In this 200th in a series of live discussions with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying (both PhDs in Biology), we discuss the state of the world through an evolutionary lens.In this episode we discuss gender equity in infant care, and what makes workplaces so toxic that women are leaving academia. And we give thanks to many of the people who stood up to tyranny and lies in the last few years.*****Our sponsors:Biom: NOBS is a different, superior way to clean your teeth. Try it, you’ll never go b...
Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse Podcast livestream, Thanksgiving Eve edition, episode number 200, not prime, divisible by 150, 25, 20, 10, divisible by 150, 25, 20, 10, 8, 5, 4, 2, and 1, if I am correct.
You just did that in your head right before we came on.
I did.
I'm proud of myself.
It's not a difficult problem, but I think I nailed all the factors.
I don't know.
I haven't thought about it.
All right, well.
8, 10, 20, 25, 50, 100.
Maybe.
I think it is.
Let's put it this way.
If it's not, we will know shortly after the podcast ends and our next live stream.
I will deliver not only a correction, but an apology.
An apology.
And who in this case will the apology be to?
To mathematics and everything that depends upon it.
Wow.
Global apology.
A universal apology, I would say.
Indeed.
All right.
Number 200.
It's big.
Wow.
200.
Who thought?
Wild.
That seems like a lot of episodes.
It does.
It does.
Okay, so join us on Rumble if you're watching live, and if you're watching live, also join us on Locals for the watch party.
We have lots of stuff going on at Locals.
We have our private Q&A this Sunday at 11 a.m.
Pacific.
We've got early release of guest episodes of Dark Horse, AMAs sometimes, got the Discord available there, so please join us there.
We are going to be talking today about equity in infant care.
That sounds like something important that we should all be interested in fostering.
It's not, but... Infant equity foster care.
That's what I'm thinking.
Yeah, okay.
Well, we will get there soon.
Workplace toxicity.
Workplace toxicity.
You're talking about the off-gassing of workplace furniture?
Is that... God, I wish I was, actually.
All right.
Kind of.
Oh, yes.
40.
You missed 40.
Nice.
Five.
Five by 40.
That wasn't even me.
You can imagine who that was.
Yes, we can imagine.
I will need to prepare my correction and apologies, so that's still going to take time.
So it seems to me that a simple – turn your page back so I can see your factors – you could have just counted the number of factors you had, and if you had an uneven number, it seems to me that – Here's the thing.
I did it in such a rush that in matching up the factors, I missed one.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Okay.
All right.
Tis what it is.
It happens.
You know, the thing is, we don't like to have to make such admissions, but it is far better to admit that you were wrong, Sam Harris, than to go on being wrong, Sam Harris.
We're also going to talk about gratitude and Thanksgiving.
Speaking of things that have nothing to do with Sam Harris at the moment.
Okay.
After we're going to do a Q&A this week, you can ask questions at darkhorsesubmissions.com, and we want to just share with you some merchandise.
We'll talk about it more at the end as well, but Zach's going to show our new store here.
We got all sorts of fabulous designs included.
Have we even talked about blueberries?
Blueberries, because oxidants happen.
That's pretty fabulous.
I've been waiting a long time to see that rendered in reality.
I know!
You tried to convince the family member of a friend of ours who does such things years ago!
Oh, that's at least a 15-year-old idea.
Yeah.
We got the Goliath cap, we got, I think there's at least one more thing Zach has queued up here to show, maybe not.
Okay, so there's good stuff available at the store.
I never remember what the URL for the store is, isn't it?
DarkHorseStore.org.
DarkHorseStore.org.
Thanks.
Oh, you're welcome.
Yes, and there's a code.
The code is... Holiday10.
Holiday10.
Holiday10 gets you 10% off.
What?
Completely news to you.
Yes.
But I'm delivering it.
That's the way news is.
The people on the news, they read the teleprompter as if they are the authority, but it's just sort of passing.
You don't even have a teleprompter, though.
You're reading your son.
I'm listening to the voice in my ear, which is actually a real person in this case.
Yeah, yeah.
And we are so grateful for that.
One of the many things we're grateful for is Zachary being real and here.
All right.
Before we move on to things that aren't this, We have three ads, as we always do at the top of the hour.
You can know that if that green perimeter is around the screen, then we are reading sponsored content, but you can also know that we only accept sponsors who make products or provide services that we actually and truly vouch for.
That is true today, that is always true.
Sponsors this week are Biome, Sundays, and MD Hearing.
And we have turned away more sponsors than we have accepted, so in terms of what it means, these are things that we believe in.
Indeed.
Our first sponsor this week is Biome, maker of Nobs, N-O-B-S.
Nobs is dentifrice of a whole new type.
Dentifrice is anything you use to clean your teeth, toothpaste, but also powders or knobs.
Nobs are fantastic.
Biome, that's Biome without the E on the end, B-I-O-M, makes a fantastic product that all four of us now use daily.
There's only two of us on screen, actually one at the moment, but you can infer the others.
Because they make products and are a brand that is legitimately focused on transparency, safety, and efficacy.
Let's talk fluoride for a moment.
Fluoride is the anti-cavity ingredient in most toothpaste that you already know about, but the fluoride in drinking water and toothpaste is not in a molecular form that is found in nature, or that has ever been part of our diet.
We talk about this a little bit in our book, and there's ever more research to support the idea that neurotoxicity from fluoride exposure, especially in children, is a real problem.
Nobs from Biome does not contain fluoride, but that in and of itself doesn't make it unique because so much research is now coming out about the toxicity of the kind of fluoride that shows up in toothpaste.
Many oral care products are now abandoning fluoride.
But unlike comparator products, Nobs includes a different and far better remineralizing agent.
That's hydroxyapatite.
Hydroxyapatite is the main component of the enamel in your teeth, and it's in your bones as well.
It has been extensively studied in medicine and dentistry and is as effective as fluoride in remineralizing teeth.
It's kind of a tough word to say.
Remineralizing.
It's not as tough as hydroxyapatite, which every time you say it makes you wonder if you've got the word correct.
Well, no, because since I used to teach anatomy labs, hydroxyapatite came up a fair bit.
So I became accustomed to talking about, when talking about the evolution, the original evolution of these mineralized tissues in the body, bone, both internal and external, and teeth.
So I would just point out that knobs should use the slogan Don't use fluoride.
It ruins your hydroxy appetite, which would technically be true, and for a small number of people would be funny.
Yep.
I hesitate to say this.
Yes.
Oh my god.
All right.
I don't actually really hesitate to say that.
It amuses me every time you make a pun and you don't know it's a different spelling.
I'll get you for this.
I get to say that.
Which is fairly free.
It's how you get access to the full pantheon of potential puns is by ignoring the spelling.
Oh, absolutely.
Yeah, it's why spellers find puns so irritating, frankly.
And why punters find spellers so irritating.
Exactly.
We'll be talking about workplace toxicity later, guys, including this episode here.
Yes, indeed.
Nobs uses hydroxyapatite, which is just as effective in remineralizing teeth as fluoride, but is not toxic, unlike fluoride.
It doesn't really stop cavities from forming.
It can even arrest tooth decay once it's underway.
Furthermore, even most natural natural toothpastes That are free of fluoride, still have lots of abrasive ingredients like charcoal, baking soda, and eggshells.
Now, I mean, when was the last time you chewed on eggshells in order to clean your teeth, and yet eggshells show up, among these other things, in a lot of toothpaste?
Because it's imagined that what you need is an abrasive.
It's like, yeah, actually you don't really want to be abrading your teeth that much.
I'll bet you, just knowing a little bit about how the world works, that the reason that eggshells show up is that not only are they abrasive, but they are also abundant because they are a waste product from some things that are being sold for other purposes, you know, products that have eggs in them.
And so undoubtedly they are an utterly inexpensive way for the dentiferous manufacturers to satisfy the non-need for abrasives.
So this is not the way this ad usually runs, but do you remember when we were in grad school and at the University of Michigan Museum of Zoology that there would sometimes be flyers up asking for any eggshells that people had?
Precisely because the bird division, you know, there were divisions for all the major, many of the major clades of animals in the Museum of Zoology, And I believe that some research that involved feeding birds was hoping, I think I have this right, to increase the calcium in the diet by feeding them eggshells.
I don't recall being asked for eggshells ever, not once.
Well, probably because you're not as much of a flyer reader.
A flyer reader, yes.
No, I fly right by those things and don't typically read them.
But no, I don't recall that at all.
I feel a little bad because probably I did have some eggshells.
Oh, I took in some eggshells with him occasionally, very occasionally.
Lots of people swear by eggshells in their homemade toothpaste.
Lots of people swear by eggshells when they're homemade.
I can see the logic being that the eggshells probably also have calcium and people imagine that that's going to somehow like move into the teeth, although it doesn't.
It's in a very fine powder.
I don't think it's tremendously abrasive.
I don't know.
Not worth doing right now, though.
Yeah.
All right.
Nobs doesn't have eggshells, and that's to the good.
Nobs also has no sulfates, parabens, phthalates, or microplastics.
No BS.
Nobs.
It's right there in the name.
Furthermore, Nobs comes in the form of dehydrated tablets, which allows them to be shelf-stable without any preservatives.
Take a tablet, chew it a few times, and brush as normal.
Your teeth are going to feel really fantastically clean, because they are.
Also, unlike with toothpaste, TSA has no interest in knobs, because they're tablets, so if you're flying with knobs, you don't risk losing your dentiferous insecurity.
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And the rest of that doesn't make any sense, so I'm going to skip it.
vicious attack over my failure to register a difference in spelling.
I have to point out that you made an error in the read there.
You said that a dentifrice was anything you use to clean your teeth.
That's not correct.
You are going to owe a correction on that one.
We can do that together with my correction in the next live stream.
Toothbrushes, for example, I think don't qualify.
So, all right, that's a proof of concept.
If you want to get into pedantry... How about your tongue?
Also not a dentiferous.
Oh, this is good.
I bet we could come up with a lot of things.
Fingers.
Yeah, fingers.
You're really, really out there, and you really are interested in abrasive, you know, a handful of sand.
Grass that you use.
Yeah.
Anyway, you will have to alter these.
You've read this ad, though, and you read that line.
Right, but you weren't being a pedant at the time and so you didn't point it out, but we digress.
So you are being a pedant now?
I am responding with equal and opposite pedantry as a result of your pointing out that hydroxyapatite is spelled differently than apatite, I guess.
Yeah, yeah.
I think this is a great episode to be talking about workplace toxicity, don't you think?
If only all workplace toxicity... Accusations of pedantry are flying!
All right, our second sponsor.
It kind of feels like we're like halfway through the episode at this point, but we're only one out of three ads in.
Our second sponsor this week is Maddie's all-time favorite, Sundaes.
Maddie is asleep in the corner, not even snoring, so you guys don't even know.
Sundaes makes dry dog food, but it's not your usual dry dog food.
This is no standard issue burnt kibble.
Still, the standard high-end burnt kibble that we were feeding Maddie seemed to please her.
She's a Labrador, she'll eat just about anything, and she really likes her food.
What possible difference was she going to show in interest between her usual kibble, which is a widely available high-end brand, and sundaes?
Well, we were wrong, as we've mentioned before.
Maddie loves the food that Sundaes makes.
She loves it!
If we run out of Sundaes and give her her previous high-end kibble instead, she is disappointed in us and in her dinner.
We should be giving her Sundaes.
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Sundae's also has no artificial binders, synthetic additives, or other garbage.
Or, um, eggshells, I think.
Right.
Yeah.
All of Sundae's ingredients are easy to pronounce and healthy for dogs to eat.
Now, eggshells are easy to pronounce, though.
Yes.
Hydroxyapatite?
Maybe not so much.
And our own little anecdote.
Maddie, our Labrador, supports that result.
Not so little, but definitely an anecdote.
Do you want to make your dog happy with her diet and keep her healthy?
set results.
Not so little, but definitely an anecdote.
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Switch to Sundays and feel good about what you are feeding your Now, to fend off any potential pedantry, I would point out that Sundays can be used as a dentifrice.
It's not a good one, but unlike a toothbrush, it can be a dentifrice in and of itself.
All right.
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You're looking at me like I have just had a flare-up of dyslexia, which I full well know happened, but nonetheless, I got there.
In the end, I think the message was conveyed, and the authenticity in the dyslexia is undeniable.
It is undeniable.
Yes.
I don't know who would want to deny it, but even if they wanted to, they'd be unable.
So to your point that dried dog food may be a dentifrice.
Yes.
I didn't claim that it was going to work.
Uh, I have looked up, I have looked up four definitions of dentifrice online.
Uh, and I, you don't need to show my screen here, Zach, but, um, I've got, um, I've got on Dictionary.com, dentifrice noun, a paste, powder, liquid, or other preparation for cleaning the teeth.
So that suggests it was created for cleaning the teeth, but I don't know.
I mean, dentifrice is a human construct.
We don't!
Wait, let me get through all the definitions.
You did this to yourself.
Vocabulary.com says, dentifrice is a fancy word, a substance for cleaning the teeth applied with a toothbrush, it specifies.
That would be hard to apply kibble with a toothbrush to your teeth.
Hard, but not impossible.
Okay, we have at merriam-webster.com, a powder, paste, or liquid for cleaning the teeth, again, for, and then where we should have started, and I was going to just read this one, the OED.
The OED says the first known use of the word dentifrice was in the 16th century, 1558, in fact, and it has a powder or other preparation for rubbing or cleansing the teeth, semicolon, a tooth powder or toothpaste, also applied to liquid preparations.
So I feel like there has to be intention.
Yes.
To clean the teeth.
I saw you coming a mile away on this one.
When you made your pedantic snarky point about Kimball being a dentifrice.
You are forcing me to level up my pedantry.
And I will point out that you do not know what the intent was of the people that made Sundays.
And it may have been that they were intending to create a dentifrice.
It turned out it was a marvelous dog food.
And so they switched categories.
We don't know that that didn't happen.
I mean, I don't want to help you out here, but... I can imagine!
But I do feel like, actually, as much as many dry dog and cat preparations are considered not optimal, because not so much for dogs in general, but because cats, being desert creatures, aren't inclined to drink.
They tend to get They're liquid from their food, so if you're giving them food from which the liquid has already been extracted, you're likely to end up having like kidney problems and urethra problems with these cats down the road.
So one of the advantages, however, of dry dog and cat food is that it does in fact help remove plaque from the teeth.
Wow, you are helping me here.
Yeah, no, this is awesome.
I believe we've made excellent progress on a puzzle that most people didn't even realize was an important one.
I still don't know that it exists at all, yes.
But also, with three of those definitions at least, I believe, knobs didn't fall into them because it said a, what was it, a liquid... No, powder, paste, or liquid.
It's a powder, it's a compressed powder.
It's a... It's a compressed powder.
Yeah.
Arguably.
OK, so if we team up on him and his pedantry, I think we got this.
For one thing, he doesn't even have a camera.
For one thing, his pedantry is derivative of ours, and therefore we are way ahead.
And so much younger.
We have so many more years on hand.
We have the proper wisdom to deploy pedantry.
He will not see coming.
No, he won't.
No.
All right.
Happy 200th episode, man.
Yeah, it's cool now that we're the only ones here because everybody has switched to some other podcast.
Yes, guaranteeing that we will not make it to 210.
Yes, it was a good run.
Yeah, wow, my scarf is falling off.
Okay, let's talk about sex equity for infant care, shall we?
You know I'm looking forward to this.
Yeah, so this comes up because a couple of episodes ago I talked a bit about having been at the Genspect Conference and I gave a talk there about sex differences.
And one of the pieces, the sets of data that I talked about is one of my absolute favorites, and I'm not going to go into it now.
I'll probably publicly discuss it at some point, but work from 1973 by anthropologists Murdoch and Provost, work that you are familiar with me having taught with a lot when we were at Evergreen, in which they did not do original anthropological research of their own but went into the anthropological literature and said, okay, what are, I think it's like 50 jobs that people do in pre-industrial cultures?
What are 50 jobs that people do And they looked at, I think it was 185 cultures, and they said for each of them, for each of those 50 jobs, and of course there's a lot of jobs that are only done in a subset of cultures, are those jobs entirely done by men, mostly done by men, it's kind of a wash, mostly done by women, or entirely done by women?
And so they have, you know, these five columns, 50 tasks, and the reason that I love this research so much is that it reveals just a number of things about, and you know, you end up using the word gendered here even though I generally try to avoid the word gendered, but Once upon a time, it was just a word with a meaning.
In fact, in the early 70s, it was just perfectly fine to use it.
Totally.
So, some work across cultures is highly, highly gendered.
The hunting of marine mammals, when it is done, in those cultures where it is done, it's done by men.
The smelting of oars, The chopping down of giant trees.
This is work that is, when it is done in a culture, pre-industrial cultures, done entirely by men.
There are fewer items, there are fewer tasks in this list by Murdoch and Provost.
that are entirely done by women, but that is, I think, because they have excluded from their list of jobs those things which are anatomically or physiologically mandated to be done by women.
And there really isn't that much that is considered a job that is anatomically or physiologically mandated to be done by women.
So, I mean, by men.
So, you know, gestation and lactation are off the table.
And while there are things like the preparing of vegetal foods, which in most cultures where it is done, which is almost every culture, It is mostly done by women, again, pre-industrial cultures.
It is not as much a highly sexed or highly gendered task as those things like hunting of marine mammals and chopping down of giant trees and smelting of ores is a highly sexed task in the other direction.
All of that is sort of as you would expect.
But where it gets interesting, and this is maybe I'll come back and actually do a full presentation on this, but where it gets really interesting to me is how many Tasks are in an intermediate state.
Meaning... Meaning... Nothing to sneeze at.
Nothing to sneeze at.
Either that there is just no gender split at all – my goodness, the dog has gotten something into her nose – tasks that are just done by whomever feels like doing them across many cultures.
More interesting yet, though, is that there are a number of tasks – things like weaving – that is very often highly gendered, In those cultures where it is done, but which sex does it is highly variable.
And so this to me demonstrates simultaneously the utility of the division of labor and the fact that many of the things that we divide labor around aren't because men or women are inherently better at them, but because men because male versus female is The most obvious, basic way to split humanity in two and say, okay, you know what, we got to get some work done here.
You do this, you do that.
Okay, I need, I got two jobs.
Okay, dudes, you're going to go over and do the weaving and women, you're going to do the, you know, harvesting of crops.
I'm just making those things up for a particular culture, right?
So this was sort of the last thing that I talked about in my talk, and I got a lot of feedback, including from some people who weren't there in the room but who watched the live stream of the talk, including from the lead author on a new paper, And who said to me in her email to me, and who sent the paper, said, I cannot believe that this work is necessary.
But I and several co-authors have written an article called Breastfeeding and Infant Care as Sexed Care Work, Reconsideration of the Three R's to Enable Women's Rights, Economic Empowerment, Nutrition, and Health.
And that was published in the Frontiers in Public Health this year.
Which apparently this paper was felt necessary because there was a push for sex equity for infant care.
So let me just read a little bit from the abstract from this paper and then the paragraph that really reveals what the crazy is.
And again, this paper is pushing back against the crazy, but it's the kind of paper that, you know, shouldn't have been necessary at all.
Let me see if I keep on dropping out of full screen here.
Okay, here we are.
So again, published in last month of this year, October 2023, and I'll just read the abstract to start.
Women's lifelong health and nutrition status is intricately related to their reproductive history, including the number and spacing of their pregnancies and births, and for how long and how intensively they breastfeed their children.
In turn, women's reproductive biology is closely linked to their social roles and situation, including regarding economic disadvantage and disproportionate unpaid work.
Recognizing, as well as reducing and redistributing women's care and domestic work, known as the 3Rs, is an established framework for addressing women's inequitable unpaid care work.
So this is, I went and looked, the UN has been talking about the 3Rs forever, like the 3Rs is definitely like a big thing in public health and division of labor research.
However, the abstract continues.
The care work for breastfeeding presents a dilemma, and is even a divisive issue, for advocates of women's empowerment, because reducing breastfeeding and replacing it with commercial milk formula risks harming women's and children's health.
It is therefore necessary for the interaction between women's reproductive biology and infant care role to be recognized in order to support women's human rights and enable governments to implement economic employment and other policies to empower women.
In this paper, I'm not going to read all of this, but in this paper we argue that breastfeeding, like childbirth, is reproductive work that should not be reduced and cannot sensibly be directly redistributed to fathers or others.
That should be so obvious, right?
And again, the lead author on this paper sent this to me saying, I know this should be so obvious.
I cannot believe we're here.
But we actually have to push back against this attempt to, you know, one of the three R's to redistribute the work of feeding infants.
Two fathers.
And so let me scroll down here to a paragraph that reveals some of some of the crazy that they're pushing back against.
It's on page six, I think.
Here we go.
The impact on breastfeeding of societal expectations that mothers and fathers should share infant care equally, such as in Scandinavia, should also be considered.
In Sweden, parenting handbooks position breastfeeding as a gender equality problem, and describe breastfeeding as alienating fathers because it distances them from newborns and makes them unimportant.
Research from Norway found that some fathers felt jealous of the mother-child relationship and sad and excluded when women breastfeed.
They describe breastfeeding as positive for children, but negative for them.
While one way of coping with this exclusion was doing more non-infant care work, another way was withdrawing from their partner and child.
It is noted that breastfeeding as an embodied and sexed practice presents a barrier to societal ambitions for sex equity and child caregiving.
Given the importance of partner support for breastfeeding exclusivity and continuance, promotion of the idea that fathers should be equally involved in infant care may undermine breastfeeding.
Communicating with fathers about the special nature of the sexed care work of breastfeeding and their important role in supporting breastfeeding and undertaking other care work may assist them in adjusting to fatherhood and increase their other care work and breastfeeding rates.
Or they could just grow up.
I have, I mean, that's incredible, right?
That some number of men, apparently in Scandinavia, are feeling excluded and wounded by observing that their partners and the mothers of their children are feeding their children when they are tiny babies.
It is a psychological disorder.
It's a psychological disorder.
It's a psychological disorder.
Maybe it's minor, I don't know, but the point is the idea that anything other than that's kind of on you, cut it out, is required here is stunning.
It is utterly stunning.
So the first reference in this paragraph, which is after the sentence, In Sweden, parenting handbooks position breastfeeding as a gender equality problem and describe breastfeeding as alienating fathers because it distances them from newborns and makes them unimportant.
The reference is this one, published in the Nordic Journal of Feminist and Gender Research.
Sounds like a heavy-hitting journal.
Published in 2021, an article called Bodies Get in the Way, Breastfeeding and Gender Equality in Swedish Handbooks for New Parents.
So let me scroll to just the one bit of this that I wanted to share with you all, if I can find it.
Where is it?
Oh, I was just going to read the abstract.
There it was.
Excuse me.
This article offers an analysis of three popular Swedish handbooks for new parents, written by authors in the Media class.
It's self-questionable.
In these texts, breastfeeding as a gendered, embodied practice collides with the Swedish ideal of gender-equal parenting.
Evolution has collided with the Swedish ideal of gender-equal parenting.
So I would say when an unstoppable force runs into something stupid and soft-headed, the stupid and soft-headed thing should get the fuck out of the way.
Is that not moral?
I would think, especially when the stupid soft-headed thing is written by authors in the media class.
The media class.
The media class.
The analysis explores the various ways that gendered bodies, gendered parental rights, and gender equality figure in the handbooks, drawing upon feminist studies of bodies and embodiment, and of breastfeeding in particular.
It contextualizes the primary texts in terms of the Swedish ideal of gender equal parenting, and in terms of current breastfeeding practices in Sweden.
In the handbooks, the breastfeeding imperative is resisted because it is irrelevant and constraining for women, but also because it alienates fathers from infant feeding.
Wonderful.
This does seem like progress.
for reasons grounded in differences between gendered parental bodies and particular understandings of gender equal parenting, we contend that the book's suggestion that breastfeeding be rejected in the name of parental gender equality, while it may cause women to feel physically free, also supports father's rights discourses and in fact serves to once more marginalize women's bodies, also supports father's rights discourses and in fact serves to once more marginalize Wonderful.
Yeah.
This does seem like progress.
Yeah.
So, mostly I wanted to share this so that we could be aware that this is happening.
That there are smart people, good people, in the medical field, who are finding it necessary to push, to publish, to do research and publish work that says the obvious.
That breastfeeding is sexed work, and it is good for the baby, and if you're a dad and feel excluded, you gotta grow up and get over yourself.
The idea that, you know, feminist discourses are going to be supported by the fact that some fathers feel bad at observing that the mothers of their children have a tighter anatomical and physiological bond with their babies when they are very young is adding insult to injury, really.
It's adding, you know, it's adding mental illness to an argument that already makes no sense.
So how does that make anything stronger?
Well, it does a couple of things.
One, you know, we talk in our book and elsewhere about the difference between, we just draw a distinction between the sacred and the shamanistic.
The idea that the relationship between parents and offspring should not be placed in the category of sacred, meaning do not mess with this.
That you need a reason of a very high quality.
The fundamental importance of this relationship is so great and your inability to know what all the various, you know, just as breast milk, yes it is food, but that's not the only thing it is.
It's also carrying messages and There's a bonding ritual so saying well, hey I've got this bottle of food and it's technically got all the stuff in it that it needs doesn't begin to get at all of the things you're disrupting that you haven't even spotted yet, right?
So there's an inversion of guess what the purpose of life is is to produce a next generation that is as strong as possible because you don't know what they're going to face.
So upending that because some males are feeling left out, like, no, that's not a good reason to experiment.
It's just not.
I don't care if you're feeling left out.
This isn't about you.
This isn't about you.
That's really the point.
That is precisely the point, and I feel like that is something that needs to be said to lots of people a lot of the time now, including sometimes women who are demanding equity in certain workplace situations.
You shouldn't be shooting for the same sex ratio as is represented in the population.
And unless you can find obvious ways that you are being excluded for no good reason, Then shut up already.
This isn't about you.
There is work to be done.
There is work to be done, and maybe the work is growing a baby, and maybe the work is smelting of ores.
But across all of these spaces, there is work to be done.
And the whining of someone who says, yeah, but I have a thing that I want to bring up here, maybe and maybe not.
Maybe it's not about you.
Yeah, it's not about you is the, you know, the thing that needs to be said to the the audience that is demanding this, but something needs to be said.
And, you know, There is no academic term for that sophistry.
We don't have to answer it, right?
You have made an argument that may be technically hard to respond to, but it is so obvious that it does not demand a response that we're not going to offer you one.
At the point we agree to sign up for the argument, we lose.
Right?
And this is now an across-the-board problem, and I would point out, it's ridiculous in this context.
It's just obviously ridiculous.
This is why I wanted to bring it, because it's so obvious here.
It's so obvious.
It's very often not as obvious.
Why won't you talk to me?
How could you not talk to me about this?
Because you're making no sense, and you're wasting my time, and I would be wasting everyone else's time if I chose to have this conversation with you.
But I want to point out that it's a totally different topic, completely different, but the same meta issue is underlying it.
When we talk about the issues surrounding the testing of pharmaceuticals and their health impacts, whether they are efficacious and safe.
And I was recently in a meeting of the Florida Public Health Integrity Committee, which is composed of people, all of whom I like and respect.
Every single person on it is good, brings something unique to the table.
They're all high quality minds and they were put on it because they're forthright and courageous and they say important things.
But we find ourselves in these discussions where these people are having their time absolutely wasted pointing out how the system could be improved in order to make sure that the drugs that emerge into the market are actually safe.
Right?
Now, I said to them the last time, I said, look, everybody here is either an academic or a recovering academic, and so you're all subscribed to this obligation to a certain level of rigor and precision and all of that, but obviously this group could spend one afternoon And describe a system that would work better than the one we have.
It's not that it's not obvious what it needs, what needs to be done to fix it.
It's that there's, this is the solution to someone else's problem.
We're dealing with corruption, right?
So, you know, it doesn't make sense to respond as if the system doesn't understand that if you have a drug company test its own drugs, that what comes out of that test is not actually a reliable indicator of safety.
Right?
Yeah, it's not a maybe they just haven't seen the problem.
Oh, they haven't realized that there's a feedback loop and that that opens the door to corruption.
No, corruption is the point.
And we're responding like it's an analytical problem, like they haven't noticed the issue.
But like, no, that's not the nature of the problem.
And this isn't either.
This is a full frontal attack on reason.
Yeah.
And it is an inversion.
It is feeding A, you know, a narcissism that, you know, would have some degree of breadth in our society, but it is being amplified by people saying, oh no, the birth process, you know, this is about you, right?
And if you're feeling left out, then by all means, this is society's obligation to correct this imbalance in the raising of children.
And it's insane because it's going to result, and it already is, of course, resulting in damaged kids.
Well, some of what you say there I think is super critical with regard to when these people, for lack of a better group identity, when these people make claims that are so patently batshit crazy, but they do so in the language of analytics.
They do so in the language of scholarly discourse and care and it's well cited and referenced and they have the right, you know, organization of the papers and such.
Almost all of us who are also, as you say, academics or recovering academics, are just familiar with what it is, even if plenty of people have not been in the sphere themselves, but are very well familiar with what it is to be scholarly in all of us.
Feel an immediate obligation to respond in kind, because we were told, and if everyone is playing by actual legitimate rules, this is true, that if an argument comes at you that uses a framework that is carefully referenced and is ordered in a way that you can, you're like, wait, what was the point?
Oh, I know where to find it.
And so it's, you know, it's organized in such a way that it is easy to figure out where the flaws are, Which should be the way that things are organized.
Not to obscure the flaws, but to reveal the flaws, because that is what everyone who makes arguments should be interested in having other people do.
Find the flaws in what I'm saying.
I'd like to be saying something more true than what I'm saying right now.
So if what I'm saying is in good faith, and I present it to you in a particular way, then it is a matter of both respect and clarity that you respond in the same kind of format.
with the same kind of clarity.
If I say, but I've got these references here that claim this, why are you ignoring them?
You might say, I don't think those are good references.
Here's why.
You can't just say, no, actually, here's a unicorn.
But the difference is that the language, the shell, the skin suit of academia Yeah, so this is exactly in keeping with what I'm saying.
I just want to flip it on its head.
actually doing analysis and the rest of us go, "Oh God, that looks like analysis.
I got to respond analytically." And no, we shouldn't have to.
Yeah.
So this is exactly in keeping with what I'm saying.
I just want to flip it on its head.
The point is when you find yourself responding to transparent sophistry, that is an indication that what you are dealing with is sabotage.
And this is not inobvious at this point.
In fact, you know, James Lindsay has explored at great length, you know, the intellectual background of the sabotage movement, right?
It was designed as sabotage, and it is now being deployed as sabotage.
And whether or not the people writing these nonsense papers know that that's what they're involved in, It is.
So at his talk at the same conference, and this is something I quote him as saying a couple weeks ago in Natural Selections, the phrase that he has begun to use is, the thing is not the thing.
The thing is not the thing.
You're going to think you're fighting about race, about gender, about COVID, about Ukraine, about Israel.
The thing is not the thing.
The thing is the revolution, is how he finishes that.
Right, which is exactly correct.
And what I would say is, You're dividing at good faith is exactly correct.
The system, the academic system, assumes good faith.
It assumes that nobody is trying to obscure the truth, that we disagree, but what we disagree over is what is likely to be true or what direction the truth lies in, but that we are all supposed to be agreed on the idea that it would be a good thing to figure out what is true.
That's not true.
We now have a university filled with people who are not interested in finding the truth.
A university system filled with people.
Absolutely.
It is absolutely filled with people who are trying to hide the truth.
And there is no mechanism.
I mean, literally, we have dozens of academic terms for ways that we describe something.
When you write a paper, and you say, you claim a point, and you give a reference, right?
Here's how I know that species numbers go up as latitude goes down, okay?
So then I will give a reference for that.
And then I will say, but see, and I will point to the person whose work suggests the opposite.
I'm not compelled by this, but I want you to look at the evidence that goes in the other direction, and I'm going to show you where it is, right?
That's me acting in good faith, showing you my argument and telling you the best evidence which does not compel me is right here.
We have that.
We have personal communication.
Ah, I know somebody who works in a laboratory, they're well-published, but they haven't published this thing yet, but they told me this, so I'm gonna use it as evidence, and I'm gonna tell you, it's not in a paper you can read yourself, but this is the person I got it from.
We have a dozen of these things.
We don't have a language for, uh, cut that shit out, right?
Cut that shit out, you're not— No, I don't have to cite you, that was garbage.
I'm not answering that question because you know as well as I do that you're talking nonsense, right?
We don't have that.
There's no immune system in this because it's not designed to have saboteurs on the inside.
It can't function this way.
And you're going to get academics like Talking themselves blue in the face about, you know, about the fact that maybe we ought to think of the production of babies as about reproduction and therefore the baby might be central, not the father's, you know, resentment, right?
So, At some level, we have to start responding to the bullshit with whatever the academic version of, no, I'm not obligated to answer that because, you know, frankly, you're embarrassing yourself or even offering it as an argument.
Yeah.
And I don't know how we get there.
Well, again, anytime we end up talking about male-female space, we see in the so-called scholarly literature an implicit argument of symmetry, of, well, but men do this, therefore women do this.
Well, but women do this at this rate, therefore men should be doing this at this rate.
And the fact is that we can, we should be, we must be, we are equal under the law without being the same.
And this, you know, this has been an error that was kind of low-level in some academic circles for a while, the idea that in order to escape from some of the restrictions of womanhood that women needed to basically act just like men.
Most smart people have long since abandoned that as an answer to the problems, but now we seem to be moving towards, well, but if men feel bad, then maybe the baby shouldn't be fed from the mother's breast.
And also, you know, go a step more insane and, well, if men feel like they're women and they want to feed babies, then they should take a lot of drugs so that they can produce some kind of sludge from their chests and feed babies with it.
Like, also no.
Also really, really no.
Yeah, everything down there.
The point is, that's a dead branch.
The fact that you're even hunting down it is on you, right?
You want me to create a landscape that makes sense where you have centered yourself?
It's an entirely narcissistic landscape.
No, actually, you don't get us to use our intelligence and analytical skills to reify your narcissistic landscape.
And in fact, once upon a time, we understood the asymmetry of this, right?
Time's arrow.
Time goes in one direction, right?
The point of parents is to produce children.
The point of children is not to reinforce parents, right?
You're supposed to spend to embolden, to make robust, to empower your child.
That's the natural order of things.
And then they will do it for their child, and they will do it for their child, et cetera.
That's how things work.
And the idea that anybody is playing with reversing this is like, well, how dumb would you have to be?
Or, you know, what are you going to play with next?
Like, you know, hitting your thumb with a hammer?
You know, that would be about equally as dumb, right?
Maybe it's even less dumb.
Maybe you should start with that one and, you know, see how that works out.
I think some of them probably should.
Save it for the rest of us.
What they're going to do, instead of experimenting with it, is they're going to demand that we do it.
And then a lot of academics who can't figure out how to say, that's dumb, are going to try it.
I guess I gotta.
Yeah, I guess I gotta, because it's in this paper, in this journal, with this impact factor, whatever, right?
It's a whole new meeting on impact factor!
Exactly!
It's like the next generation of fear factor, and we'll see who the next Joe Rogan is going to be.
There's a part of me that, you know, I can't say I've studied it, that I know anything about it other than it has struck me as insightful and important and it keeps recurring in my thinking.
Yin Yang, right?
Yin Yang, to the extent that your culture contains this shape, And that you come to know it as like bedrock foundational unit of your mental architecture is important, because what it describes is complementarity.
And although even the diagram, which is essentially, it is perfectly symmetrical in a way that is actually mathematically slightly complex to describe, right?
Yes.
Yes.
I think so.
It is perfectly symmetric.
Black pixel, white pixel, right?
Well, so you're saying it's bilaterally symmetrical?
That's the question.
Yeah, it's not really symmetrical.
It's neither, and the point is, but you can tell that mathematically speaking it is perfectly symmetrical in some way that you and I struggle for, because in our tradition it doesn't exist.
We have to borrow it from the East.
That kind of symmetry doesn't exist?
Or, well, it doesn't exist.
It does not exist as a fundamental piece of our education.
Right?
The complementary dualism.
Right.
And so the point is, I even find the fact that the name is not Ying Yang, it's Yin Yang.
Not perfectly symmetrical.
Right?
So anyway, the point is if you have something in your culture, deep in your culture, that speaks of complementarity at a level that there is a symbol when you want to speak of complementarity, you have one.
It's as ingrained as any character in your alphabet, right?
Everyone has access to it.
And so the ability to say, you know, that male and female are perfectly complementary.
Oh, do you really mean perfectly?
Yeah, I mean fucking perfectly, right?
They would have to be.
That's how we got here.
That's how, you know, that's how we end up, I guess, a billion years down the road from the invention of these two things is... Maybe two.
Yeah, maybe two, but whatever, at least a billion.
So that perfect complementarity You think you know better because you have a PhD in some field that barely exists?
I mean, no, you don't.
You don't.
This is just simply what we are.
And the fact that you think you've got something clever to say, um, no, actually what you're saying is insane.
And the idea that your particular brand of insanity is going to manifest as an experiment on children, on the normal process of raising children, who the fuck do you think you are?
Well, why are you getting to experiment with that?
No, this is about children.
It is not about academics, and it's not about fathers who are butthurt over not being able to breastfeed.
It's about children, right?
You mess with that last.
That is as sacred as it gets, right?
That's the whole point for every species, is the production of viable offspring.
And so, you know, the people who are, like, eager to, you know, get in between parents and offspring in some way, they're just, these are madmen.
That's all there.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I got another example.
Oh, awesome.
This one does not involve children.
Okay.
At least explicitly.
We're making progress.
I don't know.
We are regressing less quickly.
Something.
I don't even know.
Okay.
Here we go.
You can show my screen here, Zach.
Nature News publishes an article, so Nature News tends to pick up from other primary research and say, oh, this seemed really big this week.
Nature News publishes this week, or recently, Toxic Workplaces, Her Biggest Reason Women Leave Academia.
Women feel driven out by problems with workplace culture more often than by lack of work-life balance.
Toxic workplaces.
Wow.
And I guess, I haven't read the paper and I frankly can't see it from here, but I'm guessing I know who's making it toxic.
We don't actually go there.
This is just a one-page thing, but I went to the research it's based on, and I read it, and I also read their supplemental materials, which is quite a number of pages of how they discovered what they discovered.
So this is the original research that that Nature News article is based on.
called Gender and Retention Patterns Among U.S.
Faculty, and I'm just going to read a few highlighted sections, and then we'll talk about it.
From the abstract, they did a large-scale survey of the same faculty of The large-scale survey indicates that the reasons faculty leave are gendered, even for institutions, fields, and career ages in which retention rates are not.
So just to tease that apart... Yeah, yeah.
Please do, because I can't follow.
What that means, and it's not the main point of this article at all, of this piece of research at all, is, oh, actually, there's a lot of cases where men and women leave academia at equal rates.
But still, the reasons they leave are different based on sex.
So let's focus on that.
Now, I can see an argument for being interested in like, oh, men and women are leaving at the same rate, but they're leaving for different reasons.
Maybe there's something there.
But it's written so cryptically and so covert, it's so hidden.
It's like, but we need to be concerned about that.
Why Why do we need to be concerned about that?
Wait, I got it.
No, I see.
I'm going to write the next paper on this one because I know where it goes.
Okay?
Here's the thing.
Let's say that males and females are leaving at equal rates for the same reasons.
But females are leaving one octave higher.
That is to say, when they describe the reasons that they are leaving, it is one octave higher than when men describe that same reason, and that is inequitable.
And because it's one octave higher, they are slightly more likely to be described as hysterical when they do so.
And it is that description that I don't even know what.
Right.
No, but it is a highly gendered pattern of leaving that women are one octave higher when they say the same stuff upon leaving, like I'm leaving.
Yeah.
Okay, so let's just share a bit more from this from this paper.
Let's just scroll through.
For each faculty record, we assigned a gender label algorithm algorithmically using cultural associations between names and the binary categories of man and woman, resulting in binary gender annotations for 98.1% of faculty in our data set.
We note that the assumption of a gender binary is a critical limitation of algorithmic gender labeling.
The entire Yeah.
Do you know that clownfish can change sex?
What?
You know the banana slugs are both sexes at once?
What?
Proving the sex binary because both at once.
I'm not, that's you.
All right.
Using this employment census, we show that across the U.S., across U.S.
tenure-track academia as a whole, women are more likely to leave their faculty jobs and less likely to be promoted than men at every career age and stage.
But then, notably, we find that the gender gap in retention closes for assistant professors after adjusting for academic field.
However, even for ranks, domains, and institutions where retention rates are similar for women and men, our survey results show that the reasons that faculty leave remain gendered, implying that faculty attrition can be gendered even if the overall rate of attrition is not.
In particular, women are more likely to feel pushed out of their jobs and less likely to feel pulled towards better jobs than men.
Although faculty associate these pushes with work-life balance issues early in their career, mid- and late-career faculty highlight issues related to workplace climate, particularly aspects of climate that are not easily measurable, such as a lack of belonging versus overt gender discrimination.
So they describe the reason that women disproportionately leave, which is feeling unwelcome, not pulled towards a higher level.
Oh, we'll talk about exactly what climate is here.
But do they describe the corresponding disproportionate, given that men and women are leaving equally, And that they've described the reason that women are leaving.
Have they described the reason that men are leaving?
Yeah, so they've got three categories, and this is in the supplemental materials.
They've got three categories where they're broad groups, and then they've got little survey questions that spell out... It's an archaic term that you should not be using.
Which one?
Three?
Broad groups.
Yeah, in the broad group, they leave for different reasons.
Yeah, so in the femme groups, they...
The broad groups are, for professional reasons, meaning like salary wasn't good enough, I wasn't getting published, I felt pushed to publish, the work wasn't rewarding to me.
I mean, actually, I'll show exactly.
That's what it should mean, those things.
Work-life balance, you know, I wanted to spend more time with my family.
I wanted to spend more time, like, actually being able to have a family, that sort of thing, right?
And then this third thing, which women are far more likely, or are at least statistically more likely to say was their reason for leaving than men, which is workplace climate, which again, remember Nature News, says toxic work environment.
Right?
That's the description.
Okay, so men are more likely to leave for professional reasons.
They're looking for more money, a more prestigious institution, a better, you know, probably they don't say this, but I would guess, given that academic jobs tend to be about research, teaching and governance and service, they probably want, you know, more research, less teaching and service duties, you know, things like that.
Is there a category in there for leaving because you identify as too smart for this shit?
Yeah, no.
They do say in the survey they included, they went and they gave the survey to a bunch of people who had left academia, but not people who had left for retirement.
They had to leave for something else.
I would think that in that group would include people who left because they were too smart for this shit.
Yeah, probably.
But that wasn't part of the survey.
And then there's also probably, it's not going to be a huge category, but people who left because they had to go pee and then just decided not to come back.
Yeah, they're like, you know what, I'll just put the key card under the door.
I'm not going back.
Okay, a few more quotes from this article.
We find that a portion of the overall gender gap in academia can be attributed to such cross-field differences, e.g., and there's a whole lot before this I didn't go into, but because women are more likely than men to be faculty in high turnover fields.
Now, A, that's important if women end up in fields where turnover is higher and therefore you don't know which came first, but you also, like, I don't know if the fields have high turnover because women are in them or the fields have women in them because they're high, like,
It's impossible to know, and they're assuming some cause and effect relationship that we can't actually imagine.
We can't actually know, rather, from what they've done.
And they find, I didn't highlight it here, but at the bottom of the left column on screen here, in addition, we find these disparities are larger in non-STEM domains than in STEM domains.
That is to say, All these fields that include all the made-up crap that didn't exist 40 years ago are the fields where women are likely to be overrepresented compared to men, compared to a one-to-one ratio.
And those fields have a higher turnover, in part, I imagine, because they're complete bullshit and smart people just can't put up with it for very long, right?
Exactly.
Now they might be able to retain more people if instead of a high turnover field they started an apple turnover field because those are delicious.
Yeah, totally delicious.
I'm having a hard time taking anything academic seriously anymore.
Oh, as you should.
From this perspective, gendered attrition is driven by gendered differences in the degree to which faculty feel pushed to leave their current position or pulled to a more attractive opportunity.
So I do see that there is a difference there.
Like, I felt like I was being pushed out versus, oh, that other thing that I saw on the horizon looked really interesting.
But just the stuff that I highlighted here is to point – I began to think, like, But is any of this based on anything that is not just feelings?
So, professional reasons.
I got a higher salary.
I got more sabbatical.
It was a more prestigious institution.
From my new place, I was going to be able to publish more and thus pursue the questions I'm fundamentally interested in.
Those are not feelings-based reasons.
Feeling pushed.
Okay, by whom?
Like, did they?
Or did you just feel that they were?
Right?
So, this is what I began to sense as I read through this and highlighted the things I did.
A few more here.
We asked faculty who left academia or retired which specific factors contributed to that decision, grouped into three broad categories.
Professional reasons, work-life balance, and workplace climate.
Workplace climate includes stressors related to the way an academic feels around their colleagues, including dysfunctional departmental culture or leadership, harassment, or feeling like they do not belong or fit in their department.
So the word feel actually just shows up twice there, right?
And then we note, however, that in the early career, women in both STEM and non-STEM domains cited work-life balance as often as climate, a pattern consistent with past literature on early career pre-tenure faculty.
Yes, because, again, anatomy and physiology and, you know, women are going to feel that pressure more when it may be time for them to start a family if that's something they want to do.
Yeah, right.
That's really freaking obvious.
And asymmetry built in here.
But I would also, I mean, this is obviously implied in you raising the whole issue, but given that there was no disparity in the leaving, the whole idea that this research is somehow useful...
Well, so there are disparities.
Right.
There are some disparities.
But overall, did they find a disparity?
Yeah, yeah.
Overall, there's some disparity in leaving, yes.
In which direction?
Especially later in the career.
Women leave more than men.
It didn't look super strong to me, and given that they admitted that actually early in the career less, STEM less, That there are a lot of ways to sort of chop up the data and find no disparity.
I'm not sure that there's a problem that needs to be addressed here.
But yes, they did find, if we trust what they found, they did found that women are somewhat more likely to leave academic jobs than men are.
If you include everything.
And does that leave a residual, are faculties biased in favor of men as a result of this?
Are you asking, across the board, are faculty in the U.S.
still biased towards men?
Yeah.
How strongly?
I don't know.
I don't know.
We obviously have some fields that are strongly biased towards women, and some fields that are still fairly strongly biased towards men.
And the move, the trend is, we know that the trend is, in college we've got like a 60-40 female-to-male split.
Among college students, and in graduate schools, I believe if you take it across the board, you've got a skew towards women, and that in many fields you've got a high skew towards women.
So, you know, that does seem to be changing, but in part it's changing because it's being Forced to change as opposed to, let's choose the right people and see what happens.
And this, in fact, before I get to the final thing I want to say about this from their supplemental materials, my natural selections this week, I wrote about what I've dubbed the appeal to the noble savage or appeal to noble savages fallacy, because there's an astronomer, an assistant professor of physics and astronomy at Amherst, Oh god.
who is spearheading a move to rename some galaxies and a bunch of other stuff that was named for Magellan.
Because he was a slaver and a colonizer and a murderer.
And anyway, she writes, and I shouldn't be snarky, I could just read her words, but go check out my natural selections piece on this.
You know, he wasn't an astronomer, and the indigenous peoples saw these galaxies first, And, you know, what are we doing naming things after him?
Well, I would actually point out that galaxies being what they are, the people in those galaxies are probably none too pleased to have Magellan associated with them.
Yeah, and no one asked them, did they?
No, I'm sure they weren't asked.
I am pleased with this piece.
I do think the appeal to the noble savage's fallacy is the right thing to be invoking when people start talking about renaming things because we're applying the standards of today, which we can't even agree on anyway, but the standards of today to people from hundreds of years ago.
But it also assumes that the people who came before were pure and, you know, not human, right?
They weren't murderers.
No, certainly not.
They weren't colonizers.
Have you seen the Incas?
You know, they weren't slavers.
Yeah, a lot of them were.
Unfortunately, you can see by looking at this person's work that one of the things that she proudly describes herself as, and I'm not going to give identifying features even though you can find it, is the first person of such and such descent to be in this kind of a field in the U.S.
You know, how many descriptors do we have to tack on to be like, I'm first!
To me, it's all about me, right?
Isn't it all about the astronomy?
Aren't you an astronomer?
You're supposed to be caring about the stuff that you supposedly were hired to do?
But instead, we have Amherst College, who hired this person, now stuck in this landscape of, well, Actually, you presumably hired this person in part because they were claiming all that stuff about their sex and their race and their lineage, making them really super prepared to do astronomy.
And now what are they doing?
They're trying to burn down astronomy instead of doing astronomy.
So it is evidence of sabotage, and I just want to point to one mode of sabotage that I think is here, and it was also in the story we talked about last time about the renaming of birds, and the utterly maddening... Well, the Magellanic Penguins are presumably on the chopping block as well.
Well, sure.
If you make the argument that anybody who is compromised by perhaps a moral defect cannot be associated with a creature or a structure in the universe or a township or whatever it is that you're going to rename, you make it impossible You make it increasingly difficult and eventually you make it impossible to go back and reconstruct history, right?
Right.
Just the same way, you know, Rolling Stone and the New York Times both published that Chelsea Manning had given documents to Julian Assange.
Not true.
Bradley Manning did and then Bradley Manning went through a gender transition in captivity while he was incarcerated.
So, the first time I read about Chelsea Manning, and I did not know that there had been a gender transition, I was like, That's odd.
Is this person a sibling of Bradley Manning?
And there was no discussion, because it was like, oh, actually, here's the truth about transition.
When a person transitions, they are simply becoming their true self, which means that they were always Chelsea Manning, which is why the New York Times and Rolling Stone reported that this person was Chelsea Manning, because it was really Chelsea Manning, even though at the time she went by Bradley.
But my point is, the ability to even go back and reconstruct history is disrupted by the renaming to, I don't even know what the justification is, to prevent people from feeling hurt or something.
Oh, it detracts from the beauty of the galaxies.
Well, I can see that, actually.
I take back my, well, maybe I don't take it back.
But the point is, if the purpose of study is for us to become clearer-headed, to understand things better than we did before, or to create models that are more predictive and allow us to navigate hurting ourselves less and helping ourselves more, whatever the purpose of understanding stuff actually is, then those who are out to actually disrupt our ability to go back and reconstruct the pattern through which knowledge was acquired, This is obviously an attack on reason.
Yep.
And so how many different kinds of sabotage do you need before you just simply say, all right, maybe we should figure out who the saboteurs are and get them out of here so we can go back to work?
Yeah.
To the earlier point you made, we had a solution to this name thing, because many women, when they get married, change their names.
And so we used the French née in, you know, parentheses after the thing.
You know, Jane Smith, née Jones.
So that these people can be tracked as the same individual, even though at some point they changed their name.
And, uh, we don't talk about the, um, the maiden name of women being their dead name.
Right.
It was just they had a different name then.
And, you know, to some degree, getting married does change, you know, if you're now married, you were single, like it does change your identity to some degree.
So, um, you know, and it's actually a thing that can happen, um, as opposed to changing your sex, which people pretend can happen.
So, you know, it feels to me like it should be treated in much the same way with regard to describing.
And yeah, and then you have these people like, um, God, what's his name?
Like Veronica Ivy, this bicyclist dude, um, who's gone through like three different names now, three different female names, um, each more, you know, the names are more egregious than the last, but this is just like, you know, an aggressive, oppressive brute, um, who's, who's, God, Some kind of academic in some field.
And, you know, it can be hard to track.
Like if you're not like, wait, is that the same?
That looks like this.
Oh, that is the same person.
Okay.
So why are you changing your name so much?
Because the first time it was because you decided you aren't the sex that you are.
But the last three times it was something else.
Yeah.
At some level, we have a right to just simply not be responding, to not be changing the names of creatures so that we know who we're talking about.
I mean, honestly, like, the creatures have names for a reason.
And, you know, Feynman made this point very clearly, right?
The names are arbitrary.
That's not where the nature of the creature is.
But they're there for a reason.
Yep.
Yep.
Yeah.
OK, so just get back to this paper, which, again, We're talking about it in part because Nature News published a piece this week headlined, Toxic Workplaces Are Biggest Reason Women Leave Academia.
So far I have shared with you various little bits and pieces from the paper that that headline is based on, and what I find is there's not that much difference in the leaving by sex, but even when there's no difference in terms of whether men or women are leaving more, there's some differences in what they report about why they left.
And men are more likely to say left for professional reasons, and women are more likely to say early in career, more likely to say work-life balance, which is something we've all heard a lot about and makes some sense.
But late in career, it's this third thing that no one was talking about until now, which is work environment, work climate.
So, I went to the supplemental material, which, hold on, did I get to the end?
Yeah.
I went to the supplemental material here.
There's survey items that they actually asked people.
Actually, I'll scroll so you can't see.
So, under professional stress, you know, is that you maybe had to produce too many papers, get funding, your institution wanted you to work on particular topics, you weren't recognized, your salary wasn't good enough, you weren't getting your work accepted, you didn't feel like your department was providing administrative support.
All of those make sense and aren't based on feels.
Right.
You know, poor administrative support.
I could see how your feels could be a part of that.
But there's also just like, you know, are there enough support staff to do the kind of work that needs to be done?
Or are you left doing things that you were told when you were hired, for instance, you wouldn't have to do for yourself?
Right.
Work-life stress associated with balancing work and life.
Caring responsibilities.
You know, you got the two-body problem where maybe, you know, you're both in fields that are somewhat rarefied and they need to move and you're like, I got to move too.
Lack of time for hobbies and interests.
Amount of time you have to work.
Lack of leave time.
And then personal issues.
So all those make sense.
And again, some of them are subjective for sure, but you can point to them and say, you know what, I just I just wanted more time to surf, right?
I just wanted more time to actually spend time with my kids or to, you know, to think about whether or not this is what I want to be doing because it looks to me like if I keep doing this forever I'm going to wake up in 30 years and not have done anything else.
Right?
Professional stress, work-life stress, and then climate stress, the one that we are told that is the big difference, where women are more likely to report these things than men.
The basis, again before I show you, the basis for which that Nature News article said, it's workplace toxicity that's why women leave.
We have dysfunctional departmental culture or leadership.
Well yeah, pretty much all of them.
It's just that's academia for you.
Feeling the new need to prove myself.
Feeling that people like me don't belong or fit in my department.
Wait, no, sorry.
Feeling that people like me don't belong or fit in my department.
Feeling that people like me don't belong or fit in my institution.
Feeling that people like me don't belong or fit in my academic field.
Harassment.
Discrimination.
How competitive academia is.
Constant criticism, comparisons, rejections.
So the three of those that I have not highlighted, dysfunctional departmental culture, harassment, and discrimination, are plausibly not entirely subjective.
Certainly sometimes they are not entirely subjective.
The rest of these?
The basis for which we have a Nature News headline claiming that workplace toxicity is why women leave academia?
Because women are more likely to answer yes to, I feel that people like me don't belong here.
And it's just so competitive.
This is such insanity.
This is playing into such crazy, regressive, stereotypical female tropes about how women behave and what they're willing to do to get their way.
And Nature News is buying into it.
This research is garbage.
This survey was garbage.
And they had, under professional stress and work-life stress, a number of things that are real.
And in this third category, almost nothing here is based on anything, but I just don't feel like this is the thing for me.
Furthermore, these are leading questions.
How many people are going to say, well, yeah, actually, I didn't really feel like I belonged.
Now that you put it that way, yeah, that is why I left.
Well, and the problem is that the work, if you can call it work, This research.
Yeah.
Like all this stuff, it is designed to create a pretext for remedies that are desired.
And the point is, this becomes increasingly a welfare program where people create bullshit scholarship for which they feel entitled to be paid, entitled to get benefits.
So they are parasites on the university system, on society.
And what they are producing as a result of their parasitism is pretext for further parasitism.
Yes.
And this is, this is midway in that.
It's a jobs program.
It's a, it is a make-work program.
It's not even a jobs program.
Because they're going to get benefits.
They have a nominal job, but it is a job that does not need to be done.
In fact, civilization would be better off if it weren't.
Right.
Well, you know, it's not like the WPA, where a bunch of things need to be done.
Right, but make work you don't necessarily get paid for.
I think we're saying the same thing, we just have different connotations for what these terms mean.
For me, a jobs program is like, oh, I just need to figure out a pretext for getting paid.
Like, well, this is it.
Yeah.
But the idea, you know, you could twiddle your thumbs for a salary that you didn't deserve.
And in fact, you know, people in the tech sector talk about the huge number of people who don't do anything.
And, you know, people talk about the fact that Elon Musk fired a huge fraction of the staff and Twitter got better, not worse.
So apparently they weren't doing anything productive.
So there's not doing anything productive.
And then there is doing something destructive.
in the very system that is paying you to do that work, right?
You are a paid saboteur. - Yep. - And I must tell you, my reaction overall is, this system is so broken to begin with.
It's scientifically broken before you even get to the fields that don't really exist and are attacking science.
And the scientists aren't even ready to defend themselves and say, no, I'm sorry, stop messing around with sex.
We actually understand this and you're not allowed from some other field to, you know, lob hand grenades in.
Actually, there are two sexes.
We know how to define them.
We know a lot about what they mean.
And, you know, you can go have your little discussion elsewhere, but you're not going to get us to change what we say to students about whether there are two sexes.
There are, right?
That's what they should be saying, but they don't.
So the scientists are pitiful, because they won't stand up for themselves.
They're too cowardly to just simply even stick up for the truth.
And the saboteur fields are on the march and taking over the thing, and the real question is, Um, look, I'm sorry, we do need a university system, but we don't have one.
And pretending that it is one doesn't help.
And decide, pretending that you could rescue this one, rescue it really?
All these cowards?
You're going to free them from something and they're going to go back to work?
I don't think so.
I don't think they remember what work is.
I mean, this is, this is, you and I have said this over and over again, but people often Um, say when, you know, various projects about, you know, creating a new university.
Oh, but you know, is there going to be demand?
It's like, oh, there's demand.
Yeah.
There will be so many students at an actual functioning university.
Will there be sufficient faculty?
Yeah.
That is what we are going to have a dearth of.
And yeah, we need a lot more students than we need faculty, but we're going to have a harder time getting a functioning university filled with actually competent and courageous faculty, because we've ruined a whole generation of faculty.
And yes, we're in the process of ruining a whole generation of college-age students as well, and they're ruined in a different way, and in some ways more completely.
But the faculty, once they're in their little fiefdoms of their classrooms, get to completely destroy people.
And they're doing it!
Well, this is a classic, it's actually worse than that.
Because the reason that there are not enough people to staff a proper university were you to start one, it's not that those people don't exist.
It's that if you assume that an academic has an academic degree, then you're taking people, all of whom have been lobotomized by the process that trained them.
There are lots of smart people who could do a bang-up job of educating people, but who are you going to hire to figure out who they are?
Because the fact is, they don't have degrees.
They did other things.
They actually, in large measure, were driven out by the idiocy of the system as it stands, and they went and did something else.
Some of them have no degree at all.
Yeah, but the accreditation process says you risk losing your accreditation if you've got non-terminally degreed people teaching your classes.
I remember actually at Evergreen, you wanted to teach with a friend of ours.
It was brilliant, and it was going to be an amazing program, but he just had a bachelor's degree, and the admin powers that be are like, we can't do this.
Even though this would be one of the most extraordinary programs that has ever been taught.
Nope, nope, certainly can't.
Right.
So, you know, it's a system that is in a death spiral because the correct move is actually forbidden, which is to figure out who's actually still smart, right?
You are required to search a landscape of people who were foolish enough to continue to sign up the rules in an era of increasing sophistry.
Yeah.
This is just more sophistry, but I'm going to show one more piece of sophistry from the same paper before we move on.
Just the very next page here, you were shown Table S9 from the Supplemental Material just now, and if I just scroll down one more page, this is 63 pages of Supplemental Material, Survey Data Cleaning.
They did a number of data cleaning choices, including about gender.
Three out of the 6,570 men in our survey indicated that they are transgender men, one out of the 3,480 women in our survey indicated that they are a transgender woman, and one of the women in our survey indicated they are a woman and non-binary.
While these five individuals used the Prefer to Self Describe box in order to describe their gender, we also included them in the binary gender categories that they mentioned in their descriptions.
Including participants who self-reported these additional aspects of the gender identities into men and women categories allows us to respect their status as men and women.
Which, these numbers are tiny, but that nullifies anything else that they have done.
Right.
The point is, the fact that the numbers are tiny means it probably didn't change things much, but they do not say in light of, you know, the right thing to do would be to exclude them.
But of course that would be transphobic or whatever.
So the fact that they include them says that they are more committed to saluting the correct flag than they are to actually discovering anything, and you know... They're respecting their status as women, which they're not!
So wait a second, this... I mean, they're one of them, but they're not the one they say they are.
If you go back to the thing that I was saying about you start renaming stuff and you make it impossible to actually reconstruct history or to track a particular creature, you know, because now they have a name that nobody can say because somebody might feel hurt about it, so you can't figure out the scholarship on that creature before the name change, yada, yada, yada.
This, the idea that we are going to include you under the name, under the gender that you self-describe means that we are no longer going to be able to figure out anything about sex differences.
This is a self-fulfilling prophecy.
100%.
And so the point is it's like... I'll bet all the people who identify as the sex that they are not are more likely to say, oh it's about a toxic work environment.
Right, but let's put it this way.
They're wielding an argument, right, about sex not being a thing, right?
And then they're going to make sex not a thing at the level of the data.
Right?
And then they're going to say, see?
It's in the data.
Right?
No difference between men and women.
Who looks at supplemental materials?
63 pages of supplemental materials.
Who looks there?
Right.
So anyway, the point is, it's another attack on our ability to understand even what's true.
Right?
Never mind whether it's fair.
Let's just figure out what's true, and then we can talk about whether it's fair.
But you're not even going to be able to know.
True first.
Yeah, true would-be first.
True has to come first.
This is the proof that, once again, the purpose of the exercise is not the one that we all think academics has.
The saboteurs have flipped the purpose, right?
The purpose is to advance a particular story, and to the extent that the truth gets in the way, they're going to disrupt our ability to even know what it is.
That is correct.
That is correct.
So that leaves us with a difficult segue into talking about gratitude.
I am not grateful for the saboteurs, but it being, as we speak now, the day before Thanksgiving, before American Thanksgiving, we thought that we would spend a little time talking about that.
So we are transitioning from the saboteurs de force Sort of.
Into a discussion of gratitude.
And actually, yeah, I think it just has to be a clean break.
We just have to switch mindsets and talk about the things for which we are grateful, which many people have noticed that Thanksgiving is about the last holiday to fall.
Maybe it has not perfectly resisted commercialization when, you know, you can buy a Mainstream Turkey, and of course one can do nothing but sit through Thanksgiving wondering about what Black Friday will bring.
So anyway, there are attempts to encroach, but it is in some ways our purest holiday here in the US still.
And I wanted to start by saying a few things about what's on my mind.
I should say you and I have just been to the Czech Republic, we then went to Great Britain, to London, and then I've just gone for a stupidly brief visit to Romania.
And I was in Denver in there as well.
You were in Denver.
And so anyway, we've been interacting with a lot of folks.
And the trip to Romania, actually, which is the most recent one for me, put me in contact with a lot of folks, some people that I knew pretty well, some people I'd never met.
But Above all else, we are in an era where we are facing a level of dysfunction that we've never seen, that many of us never anticipated, even if we knew that it was possible.
It was hard to imagine that we would find ourselves here.
There is a level of disappointment.
It's not strong enough a word, but people who should have stood up, who just absolutely didn't.
And there's a tremendous amount of betrayal.
People who, instead of standing up or even cowering, decided to sign up with the enemies of reason and freedom and decency and all of that.
But there are also a tremendous number of people Who have stood up, people that we never would have encountered if this particular passage of history hadn't unfolded the way it did.
And I was especially reminded, the trip to Romania was for the International COVID Summit, the fourth International COVID Summit, the first one I've attended.
But I was struck by meeting some folks who have paid a terrible price for their forthrightness and their courage.
And yet they still continue because it is the right thing to do.
And they, like we, have no choice about it, right?
There just simply is the right thing.
And if your values mean anything, your values have to endure under incredible pressure.
And so I was talking to Ryan Cole, who has long been one of my favorite people in the medical freedom movement.
He's a pathologist.
He's somebody I first became aware of.
I was just watching a YouTube video.
I had no idea who he was, and he was, you know, testifying.
I don't remember even who he was testifying to.
He was testifying to some governmental body or something.
And he was saying such reasonable things about what actually threatens health, what actual measures work to benefit people, the insanity of the COVID response, and I was just struck by his eloquence and I've learned since, I've now met him a couple times in person, I have learned since that he's actually quite the renaissance man.
He's a musician, he's a farmer, he's a craftsman, he, you know, he's exactly the kind of person that, you know, there's just an incredible depth to what he understands of the world, and so it makes a lot more sense of His standing up in the face of terrible pressure and he's faced the loss of his license to practice.
He's got medical jeopardy and all for just saying the right stuff and being early, right?
Talking about the emergence of what are being called turbo cancers.
He was talking about that very early.
He talked about vitamin D and its role in Preventing COVID.
He's talked about clotting disorders and the so-called vaccines.
Anyway, he's been a very powerful force and he has He has withstood a tremendous public beating from the powers that be, which would really like to shut him down because of how important the message that he's delivering is.
And his message is based on empirical observation.
Yes.
So it's particularly difficult for others to say, you didn't see that.
You're not seeing that.
When he is saying, I, in my professional capacity, am seeing this.
And because he's a pathologist, we've made this point before, but because he's a pathologist, he doesn't even have the normal doctor experience, because he has vastly more patients.
He's not seeing the patients themselves, he's seeing samples, he's seeing scans, and so as a pattern emerges, like, oh my goodness, there's vastly more cancer of X, Y, or Z type, the point is he's seeing it as something much closer to a statistically valid thing.
His sample size is orders of magnitude, maybe, orders of magnitude, probably, larger than what most doctors would see.
Absolutely.
Interestingly, though, when you talk to him or when you see him present, the cases are very personal to him, right?
He talks about, you know, the young woman who has died suddenly, you know, he knows how many hours after her vaccination she dies and what she has died.
And you can tell that he feels each of these cases personally, as if he was the doctor in the room.
So anyway, I have a lot of gratitude for a guy like this who simply will not back down from what he knows to be accurate and will present it to the world whether they want to hear it or not.
That is a, you know, surprising how few doctors.
We have an entire profession of people, most of them screwed up and Many of them now know they did and haven't admitted it publicly.
Many others don't yet know that they did.
And a very small number who have become familiar to us because they're the only ones telling us what we need to know.
These people have emerged and I don't know, they deserve a tremendous amount of thanks.
Yeah, they really do.
Yeah, I would also point out I hadn't seen Robert Malone in some time, but in fact Robert Malone, who was sort of the headliner of the conference, I was reminded That when he came to our house, actually, before he was well-known, Dark Horse was the first place that he showed up that he got substantial traction.
And of course, Dark Horse was demonetized.
It remains demonetized on YouTube.
That was one of the two videos that YouTube went after.
We were fact-checked over things that were said in that episode.
I met for the first time Byron Bridle, who actually was responsible for unearthing some of the information for which we got fact-checked.
We said true things and the fact-checkers declared it misinformation, which of course set YouTube in motion, demonetizing us and crippling our ability to earn.
So anyway, I saw Robert Malone.
And Robert Malone, since the last time I saw him, has endured the awarding of a Nobel Prize for a... The Nobel Prize was strangely narrow in its description, but I was reminded that when Robert Malone, who I didn't know who he was, came to our house and did a podcast, did a Dark Horse podcast, And I found out who he was.
He told me basically what he had done, and I was disbelieving.
I think like many people in the medical freedom movement, there's this question about why Why is the inventor of mRNA technology on our side here?
Right?
And he's on our side because he's a very good guy and the technology isn't safe.
It doesn't matter that it's brilliant, right?
It shouldn't be injected in anybody and Robert Malone knows it.
But what I remember saying to him, again, meeting him for the first time, was, you know, if you go on this program, That's the end of any shot you have at a Nobel Prize.
You're talking about a Nobel Prize-worthy discovery, invention, and you're walking away from it to talk here about what it actually means.
And he knew.
He understood what he was doing.
Which, you know, watching the Nobel Prize then be awarded, and I will just point out for those who are paying particular attention here, It was awarded not for the mRNA platform.
Why?
Probably because then history would have to record his exclusion and then the fact that he holds those patents and therefore is the discoverer.
Yeah.
No, often it goes to three people.
It could have gone to him as well.
If it was for the platform, it should have gone to him.
But so the Nobel was not for the platform.
Right.
It was for the pseudouridines.
It was for the pseudouridines, which is an amazing thing for them to have given it for.
For one thing, it allows them to award the thing as if this had been a great triumph.
But the pseudouridines that were swapped in for the uracils in order to make the mRNAs durable is actually one of the most dangerous things about the shot as it was delivered in the And so to give a prize as if that was a good thing, you know, reminds me of the scene in Catch-22 where
If I recall correctly, the squadron has gone out on a mission that they're terrified over, and they've dumped their bombs uselessly somewhere because they didn't want to fly into territory that— Because they were going to catch so much flak.
Right, exactly.
So they dumped their bombs uselessly.
And the brass in Catch-22 decides that that's so embarrassing that what they have to do is give them medals for their bravery in order to obscure the fact that they've done this, right?
So it's the same damn thing, right?
Yeah, except dropping bombs someplace where no one is hurt is a neutral act, not an actually dangerous act.
Right, exactly.
So anyway, I was, you know, Seeing Ryan Cole and Robert Malone in the same place and, you know, the feeling of camaraderie amongst the people who have stood up against this madness and suffered all kinds of indignities and terrifying losses of their ability to do their job.
You know, I don't know how much I'm entitled to or allowed to say about the Awful stuff that has been done to Byron Bridle, but it's insane what the man has faced.
Just, just, it's beyond belief.
So, anyway, a lot of gratitude for the small number of people who actually shined under the worst conceivable Circumstances who are still standing up and doing the right thing.
And you know what?
These people who have suffered so utterly, they're actually a joy to be around.
And it's not surprising, right?
They actually, even though they have as much reason to be bitter as anybody, they are the opposite, of course, right?
If that was your approach to life, right, the point is, well, okay, they were suffering, but they're still standing.
They embrace life and they appreciate that's just the burden of the role they find themselves in.
I don't remember to whom the quote is attributed, but I watched this documentary last night, 20 Days in Mariupol, about Ukraine.
And at one point, the journalist, I think, who's making it reports this quotation from someone, and again, I'm sure we will hear who it is.
Who says war reveals people's character, and the bad people become worse, and the good people become better.
And I think that this is part of what you are reporting on here.
This is part of what you are seeing.
Almost, well certainly none of the people you just mentioned, and if I think, you know, almost none of the people whom we have been interacting with during COVID, over COVID, through all of this, were people whom we could have named, whom we could have pulled out of a lineup before, right?
And so that, that too, is something to say to those who can see but are scared, uh that when you do stand up uh you it is it does reveal like you you will lose people there there will be people who turn on you and you will be surprised By whom some of those are.
You will.
And you will be disappointed and there's no getting over that.
But you will also be surprised by some of the people whom you know who stand up with you.
Wow!
That's amazing!
And also by all the people you don't yet know who will begin to reveal themselves to you or come to you and maybe you know who they are and say, yeah, thank you and Now you two are in this with the rest of us, and here we go.
Yeah, and, you know, we've called this the painful upgrade, and it is, but the degree to which... it's just better.
Yeah.
Right?
- Live not by lies, right? - Yeah, live not by lies.
And the fact is, yes, they will make you suffer.
That's what they do.
It's how they get away with it.
But the ability, the ability to be in a room full of people who you, you know, you just admire because of what they have endured in order to frankly tell people what they needed to know in order to protect their families.
It's an honor to be in that context and to know that you belong.
And so anyway.
There's no getting around the fact of, uh, the cost and there's no getting around the fact of people you will lose, but you're better off without them.
Um, and you know, you will, you'll be glad to join the group of people that at the end of the day, you know who they are, you know what they stand for and, um, and you don't have to feel strange about, um, about, you know, Right.
And you know, in the case of those people who have stood up courageously and suffered the costs, that when you do come to disagree with them, when you do discover disagreement with them, which you will because there is presumably not anyone else on the planet with whom you agree entirely.
But they are not going to respond with outrage and hurt and woundedness and act like this is all about them or that you're an idiot for thinking that way.
And, you know, maybe you do have some opinions that you're an idiot for thinking that way.
We probably all do.
But, you know, these are the people who are well able to sit with other human beings with whom they do not see entirely eye to eye and say, cool, let's talk about it.
Or, okay, we've done that for now.
Um, at least for right now, we're not going to get any further.
So, you know, let's, let's play ball.
Let's have dinner.
Let's have a campfire.
Whatever it is.
So, I guess there is one thing that I would sort of offer to that group.
I think if there's one vulnerability of all of these incredible people, and, you know, I'm hesitant to start naming names because I will inevitably, you know, forget people, but I spent some time with Jessica Rose, who I'd never met, Harvey Reich, Denny Rancourt, Meryl Maas.
There were lots of important names from this movement there.
Most, this was their first rodeo.
COVID.
COVID.
Not this conference, but this COVID.
COVID was their first rodeo.
And the problem with that is A, COVID was special, right?
It was the most extreme one of these probably ever.
The degree, the breadth of the propaganda, the intensity of the attacks, the amount of money at stake made this sort of the ultimate battle. - The mass psychosis was global. - Was absolutely global.
And actually, Matthias Desmet was there only briefly at the conference.
It was great to see him too.
Speaking of, he doesn't suffer from mass psychosis, but he has described mass formation.
And anyway, it was great to see him.
He gave a wonderful talk.
But the What I wish these folks could understand, most of them, is that some of what they are experiencing is unique to COVID.
And some of what they are experiencing is generic to fighting power.
And you really need a couple of data points before you understand that part of this, you're being misled by the degree to which the details are about COVID.
Maybe they're about immunology or they're about, you know, the funding of medical research or something like that.
And you don't realize that there's a generic aspect to this, which is that when power wants to shut down a narrative, it does certain things.
And some of it's just generic.
So I was talking to Byron Bridle, for example, about the insane stuff that he has faced at his university.
He's like, can you believe that my colleagues, X, Y, and Z, it's like, oh, yeah.
Yes, I can believe it because we face the exact same thing on a totally different topic.
So anyway, I do hope that those folks can somehow globalize what they know and infer that fighting power is this thing, and they just had a very unusual first experience.
Well, I can add to that that I had a similar experience with some number of the people I talked with at the GenSpec conference in Denver.
People experience one of these sort of reversals of reason.
and mass formation, and learn that lesson very, very well and suffer a great number of costs.
But it can be very, very difficult to generalize to, oh, maybe this isn't the only time or the only domain in which this is happening.
Well, and I guess the hope, I think, I believe you think, that the powerful force that pulled this COVID nonsense on us is the same powerful force that is on the march on other topics.
You know, the woke revolution is about something and it's not really about, you know, people who think they're oppressed rising up.
It's about disrupting a kind of normal functioning for the purpose of getting somewhere.
And so what we need is the There aren't enough people who are ready to stand up and fight courageously.
But each time somebody does, they embolden somebody else.
So we need a kind of contagious spread of courage.
And that requires people to realize that their Uh, partners may actually not, you know, if you're a COVID dissident, you may not realize that, you know, John McWhorter is on your team too, because he's on a totally different topic.
Right?
But it's not a totally different topic.
It's people who are willing to stand up in the face of power and actually speak the truth.
And to that point, this leads to another category that I'm grateful for, that I think is worth calling out.
And I don't know how to do this exactly, but we noticed back in the days of the BLM riots, One of the things that was really conspicuous about the enemies of reason and decency was that they were tone-deaf, like literally.
They couldn't come up with a protest song that didn't sound like a dirge.
You know, it was terrible.
It, like, hurt your ears.
God, it was terrible, right?
It's like, wow, that unmusical?
And then, you know, the degree to which there was no sense of humor.
Those people just no sense of humor.
It's, like, terrifying, you know?
Unmusical, not funny, right?
There's just no spark of human genius anywhere in that group.
So what I wanted to point to is that something has emerged that's quite hopeful, and we haven't released it yet.
We will soon release an episode I recorded, With an artist, his name's Brad, but he goes by Five Times August, who has shown up as a... He has become a person who writes songs about where we are, which is not what he set out to do.
His life has been music, but he was much more standard, and he became radicalized as he saw what happened over the course of the last several years, and he became, you know, a poet of The folks who actually are on the right side of history, if I can use that overused phrase.
But anyway, he wrote a song, which was one of several that caught my attention, called Ain't No Rock and Roll, in which he, and it's emotional for me even to describe it because of what it must have meant to him to do it, but he calls out all of his heroes for not showing up, right?
Or even showing up in the in the wrong place.
Yes.
Right.
Yeah.
And his basic point was, you know, all that stuff that you've sung about, you know, the man and oppression and, you know, the failure of decency and all that stuff was bullshit apparently.
And we believed you.
And then, you know, Uh, you know, there's a line in the song where he talks about the fans took the blame, right?
The fans effectively had listened to, you know, Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, and, you know, Neil Young, Neil Young, all of these people.
And then these people just cowered.
And so anyway, I think there's something remarkable in an artist, you know, confronting his elders and pointing out their terrible failure.
So anyway, that means something to me.
I was listening to that song.
I asked Siri to play that song for me in the car, and then it played another song after which I had never heard before, which was also Five Times August, which I would recommend people also listen to called The Anti-Fascist Blues, which is a spectacular song in its own right.
I should point out, I know the second song you're talking about there, because I listened to a bunch of his music after you recorded that podcast.
He's legitimately a good artist.
He's not just making activist music, which usually sucks.
He's great, and he's the cutting edge.
But it's really good, and it's also not a recreation of music from the 60s with new lyrics.
It's unique to him, and it's really good.
Well, in fact, you may not know this, but the song The Anti-Fascist Blues is Musically, an allusion to the subterranean homesick blues of Bob Dylan.
But that's a difficult needle to thread.
You either get too close to the subterranean homesick blues, and then it's derivative, or it's too far, and then like the allusion, what does it even mean?
But he nails it perfectly.
And the lyrics, so the other thing about him is his songs all come With a video that he puts together.
And the video is sort of collages.
It's animations, but it's, you know, it's done sort of like Monty Python with, you know, cutouts that move, right?
Anyway, it's done very well.
It's also very compelling.
It's not a simple... Yeah, it's not simple.
Not a simple thing to do.
And it contains all the lyrics.
So one of the things that's wrong with rock and roll is you often don't know what's being sung.
But in this case, you watch the video, you know exactly what's being sung because it's...
contained in the video.
But anyway, so I'm a big fan of what this guy is doing.
It's cutting edge in a number of different ways.
Musically, it's great.
It's so poignant and timely.
And his interaction between the music and the video stuff is also, you know, it's like, you know, an opera has, you know, the score and the libretto.
And the point is, it's not really complete without both things.
So this is sort of like that.
But Often, almost always, with opera, created by different people, which always seems strange to me, because in the kind of music you're talking about here, it's almost always the same person.
The same people, yeah.
Or at least it should be, because the artist who wrote the thing also knows what it's supposed to mean, and therefore creates the visuals.
But anyway, so I'm really appreciative of the fact that... How shall I describe it?
Goliath, the force that opposes all meaningful change, has made a terrible, terrible error.
Goliath has taken every Talented, courageous, insightful person.
And it has shoved them out the door simultaneously.
It's put them all on the same team.
And that team faces significant disadvantages, right?
It doesn't have the equipment, certainly doesn't have the institutions, right?
It's at a disadvantage, but it's got all the best people.
And guess what?
It's got the musicians.
There aren't very many at the moment that you would want to listen to because of the collapse of, you know, the music industry turns out to be just a business and all of the people who pretend to be rebels aren't, right?
So that's tragic.
On the other hand, the people who are actually now pushing music forward are on our team.
Right?
That's pretty cool.
And so I would point to, you know, not only Brad of Five Times August, but I became aware of Francis Aaron and his, I pointed you to it, you don't recognize the name, but his song, which is in a genre I don't typically like, about humans aren't clownfish.
I think the song might just be called Clownfish.
Anyway, it also does the same thing, where the video makes it really clear what's being sung about.
I feel like you did this thing that people usually do in, like, sophomore year of college, where they're like, I'm just going to listen to this on repeat, like, 300 times.
Right.
But it was just so necessary to hear somebody, you know, who's obviously... It's a great song.
It's a great song.
It's done... the genre is hip-hop.
But it's like...
So intellectually incisive about the gender stuff and I would point out that just the cherry on top is that the so the song takes place where you know, I guess Aaron Francis Aaron is Describing how crazy the situation is, but he's got a kind of a dumb shit who keeps asking questions Right when you know, what about clownfish right exactly and but
Francis Aaron resists the obligation to explain why it matters that human beings aren't clownfish.
The point is, look, that's all I need to say, right?
Clownfish is not an argument because we aren't them is, you know, more than actually needs to be said already.
So anyway, I greatly appreciate that there are a group of artists who are, as Zach says, Very high quality, in their own right, and also on our team.
And that's not a surprise, because of course, you know, the people who are really thinking for themselves would end up on our team, and they'd also be the people pushing music forward at a time when it has become boring, corporate, and all of that.
So anyway, that's really cool.
Now before I move on to the next little piece of this, something I forgot to say to Brad when I interviewed him.
I didn't interview him.
I don't interview anybody when I talk to them.
I don't know that I grilled him, but anyway, a connection I forgot.
Some of the guests leave with those black lines.
I was wondering where they got those.
The grill marks?
Yeah.
Yeah, I don't know.
I'm just that good.
But anyway, I noticed something else, a connection which was...
A Walter Kern tweet.
Now, Walter Kern is not an artist.
He's a writer.
Somebody that I quite like and that you are now working with on Country Highway.
County Highway.
Sorry.
I'm sorry, Walter.
County Highway, which is America's only newspaper.
Is that right?
Yeah.
It's quite cool.
It's awesome.
I really like it.
I don't have a copy right here.
I'll break it up.
But will you put up that tweet of Walter Kern's that I sent you?
I didn't?
Yes I did.
Yeah, so it's possible that I've sent Zach the wrong tweet.
I was, I had my attention, maybe Heather will turn this a bit.
I don't know what you're talking about.
- If you go to Walter Kern's thing and you search for rock. - So I have a video and everything from-- - So hold on, I just want to show Walter Kern's tweet.
He deserves credit here.
So you want me to search for rock within Walter Kern?
Yes.
Fuck's sake, man.
I gotta go into a different site then because you can't just do that from So anyway, Walter Kern was pointing to an event that also caught me off guard, but he summed it up quite accurately.
The event was the inauguration of a State Department initiative where they were going to basically use...
Hold on.
Let's scroll down.
No.
Scroll.
This is Secretary Anthony Blinken.
Blinken.
Blinken, thank you.
And what this is, is an event where they are launching an initiative to combine music and diplomacy.
Effectively, they are going to use Music to enhance their propaganda efforts.
And now, if you watch this video, Zach, you want to play 30 seconds of it?
30 seconds of it, yeah.
Yeah.
So, from the great muddy waters, and if this doesn't clear the house, I don't know what to do.
One, two, three.
No.
Keep going.
So, to the Great Muddy Waters.
And, if this doesn't... This is what I told my mother before I was born.
Gonna be a man child coming.
Before I was born, gonna be a man child coming.
Gonna be son of a gun.
Gonna make pretty women's jump and shine. - Okay, yeah.
So anyway, we can't hear it when Zach plays it, but what you guys heard it, and you can tell this is a very musically competent, right?
This was high quality at the level of production values, but Soulless.
Because these are dudes at the State Department in suits playing the blues.
They didn't pay their fucking dues.
Right?
That's the rule, actually.
Right?
If you want to play the blues, you have to pay your dues.
That's the relationship between those things.
And so Walter Kern's tweet, I thought, nailed this.
He said end of the rock era, he said.
Official end of the rock era.
Official end of the rock and roll era.
Walter Kern is declaring rock and roll dead on the basis of this despicable event.
And he's right, of course.
He's Walter Kern after all.
It's one of the things he does.
Walter's very insightful.
He absolutely is.
I've recently been thinking again about the appeal to authority fallacy, and it's a fallacy not just because most of our authorities turn out to be idiots, but because even actually knowledgeable people can be wrong.
This isn't appeal to authority.
This is appeal to track record.
Walter declares rock and roll dead on the basis of this, which I think is absolutely accurate, which is also completely concordant with Brad of Five Times August calling out the entire history of rock and roll on the basis that they were obviously lying, because if they weren't lying, they would have shown up to fight the man and they didn't.
So anyway, I think that confluence of stuff is interesting, and I'm grateful for people like Walter, who delivered the insight at just the right moment.
I'm grateful to these artists who are creating, you know, they're wielding one of the two best weapons that we've got, right?
Music is a very powerful weapon for galvanizing people, and it needs to be there.
And then I guess lastly, I would just also say that the, you know, we also have Bob Moran, who's put together some brilliant cartoons that have made these, you know, infuriating claims by the powerful, has called them out in ways that are just infuriating claims by the powerful, has called them out in ways that
And then we've got comedians like Jimmy Dore and Dave Smith, who have also done an excellent job of calling out the nonsense that we've been facing.
So anyway, I guess what I'm really saying is, Times are rough, but if you're paying attention, if you're on the right side of these issues, if you're standing up and you're feeling isolated by the fact that, you know, there has been a zombification of a huge fraction of the population on issue after issue,
Then it's kind of marvelous to discover that you're actually on a team with all of the most clever, musically incisive, funny, gifted people.
That's a good place to be.
And would you want to be anywhere else?
I don't think so.
That's the team you want to be on.
And frankly, as much as we're outgunned, I kind of like our odds.
Hope you're right.
I better be.
All right.
I think that's a good place to finish, Lynn.
All right.
Good.
We will be back in 15 minutes or so with a short Q&A because we've gone very long.
And then we'll be back in a week.
A week, I think.
Yeah, a week.
And in the meantime, you can find us on Locals.
We'll be doing a private Q&A this Sunday at 11am Pacific on Locals.
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Yeah, that's great.
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