was thinking about this in the context of, for a variety of reasons, some of which I don't know, but some of which is that I was in Portland and so ran into more people this last week, We've been hearing from a number of people who are appreciative of what we're doing, and I was just thinking about, of the people I know, like, who are these people in the world?
What are they doing?
And this is by no means a complete representation, but we have farmers and gardeners, artists and artisans and makers.
Pilots and teachers, healthcare professionals and people in the military, people focused on nature and actual sustainability and conservation, not the thing that's passing for sustainability and conservation in so many circles now, people who don't actually like to go outside but like to claim to be all about nature and such, people who don't like discomfort.
We've got people who work in food co-ops, who understand stuff about actual actual food security, who make ferments and grow garlic and construct herbal concoctions and get raw dairy from people who produce it and get it to the people who think that they need it or want it for their own health.
Musicians who speak truth to their lyrics and their notes.
Printmakers who meld the wisdom of the past with amazing images.
There's more.
Every single word that I just used there represents one or more actual people whom we've heard from in the last week or two.
And every single one of them is doing something real in the world with a real manifestation in the physical world.
Not very social.
It's not entirely social.
And I think that is going to be the, you know, the predictive thing here.
Like, were you Paying attention to something that they could not lie to you about early on or throughout this pandemic at all, such that at the point that what you knew to be true because you experienced it with your own senses in your own body, at the point that they made some claim that was opposite, you went, No.
Not because you went into it needing to disagree.
Not because you went into it needing to agree.
Not because you were faithful or cynical.
Not because you were a contrarian.
But because you went, huh, that's not right.
Well, now I'm going to be on a little bit of an alert, because that thing that I was assured was true isn't true.
Oh, there's another one.
Oh boy.
And you know, you quickly do go into this space like, oh wow, I did not know so many things were not true that I was being told were true.
But the assurances from the talking heads that all you have to do is follow along, and you know, I am the embodiment of science over here, and you know, you just have to do what this three-letter agency says over here, People who actually have real physical manifestations in the world, because they're flying planes or growing garlic or making ferments or, you know, whatever it is, we're much less likely, I think, it's a hypothesis, to be fooled by this across the board.
And it's the people who are hyper-educated who don't spend time in real physical space.
Maybe, you know, maybe Build a fence.
Learn to lay tile.
Do something with physical manifestation in the world where you can see the results and not negotiate your way into convincing yourself that you were right all along.
It's interesting that you mention the people who do something real in the world and their ability to spot red flags because it's interesting.
Barry had Ellen Lewis on her podcast earlier, I think it was last Friday.
She and Michael Schellenberger and Rene Duresta were on Sam Harris's podcast.
And Barry says something in both cases, almost identically, which I believe is a reference You know, so in some sense, in Barry's own podcast, she tries to uninvent the IDW, and she basically imagines it as her creation.
You know, maybe she made her article, created something that didn't really exist, wasn't wasn't for real in the first place, which is kind of a nonsense idea.
But in talking about the IDW, she lays out a trajectory where she says,
You know, I think people who, you know, got something right and noticed that something wasn't being well stated by the official institutions then fell down the rabbit hole and they went from, you know, the CDC was wrong on masks or whatever her example is, to, and then her example is that Bill Gates is trying to inject you with a microchip
Uh, in your brain because of the Great Reset.
This angered me to hear it because A, I think... It's like a prototypical straw man.
It's a prototypical straw man because it starts out right and in fact it doesn't even end entirely wrong.
Is the Great Reset a problem?
Yeah, I think it probably is.
Is Bill Gates involved?
Yeah, I don't exactly understand why, but You know, there's something there.
Does this have anything to do with microchips in the brain?
No, that was you throwing something in there to toxify the well so that nobody would start to try to sort out what the relationship of these things is.
So anyway, what I want to do... Most such maneuvers are unwitting.
I'm not saying that that one was, but take pieces that might be plausible and add to them pieces that sound so absurd that by tying them together, you cause people who haven't yet started to investigate such a thing to be like, oh, there's too many things to do in the world.
Not that one.
Not that one.
That's toxic.
I don't know if it's witting or unwitting, but this definitely feels strategic, which I do not begrudge Barry a strategic nature.
Obviously, strategy is important in order to get good things accomplished.
But what she's accomplishing in this case, I don't believe is legitimate.
And there are several features here that tell me something is off.
So Barry and Helen are having this discussion, and they're talking about what the IDW is.
And Barry describes the IDW, and she basically names a number of the male participants who were in her article.
And says, and there were some females as well.
You are again disappeared.
And that will become relevant when we get to the part where I come in for critique.
I think your disappearance has a meaning.
This is not the first time we've seen it.
Sam does it and Barry is now doing it.
Let me, let me, I think there's one of three, three things going on there.
Well, let me put my hypothesis on the table.
You tell me if it's in your list.
The podcast that Barry does where I'm claiming that she's involved in this middle ground scramble to create an explanation for how she and others missed the boat on COVID and slap power on the wrist in a way that it will want.
Is traffics in the moniker gurus, right?
Helen has taken up the idea of gurus in earnest, and I am effectively portrayed as one.
I think, look, the fact is during COVID, as you and I were doing what we did, we played different roles.
You know, I've always been more theoretical in my work, so the roles are asymmetrical, but There was no asymmetry in the level of contribution.
In fact, one of the things that comes up in the little clip that I'm going to play is a contribution that you made.
The response to something Helen says is something that I got from you.
So my point would be... I don't yet know what we're talking about.
If you're gonna level the allegation, That podcast listeners are falling for gurus, right?
The point is, well, you and I don't look like a guru, because a guru doesn't tend to look like two scientific people having a conversation about hypotheses, predictions, and tests, right?
That's not a guru move.
That's a science move, right?
After two people to use a singular pronoun, that's just tricky.
Right.
Indeed.
In fact, I can't even figure out how you do it.
But the point is, if they are going to dismiss us as not having been right, because what we really did and, you know, Barry's language is, you know, when she says you go from spotting that the CDC screwed up masks to thinking Bill Gates is trying to inject you with microchips, she describes it as falling down the rabbit hole.
It doesn't sound good.
It's funny though, a lot of the heterodox thinkers who are quite good use the metaphor rabbit hole for themselves, right?
The point is this is not inherently a bad thing, and in fact a rabbit hole isn't a rabbit hole.
A rabbit hole is a rabbit warrant, and so in going down a rabbit hole, built into the metaphor is the idea that there will be blind alleys, right?
Going down the rabbit hole is about sorting what is down there.
But also unexpected ways out.
Yeah.
Multiple, multiple ways in.
Right.
So anyway, maybe we should play the clip and then we can talk about what it's implicated.
It's short.
So yeah, Zach.
Yeah, we are ready.
It gave them so much to kick against.
And the more that people said, you know, these people are awful, you shouldn't listen to them, you shouldn't see them, rather than rebutting them.
The more power they got.
Right.
And I felt very strongly when I went into that Jordan Peterson interview.
This is the one bit I do remember having a conversation with myself about.
I will never say in that interview, I'm never going to say anything that you say is offensive.
I'm going to say if I think it's wrong, and I'm going to make the argument about why it's wrong.
And I think that's the thing, is that there was the overused cudgel of offence and blasphemy rather than As you say, you can say to Brett Weinstein, well, look, there's very good evidence that the vaccines are safe and effective, and that ivermectin was a promising treatment at one point, but we now have a good meta-analysis review that says, sorry, no, it's not.
And it's not a big pharma conspiracy, because it's a generic drug that's very cheap.
Lots of things that were basic steroids.
Dexamethasone, for example, was in exactly the same position Ivermectin was, but that one turned out to work, and so people prescribed that one.
What's your mechanism why you think this was suppressed?
And that's the argument that you should be making, right?
Rather than, you must not question the wisdom of the elders.
You have to partake.
Okay.
So.
Helen, in this clip, is portraying me as somebody who can't grok even basic information about COVID.
And she says, you know, you can tell Brett Weinstein that there is, you know, evidence that the vaccines are safe and effective.
The implication being, I simply am unaware of that evidence, or worse, that the evidence exists.
And that I refuse to accept it for some reason.
Now, the fact is, there is an awful lot of evidence.
There is mounting evidence that the vaccines are unsafe.
That does not mean that nobody gets away with being injected.
Presumably most people do.
But the idea that she is simply going to slip in there the assumption that the evidence tells us that these things are safe and effective is preposterous.
Now, I will point out, Barry says nothing.
Barry, a journalist who knows that there is mounting evidence of the hazard of these vaccines, has an obligation journalistically to challenge that.
It is not simply true that they are safe and effective, and I believe that Barry actually has in her circle somebody who's been vaccine injured, so she knows better.
And she had an obligation to say so.
What's more, she's talking about the IDW, And there are a number of people in the IDW or close to it who also know of vaccine injuries.
So, you know, there's a vaccine injured person in that realm.
There's somebody with a spouse.
The fact is, this is not a realm in which a journalist can bypass the fact that there is evidence around us of something more than safe and effective.
But then worse, she goes on To say that, you know, another thing that you can't seem to convey to me, because apparently I'm too dumb to get it, is that Ivermectin seemed promising, but then she says, but we now have a compelling meta-analysis that tells us that that is not the case.
Really.
I think Helen Lewis does not understand what the state of the evidence is on ivermectin.
I think she's barely familiar with it, and that her use of the term meta-analysis tells us that.
I think she's not referring to a meta-analysis, because if she is, She's either referring to the Cochrane meta-analysis, which said ivermectin didn't work, the Cochrane meta-analysis, which is compromised by the fact that they set inclusion criteria for which studies would be represented, and then violated their own criteria.
And if she's not talking about that one, she's talking about the Andy Hill meta-analysis.
The Andy Hill meta-analysis, which Andy Hill, on videotape, captured by Tess Laurie, admits he changed the conclusion based on his funder's preference.
I'm certainly not talking about the Laurie meta-analysis, because that one shows up in the opposite direction.
Right.
So, A, what she's done is just, if she's talking about the meta-analyses, she's either misrepresenting them or remaining ignorant of the actual underlying problem with these things, or she doesn't mean meta-analysis all and she's throwing that in there to sound technical,
Well, and I think... And then she's referring to, for example, the TOGETHER trial or the ACTIV-6 trial where we also have evidence of fraud where, for example, the dosing carries this unexplained parameter where people above a certain BMI have their dose capped.
And when you have a disease that afflicts people in proportion to the degree of their obesity, and you start underdosing people the fatter they are, of course you cause a problem.
So, the fact is, she is representing this as Brett Weinstein simply cannot understand the state of the evidence in ivermectin, when in fact, she doesn't apparently understand the state of the evidence herself.
Well, and so I'm not that interested in talking about why I'm not present in many of these attempted takedowns of you.
But I said that I think that there's three different reasons, and I do think that those three different reasons are useful to consider across the board with regard to this.
But just let's remember, That the reason this is important is that this cannot happen again.
And that this middle ground scramble, as you have described it, in which the institutions that are flawed and failing are trying to keep some of their imprimatur of seriousness and are
Effectively signing on with or the other pseudo-heterodox sort of talking heads are signing on with the idea of what the institutions have always been doing without understanding anything about what has actually happened.
It's like the metaphor that I was thinking of.
It's like rearranging deck chairs on The Analysis, except for rearranging intellectuals.
You're going to replace some of the old talking heads with some new talking heads, and they seemed heterodox at some point, but it turns out they're not courageous.
These are not the courageous people.
They're just following along like everyone else, looking for power.
And no, not everything is about power, but these moves are.
So, you know, why don't I show up when Sam Harris talks and Scott Adams and, you know, Helen Lewis and Barry Weiss and such?
I think it's one of three reasons.
And it's some combination, often.
One, because people aren't actually paying attention.
They've never heard you and me talk.
They've never heard you talk.
They haven't actually engaged the material.
They've gotten their information from someone else.
And that, I suspect, not knowing very much at all about the situation is what, for instance, Helen has done.
She's never heard anything here.
But it's also true that, you know, you went on with Robert Malone and Steve Kirsch.
You went on with Pierre Coury.
Like, you do the guest hosting.
And so, you know, you're more out there.
You're easier for the people who want to hate on what it is that we're doing and what you're doing to grab you and to take it.
And so, I think one of the big reasons is It's a reveal of actually, I never actually listened to or read anything that here they said, and so I'm going to just focus there.
That's one.
Second reason is that in some cases, not this particular, these two women presumably, although I don't know, is that it's actual cryptic misogyny, and that they're accustomed to not paying attention to women being influential in a space that sounds like things that they can't understand, and therefore probably this is not a thing that women would do.
Well, so that's obnoxious and terrible if it's true, but I do think that that is part of the reason sometimes.
And the third reason I think that this happens, and I do think that this is part of what's going on with the podcast you're talking about now, is that it's strategic.
And it's more difficult to take down the two of us together.
Because as you say, we don't look like a guru.
Right?
We look like two people with scientific backgrounds, and yes, also credentials, but that's not the thing that matters here.
We have decades, both individually and even more decades, between us thinking carefully through scientific patterns and processes, making observations in the world, figuring out what hypotheses might explain them, how to test between, how to discriminate between those hypotheses, and how to move forward.
That is what we do professionally.
Both of us.
And yes, I'm more of an empiricist.
Back when we were actually practicing scientists in the way that most people think of when they think of it, and you were more of a theorist.
But you know, I do theory, you do empiricism, like we both do both things.
And it's just far easier to have it be, especially in this era, This, like, this, even the people who claim to be the most anti-woke, like, oh, let's go after the dude.
He's, you know, it's, it's just, it's this guy who's just off, off the cuff.
He's just not making any sense.
You just can't talk to him.
You can't talk to him about ivermectin.
Really?
Like, I'm, I'm guessing that this is what you were talking about when you said that one of the things that they talk about is something that I brought to the table.
Nope, haven't gotten there yet.
Okay, well, like, I remember I remember having gotten up early one Saturday back almost two years ago, probably.
Maybe two years ago.
And we were still living in Portland, and I don't remember how I went there, but I went down that rabbit warren of Ivermectin and emergency use authorizations, and you came downstairs.
And I looked at you, my jaw dropped.
I was like, I think I have stumbled upon the most egregious example yet of anything in the pandemic to date that I or we have talked about.
And it was ivermectin.
So that's the piece.
It is specifically the emergency use authorization because the last thing that Helen says in the clip that we played is that it doesn't even make sense that there would be some sort of collusion to exclude ivermectin as a treatment for COVID because it's a generic drug and it's cheap.
Okay, Helen, that's a non sequitur, right?
The reason that people imagine that ivermectin was blocked was because it was a direct competitor to these vaccines which were emergency use authorized, and emergency use authorization requires that there not be a viable treatment in order to be granted.
There being a direct competitor to the vaccines to prevent COVID precludes the EUA and therefore would have precluded the vaccines going on the market when they did.
Right, and then she says that her point is proven because she names a steroid that is used... Dextromorph... something.
I'm going to skip it for the second, but the point is the fact that some other generic drug is being used, and yes it is used for pulmonary compromise that comes along with COVID.
Is it dextromethorphan?
No, no, no, no.
Anyway, the fact that she uses this example is evidence that she doesn't understand what's going on, because the point is Ivermectin has two values.
It does treat people with COVID effectively, assuming you treat them early with a sufficient dose.
This has been demonstrated many times, and we can talk about why you think the evidence says that it doesn't, but that evidence is not persuasive.
But the other thing it does is it is a preventative of contracting COVID.
And so the point is, You're comparing apples to spaceships.
They're not comparable.
You know, I'm now thrown by Zach, who says that we didn't play as much of the clip as I thought that we played.
But nonetheless, there's like four or five sentences involved in her critique.
And there's three or four critical errors in what she says.
Now, my point is going to be, she's not actually trying to make an analytical point.
She's trying to sound like she's making an analytical point.
The actual payload of this entire exploration Is the word guru.
The idea is, this is not going to compel anybody who actually pays attention to the podcast.
What this is going to do is prevent other people from paying attention.
That's its purpose, is to stigmatize us, to make us sound like... and this is a move that we see repeatedly now.
The idea is, if that thing persuades you, that's because you're a sucker.
And so the point is, anybody who hears us and thinks, oh, Well, that's not what I thought it was.
That actually sounds kind of compelling.
That sounds like a scientific discussion.
That sounds like a discussion I'd like to pay attention to.
Ah, you're a sucker.
You're falling for a guru.
It's, you know, something is fitting a religion shaped hole in your persona and that's why you're responding to it.
So this is designed, it's like, you know, it's like skunk stink.
It's supposed to make it difficult for people to get anywhere near this discussion because really the point is another discussion has to take place and it's not up to the challenge.
Yeah, well, I will repeat that, I mean, also not on my list of people we've been hearing from who are grateful for the conversations in which we try to logic through evidence out loud in front of the camera are many tradesmen.
We've got roofers and, you know, all sorts of people who are, again, doing physical things in the world.
I would hope that anyone who is so convinced that what we're doing is based on a simple rubric of contrarianism Or falling prey to some kind of something, something, something.
I propose first that you're recognizing a part of your own brain, and that part is not necessarily universal.
And that if you get yourself in the habit of doing something physical in the world, and seeing the manifestations of it, then you will be more able in the future to distinguish between arguments that are careful and logical, and arguments which are entirely based in social conclusions.
And I think most of what we're hearing, most of what you're talking about here, are arguments based entirely in the social sphere with sort of nodding, passing referral to science-y things.
But this is coming from people who aren't actually engaging any of the evidence.
Yeah, that's quite right.
I would say that there are multiple ways that they are attempting to dismiss the conversation that now needs to take place, and people should be aware of all of them, right?
You've mentioned contrarianism, right?
To the extent that the system got Really, essentially everything wrong about COVID, from its origin, to the best mechanism for treating it, to the safety of the vaccines, all of these things, to the utility of vitamin D, all of these things it got wrong.
And so if the system is in the practice of getting everything wrong, yes, a contrarian could get there without understanding anything, but that doesn't make people who understood contrarians by nature.
Yeah, no, and I think we talked about this last week, but I wrote a piece in my subsec last year that I have just been sending to people when they, you know, like, oh, you're just a contrarian.
Like, no.
That is the opposite of science.
It is the opposite of science.
It is the opposite of science.
So is faith.
Both of those things.
Simply having an idea in advance of I will or I will, I will accept or I will reject whatever the authority says.
That's not scientific.
Um, in addition, I also hear, especially from, uh, from various quadrants, including, um, Oh boy.
Damn.
I've forgotten.
Um, the.
The thing that Barry says in this podcast is that, and actually Helen picks up on this and runs with it, the idea is that all of this is explainable by audience capture, right?
A term that Helen correctly attributes to Eric and then misdefines, right?
Audience capture would be the idea that you simply start saying the things that the audience wants to hear because it's lucrative.
And I want to point out that yes, that's a very sophisticated sounding rationale for dismissing a correct line of logic.
But what is really obvious, and should be obvious to anybody who pays attention to this podcast, is that we are very frequently arriving at a position for which there is exactly no audience.
Right?
Like, for example, global warming is real, it's dangerous, but the models are crap, and the fields that study this are going to be compromised by the same perverse incentives that compromise COVID policy.
The vaccines are obviously a hazard.
So is COVID, right?
The obvious thing, if you were going to follow some path to some audience that wanted to hear something, is to follow it to some audience that actually exists.
Like, COVID's not serious and the vaccines are dangerous, right?
But the point is, time and time again... I remember being asked by a conservative friend, maybe a year into the pandemic, why is it that you're skeptical of vaccines and yet you think COVID is a real problem?
That was really the phrasing, and I'm not going to say who it was.
And I thought, what do those two things have to do with one another?
Those are really unrelated.
And if you are coming to your conclusions because of who your team has voted for, you're not doing science.
So, you know, let's put it this way.
You can just simply look at the various ways that, and I don't, I wish this weren't personal, I wish we were talking about somebody else's podcast because it would be a lot easier to do this, but you can't get to where we are by contrarianism, by reflexive contrarianism, because the point is the place that we have arrived is not otherwise on the map, right?
You can't get there through luck because the track record is too many things that were unlikely but turned out to be true.
And you can't get there by falling down a rabbit hole either because the point is the pattern would peter out.
So none of these things make sense.
It's not a coin flip.
It's a scientific process.
It shouldn't be true that it is possible to do this on a podcast and come up with a superior model to whatever the CDC is playing with, but it is apparently possible.
And that really is the discussion we should be having.
So it's nothing to do with gurus.
And, um, you know, it's really, uh, it's quite disgusting for people who have not gotten COVID right to be challenging those who have gotten it right over time through a process which we have done in public so that other people will not pay attention, right?
That is just It's an unacceptable thing to do, and frankly, the amount of chutzpah involved in doing such a thing is pretty remarkable.
I must say, I'm a bit horrified to be hearing this from both Sam and Barry.
Both of them know better, and I hope they find their way back to sanity.
Okay, we're going to Talk a little bit about dogs next time.
We promised this time, but I think maybe it's time for us to take our break for the week and come back with a Q&A shortly.
For those of you who don't do the Q&A, we'll be back again same time next week.
We will not be doing a Q&A next week, but we will be back with our regular live stream.
You can ask questions for the Q&A at darkhorsesubmissions.com.
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