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Jan. 26, 2024 - The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters

01:31:14

The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters #837

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	Good afternoon, folks.
	Welcome to the podcast, The Lotus Eaters for Friday, the 26th of January, 2024.
	Yes, you've made it to Friday, the last Friday in January.
	That was the first month of 2024.
	Wasn't easy, was it?
	I'm joined by Travis and Peter and we are sorry, Travis Brown, was it?
	Yes.
	And Peter Boghossian.
	And we are going to be talking about the plagiarism in academia scandal, uncomfortable truths about gender ideology.
	And then we're going to touch on gay surrogacy.
	Nothing controversial in this pod.
	Nothing controversial.
	Um, but before we begin, we've got a couple of announcements.
	The first is we are recruiting.
	We would like a social media manager.
	So if you are watching and think you can do a good job running our social media accounts, do get in touch.
	Remember one stipulation of the jobs you will have to work from the office.
	So don't apply if you're like in Australia or something.
	And you can't make it on a daily basis.
	The second announcement is that we have the gold zoo, the monthly gold zoom call for the gold tier subscribers at three o'clock today.
	So after the podcast, we'll come and hang out and we'll just talk about whatever it is that's on your mind, really.
	Uh, but that should be quite fun.
	And so we will see you there in the meantime, though, let's begin.
	So how widespread is plagiarism in academia?
	Well, I have an academic here who's going to explain it to us.
	Thank you.
	Great to be here.
	That is the million dollar question.
	How widespread is it?
	Before we get into it, do you want to give us your background just so people can understand how we became friends?
	Yeah, sure.
	Yeah.
	We've known each other a long time, friends for a long time.
	So I taught at Portland State University, taught philosophy.
	I did my dissertations in the prisons and I worked with increasing prisoners' critical thinking and moral reasoning.
	Abilities and I resigned from Portland State because it was a woke cesspool and then I've written books about how to have impossible conversations and I travel around the world and we do with Travis and Reed and who's the president of street epistemology.
	That's basically it.
	The plagiarism issue is it will be my prediction to you is I'm a big fan don't tell anybody how smart you are make predictions as my friend Michael Sharma says.
	I predict that this is going to be a massive scandal.
	I think it already is.
	An epic scandal, yeah.
	So what here's, okay, so let's talk about the elements of the scandal.
	First is Claudine Gay.
	So she herself is, oh and that's fantastic.
	So this is exact, so your viewers will see this, right?
	Yeah.
	So the viewers should see it.
	So they can look for themselves, right?
	So they can compare what she wrote and what other people wrote.
	And I want to say something that gets lost in this conversation.
	So plagiarism is basically the idea that you steal someone else's work, intellectual work, and you don't take credit for it.
	But this is what's left out of this conversation that's super important.
	So when people write a dissertation today, they can just put things on a screen and copy and paste, et cetera.
	But back when she did it, you had books.
	You have to write it by hand.
	Exactly.
	So there's a kind of intentionality to that, to that theft that's absent in the context of it.
	Okay, so that's one thing.
	Your question is an excellent one.
	I don't know the answer to it, but I'm going to guess.
	In the humanities, I would guess seven to nine percent of dissertations are plagiarized.
	Seems high.
	That's very high.
	In the sciences, I think it's less, but I think data fraud is a different issue.
	Now, I could be way off on that if it's hovering around the 15 or 20 percent, and what I mean is like Claudine Gay, black and white.
	Um, and so the other thing is, that's hard to imagine, is she even plagiarized her acknowledgments.
	Like, thank you to so and so.
	She plagiarized, okay, so we got, that's one level of corruption.
	Yeah.
	Another level of corruption is that universities are making it more difficult to find dissertations now.
	They're basically doing the best they can to hide them.
	Now, why are they doing that?
	Well, they're doing that because they know the plagiarism is rampant.
	And again, my figure of 79 could be wrong.
	It could be 15 or 20.
	It could be huge.
	Okay, so then you have universities attempting to hide this these plagiarized citations.
	That's another thing.
	But then there's yet another kind of corruption, and that is that there are entire fields that are corrupt.
	Anything with studies in it as a general rule is corrupt.
	These are ideological fields that push certain narratives.
	They're inherently fraudulent.
	So you have layers of corruption and fraud.
	And these are our engines of knowledge production.
	These are teaching our kids.
	So when I say burn them down, I mean actually like that's it.
	Why would you want to have something in your society teaching people bad ways to think about fallacious conclusions?
	Yeah.
	And burning it down is, I mean, the response to this was brilliant.
	The first one was, well, you're only doing this because she's a black woman.
	Right.
	Marc Lamont Hill.
	A lot of people said that.
	Well, the response to that is, no, we hired her because she was a black woman.
	That is correct.
	The reason she's being given a pass by you guys is because she's a black woman.
	That's correct.
	And so we should talk about that.
	So in academia, seven publications in seven years get you tenure.
	Now, one thing that I recommend the audience do is you go to scholar.google.com, put in my name, put in anybody's name, use an academic, put in Jordan Peterson's name, put in Steven Pinker's name, put in Foucault's name.
	Those people have extraordinarily high, what's called an H index, the number of citations, procedure of the journals.
	Claudine Gay, she doesn't even have a profile.
	Her citations are high for the articles she's written, but the articles themselves are basically bogus.
	They're about make-believe land.
	And so there's a small cadre of people who keep citing other people in these make-believe disciplines, and that artificially inflates The citation rating.
	But she only has 11 publications.
	I mean, when we did fake papers, we wrote 20 papers in a year.
	Seven were accepted before we got busted by the Wall Street Journal.
	So I mean, 11 papers is nothing for a full professor at Harvard.
	She's making $900,000 a year.
	And instead of firing her, she keeps her job.
	She keeps her, well, she keeps her university position.
	But it's worse though, isn't it?
	Because the ranks closed around her.
	100%.
	It was all of the academics, the entire faculty of Harvard, the board of directors, and the media.
	Correct.
	And Obama.
	And Obama, yeah.
	The wider circles, all closed ranks to protect her.
	I mean, this is just...
	I would be deeply embarrassed.
	It's a disgrace.
	The fact that they're doing this shows that this has just become of them and us.
	So think about this.
	They conducted an investigation, Harvard, internal investigation of plagiarism.
	They found her innocent before they even investigated.
	I mean, the level of corruption is astonishing.
	And this is Harvard.
	This is not some rinky-dink community college where everybody's buddy-buddying around.
	This is the, I don't know if you want to say Western world, but certainly one of the top universities in the Western world.
	Theoretically, it's one of the top universities.
	Historically, it was one of the top universities.
	Okay, so there we go.
	Yeah, there we go.
	So what do we do?
	So what are the consequences of that?
	And again, I don't want people who are watching this just to think, oh wow, there are a bunch of people who are plagiarized.
	This is a corruption scandal.
	That's why this is so interesting.
	Bodies of literature corrupt, people hiding dissertations, people because of basically an immutable characteristic, and it's even been floated.
	What if a higher percentage of people fit in an ethnic demographic who have plagiarized?
	What do we do then?
	I mean, imagine even asking that kind of question.
	Like, imagine what you would have to do to even think, like, to break society up into racial categories in the first place.
	If you didn't plagiarize your dissertation, you've got nothing to worry about.
	Yeah.
	I put my plagiarism, my dissertation, so one more thing, so this is a very complicated area, so I'm speaking quickly, but it's not as simple as, and if people are are watching this, it's not this that you can go on and become an internet sleuth and track down people's dissertation and put them through plagiarism checker.
	The reason you can't do that is because there are false positives and false negatives.
	And before, this is a very serious accusation.
	That's like the most serious of accusations, which Claudine Gay tried to decrease the standards for plagiarism because she knew she was guilty.
	Okay.
	So the problem is it's not just like you go to this program called Turn It In or what have you.
	And if you do that, you have to physically like this.
	You need to take the paragraphs and put them next to each other and go through those.
	Because if you don't do that, you don't want a situation in which we start accusing people of things, they haven't done it, and then the public will think, oh well, it's no big deal.
	And just to be clear as well, the reason that this is a genuine issue is because In almost every field, there are going to be certain formulas to describe a thing that people use.
	So you might be saying a Western liberal democracy or something like this, and it's not inconceivable that you'll say something like, well, I think Western liberal democracy is a good thing.
	And that's not plagiarism that lots of people will have written that sentence.
	And so because there's a certain formulation of the concept that you're putting across.
	Okay.
	So it's very easy for people to sort of duplicate that without it being plagiarism.
	Okay.
	So this is how I think we should think about this.
	Let's say, I assume they call, you have fire departments here, is that what they call them?
	We have five.
	Okay, well I don't know if they're called fire departments, so some of the words... Fire stations.
	Okay, fire, so you have fire stations.
	And I assume, and I'd be shocked if this were not the case, you have to take some kind of fire person's exam.
	I imagine, I've never been a fireman.
	I don't know, but I would be, and the idea of the exam is that it tests things necessary for you to know how to discharge your primary function, which is to put out fires.
	I'm assuming that's the way it worked.
	Everything I've said is totally reasonable.
	Seems so.
	Okay, so now let's think about how completely deranged this is.
	So we have a situation in which a large number, a non-trivial number of people who, firemen, firewomen, what have you, firefighters, have lied on the examination.
	And the examination is necessary for you to put out fires.
	So what should the fire, if there's a chief municipality of governing firefighters, I have no idea, but what is the reasonable response of these people?
	Any sane person would say, well, we don't want people to die in fires.
	That's the whole point of the fire department.
	So when you're going to root out the corruption, we're going to find out Who cheated?
	We're going to conduct a thorough investigation and we're going to just boot you.
	That's it.
	There's no, there's no appeal.
	If you're guilty of, of not the plagiarism is a peril, but if you're guilty on the fire exam, then you're out.
	There's no, if Sandra, I don't care if you're a midget, I don't care.
	Well, I don't care what you are.
	If you cheated on the fire fireman's exam, You're not going to be a firefighter.
	That's it.
	Your days are over.
	So when you do that, you restore confidence in the fire department among the citizens who believe the fire department can actually put off fires.
	That is not what's happened in this case.
	No, no.
	The opposite has happened.
	Universities have lost even more legitimacy.
	And I think it's also worth noting that this was Not actually, originally a plagiarism scandal.
	What this originally was, is a really strange antisemitism scandal, where for some reason, the president of Harvard was like, no, actually, you can chant for the death of Jews, as long as it's not at a Jew.
	It's like, right, okay, that's not... Yeah, that's really weird, because, you know, in every other case, I mean, we've experienced this personally, what we're doing, it's not context dependent, actually.
	It's in any time, in any place, for any reason.
	So, okay, actually, in every other case, it's not context-dependent, but in this case, when it's defending your radicalized students, it becomes very context-dependent, and that's what they all ranked around.
	And so there's people like Chris Rufo, who found, well, hang on a second, there is another reason to get rid of her.
	If, for some reason, screaming anti-Semitic chants on Harvard is fine, well, why have we got all these plagiarists?
	And then you see the backlash and the sort of kickback from all that.
	So, well, I mean, plagiarism is not a big deal.
	No, it is a massive deal.
	Okay, so let's talk about that.
	I saw them sort of saying, well, yeah, but this, this means that everyone's going to have to be checked.
	And it's like, good thing we've got AI then, isn't it?
	Yeah.
	You know?
	Okay.
	So let's, let's talk about that.
	So part of that endemic corruption is then universities now rushing to change the plagiarism standards.
	Yes.
	So just again, the analogy breaks down with the fire department at some point because you don't rush to change the standards.
	They do.
	They do rush to change the standards because what they say is, well, we're not getting enough women and minorities because they're not passing the fitness test and so they lower the fitness test.
	Right.
	So that's exactly, that would be a great- There is exactly a parallel.
	Okay.
	And it's being done for the same reasons.
	It's the same ideology that controls- The same reasons.
	And I would argue that the same consequence applies is that people have less confidence in the institutions to discharge their primary missions.
	Why would you have any confidence?
	Because the people have been caught in the act of cheating, and they've been caught for something else, but we can show that they are cheating and they're not doing their job sufficiently well, even with the moral question taken away.
	And then they've said, well, no, we're going to double down and just say we don't have to do as much as we need to do anyway.
	And so they're deliberately saying, no, our institution is actually not really fit for purpose.
	100%.
	And just to be crystal clear, these are not your rules.
	These are not my rules.
	They're their own rules.
	These are their rules.
	These are the pre-existing rules that they agreed to.
	But you know that they don't care about consistency.
	No, that's the problem.
	I'm wondering what do you think will be the over other than people are already losing interest and confidence in these institutions.
	Yeah.
	So what do you think will be the practical implications?
	Because as I've said to you, I think that they'll just move on from this.
	I think they'll say, well, we already know objectivity is this, you know, white Western construct.
	We already know the scientific method is based on white supremacy.
	This is what they say.
	Right.
	So how do you defend against that?
	Okay.
	So you have a number of different responses to that.
	All those people who go through crazy town and make those arguments, the vast majority of people are sane and don't believe that.
	The overwhelming majority.
	So they're going to see that conspicuous, naked, ideological stance and they're going to say, hey, wait a second.
	Should we really be paying X number of hundreds of thousands of dollars for our kids' education?
	What are they really getting out of this?
	And not just that, donors as well, right?
	Because then you've got, like, you know, very Harvard graduates who have done very well for themselves and then donate money to the university because of the... Yeah, that's the other thing, the donors, yeah.
	I was just going to say, but will they?
	Because we both know people in Portland, Oregon that still live there and they still think that defunding the police was a good idea, even though more black people died as a result.
	They still believe it.
	I mean, it's so insane, it just doubled down.
	I haven't got any data, but I am absolutely certain that there were donors pulling out of Harvard.
	Oh yeah, we know that.
	They lost over a billion in their endowments.
	We know that.
	I heard Harvard describe it as a hedge fund with a school attached to it.
	There is definitely an argument there.
	So the question is, what do we do as a society?
	So what do we do?
	We are at the precipice, and that's assuming that it's 7-9%.
	Again, I could be flabbergasted if that number were under 5%.
	I'm telling you, I'll take you to the best dinner ever if that number is under 5%.
	So what do we do as a society?
	I think you only have two choices.
	You either try to, and this is what Rufin wants to do, full disclosure, Rufin's a friend of mine.
	Oh, let's go full spectrum on this.
	He's a friend of mine.
	I disagree with him on this.
	I hope he's successful, but I don't think ultimately he'll be a success.
	We'll see.
	We'll see.
	You have two choices.
	One is you try to reform the current institutions.
	That is primarily, you know, who's the governor of the state in the United States?
	Who's the president?
	That would be much more difficult under a democratic administration.
	Or you try to do what I'm doing, which is to build new things, which is like the University of Austin and there are other institutions that are trying to be rebuilt.
	Now, what's interesting about this is that You know, and I asked Chris, I interviewed Chris about like, do you want me to succeed?
	Do you want these, like the University of Austin to succeed?
	He said, absolutely.
	Yeah.
	But why wouldn't he want it to succeed?
	Like that creates competition.
	It creates a kind of vibrant educational marketplace where people can choose.
	You know, Jonathan Haidt, the sociologist from NYU talks about this.
	Do you want to go to a social justice institution or do you want to go to a truth based institution?
	So if you want to go to a social justice institution, we'll see when the reality of the marketplace.
	Well, that's the problem though, isn't it?
	Because they get huge amounts of government funding as well.
	Okay, so that's the other thing.
	A market wouldn't sustain this.
	Yeah, so that's the other thing.
	What do we do about if we know that these institutions are fundamentally corrupt?
	And that was the problem when we wrote the fake papers of the Grievance Studies thing.
	We just did it too early.
	It just wasn't in people's consciousness.
	Same with Alan Sokal, wasn't it?
	Sokal, yeah, in the 90s.
	I mean, that's way earlier.
	Yeah, we just had dinner with him.
	He lives here in London.
	Makes exactly the same point.
	Yeah, he made the same point.
	He published a piece, and if you're not familiar with the SocaHawks, you should totally go to look into it.
	It's fascinating.
	Postmodern gibberish he put in.
	So the question is, what do we do?
	So we have this range of options.
	Build new things.
	Ignore the problem, which I don't think... The only people who want to ignore the problem are the same people who want to deny the problem, or the same people who occupy... But the same people benefiting.
	Well, yeah, they're benefiting because they get to have their little fiefdoms.
	They get to discharge their moral impulses into journals that are completely corrupt.
	They get to indoctrinate kids in this ideology mill.
	The students are the ones who suffer from this.
	The students are thinking that they're getting something real, but they're being lied to.
	It's total BS.
	The whole thing is complete madness.
	They come out without any actual tangible skills.
	Yeah, that's why.
	So my daughter is about to go to college and I told her, go to vocational.
	Not only is there no shame in a vocational education, those are honorable, good money.
	Make your own hours.
	Be a plumber, a carpenter, an electrician.
	Can't speak in the UK and the US.
	Oh no, it's exactly the same.
	Yeah, we desperately need those.
	These are highly profitable.
	So if you're out there, you're thinking, should I go to college?
	Think about vocational skills.
	I mean, at the end of the day, Paradigms can change in the university, but things will always break.
	So, you know, they'll always need people to fix things and build things.
	So do consider them.
	But yeah, this whole thing has just been a massive eye-opener, I think, for a lot of people, right?
	- 'Cause I mean, no one would have thought, no one thought over an academic scandal, and sorry, an antisemitism scandal, they would become this giant academic corruption that's been unraveled.
	And so what I'm interested in is actually where this goes, 'cause you've got someone like Chris Rufo, who's like, "Okay, well, I'm going to literally check as many of them as I can, And actually with the advent of AI, that becomes a practical endeavor.
	Well, I'm working with someone, well, I'm advising someone who's doing that now.
	He's building a system to search dissertations by the tens of thousands.
	Yeah.
	And it's probably eight months before that is out.
	So I personally am not doing that, but I want to make sure to help him to make sure that that's done right or help them.
	They're very well financed.
	In eight months, we're going to see what that number is.
	Yeah.
	And that could be really, It's going to be, and I'm telling you for a fact, it is not going to be under 5%.
	Oh yeah.
	So that, even if it were 5%, which it won't be, that's 1 in 20.
	1 in 20 are people are liars and frauds and cheaters.
	And there's just no benefits in a normal world.
	To allowing those people to continue to prosper.
	100%.
	But not only was Claudine Gay allowed, she kept her position at $900,000 a year.
	And this is the thing, okay, Claudine Gay eventually had to resign as the President of Harvard.
	But what about the other people who totally and unconditionally supported her?
	They have to go as well.
	All of the people... They're complicit.
	Exactly, they're all complicit.
	And so, ideally, you would have them all fired.
	They would all have to be.
	So to be full disclosure, all the cards on the table, I did not want Claudine Gay fired.
	Nope.
	I thought she was the president Harvard deserved.
	I thought she was the perfect embodiment.
	We want a cheater.
	We want an ideologue.
	We want someone who's underqualified.
	I couldn't possibly think of a better person to occupy that position.
	That is a good point.
	But someone who wanted to reform the institution.
	Which I do not, but I want to burn them down.
	I've been very honest about that from the beginning.
	But if you did want it reformed, you'd want every single one of these people in this chain.
	Correct.
	Okay.
	Operating under the assumption that we want to reform the institution, she would have to be fired and removed from her university position.
	She won't be because of her immutable characteristics.
	All of the people who are complicit in this, all of the people who, when she was cleared in the investigation that I mentioned, that found her innocent before she even Those people need to be fired.
	You would need to clean house to a level they simply would.
	And all the people, the black academicians that she persecuted, like Roland Fryer, he would have to be, all of them, Carol Swain, all of those people would have to be reinstated to Carol Holvin.
	But it would go further, like the administrators who didn't blow whistles.
	Who aren't necessarily academics, but are the ones responsible for the machinery of the thing.
	Maybe they are implicated as well, because if you can see corruption happening in front of your eyes, you have an obligation to be a whistleblower.
	100%.
	So even the non-academics who are just doing the functionary work of the university, sorry, you might be implicated in this as well.
	It would have to be a root and branch to pairing up with them.
	Okay, so just really sincerely think about this.
	The reason, if this were the fire department or the ambulance service, of course this would be done.
	Well you would think so, but actually in our country it's not.
	It's probably the same in your country as well, for diversity reasons.
	Okay, well that's the same contaminant, the same ideological contaminant.
	So the fact that this is not being done goes to show you, and then goes to show you not only how deep the corruption is, but the fact that it's at its root Undergirding the whole thing is the ideology.
	So here's, in a nutshell, the reason I don't think the universities can be reformed.
	One, you can't have DEI and free speech.
	Harvard still has massive DEI universities.
	All these institutions spend millions of dollars.
	The other thing is, you have people who have jobs for life.
	How on earth are you going to reform that?
	How do you hold them accountable?
	You can't.
	They have jobs for life.
	So what are you going to do?
	Well, you burn the whole thing down.
	You don't send your kids there.
	You send them to vocational education.
	You send them to Ralston College, University of Austin.
	You send them to... Elon Musk is building a new school in Austin.
	Who else was I just talking to?
	Yeah, there are a bunch of people who are making posts.
	Mark Andreessen is talking about building new schools now.
	So you have this billionaire class who wants to build new schools.
	Those will be alternatives to the existing educational infrastructure.
	So if you want to send your kid To a school in which not only will they, they'll kind of come out damaged in a sense because they'll believe things that are false.
	There's simply no evidence for these things.
	Like literally handicapped by a worldview that makes them believe that they can't achieve.
	Racism is the ordinary and everyday state of affairs.
	it's ever-present, that equity-based thinking, race, gender, sexuality.
	Gender is assigned at birth, assigned at birth.
	The whole spectrum of it is designed to make them think that there's no progress to be made within the system themselves.
	That's correct.
	And if you are creating self-fulfilling prophecies, but not only that, you're depriving them of the necessary tools with which to prosper in the system that they're operating.
	So the reason that's particularly insidious is that they're going to these lead institutions, they think that they're learning something, I think they're becoming more knowledgeable.
	They're taking things that they've learned that are clearly false.
	Not only is there no evidence for it, there's actually evidence against it, like microaggressions.
	Scott Lilienfeld wrote a great piece, Microaggression, Strong Claims, Inadequate Evidence.
	So there's inadequate evidence, they're going into positions of leadership and authority as people with university degrees in general tend to do, not always of course, and they're bringing these artifacts with them into the workplace.
	So it's a kind of a way that the ideology spreads itself throughout the society.
	So of course you should burn them down.
	And also, there's another aspect of it, which is they don't know anything positive.
	They only know things that are negative.
	Right.
	So they don't have grievances.
	Yeah, exactly.
	They've just got grievances.
	Whereas a normal person would say, OK, well, to build a healthy human being, you have to behave in this sort of way.
	You have to work in this kind of to this capacity to produce this kind of output.
	But actually, they don't have that.
	All they can say is, I'm against this.
	I'm against that.
	I'm against the other.
	OK, but you're not training them And habituating them into the ability to be actually positive and productive.
	That's what the very idea of Apollo for his critical consciousness is.
	You're giving them a critical consciousness so they can identify oppression and remediate that oppression.
	But the problem is... You need to create an order.
	You need to create an order.
	The whole thing is illusory in the first place and it predicates itself on things that are simply untethered to reality.
	But it also predicates itself on an existing order.
	Okay, well let's say that everyone agrees, yeah, all the existing order is bad and you've got to tear it down.
	Okay, but you've got nothing, you've got no tool set with which to create a new order for the people to go through and become better than they were to begin with.
	So you've just abolished the concept of a standard there.
	Because they just, from within, there's a woke ideology.
	There is no standard.
	And in practical terms, what do you get?
	You get chairs.
	You get people in Portland with signs that have flames on them saying, burn it all down, fuck Biden, we want revenge.
	Burn it all down from the ashes, a world anew.
	But how do they build the world?
	But what's the new world?
	They don't even have trash collection.
	What are they talking about?
	Not only will they not prosper, but some of them can't even function, as Jonathan Haidt and Greg Wookiee have pointed out in the following American Mind.
	The cognitive ability of these students has been decreased, and there's no mechanism for it to be increased.
	Yeah, just downwards.
	The cognitive, so I'm going to go one step further than that, it's even worse than the cognitive.
	I bet it is.
	And I thought that was bad enough.
	That was the most charitable thing you could say about it.
	It's that they have removed the tools necessary for them to correct their beliefs.
	Yes.
	So you've then trapped them in an ideological framework or way of thinking of the world.
	They don't agree with discourse.
	They don't like dialogue.
	Those are tools of oppression.
	Those are tools of the heteropatriarchy.
	This is a way that the ideology buttresses itself from criticism.
	And it is metastasized throughout the society.
	And it is, you know, I say that it is a cognitive sickness.
	It is a mass delusion.
	And pointing that out, The people go crazy on me, but it is actually true.
	You are robbing students of a tool set that you can give them to figure out not even what's true, but what's more likely to be false.
	It's even more humble of a claim than that.
	But even then, when you've got to that position, we're in the first generation of this being widespread.
	It's always been a small thing in academia, but now it's broken through.
	OK, we're in the first generation.
	Well, what does that look like going to the next generation?
	Man, if there's one thing that teachers are afraid of, it's Generation Z. They're like these people.
	These kids are thick.
	They can't read.
	They can't calculate.
	They can't reason.
	They can't form an argument.
	They can't articulate why they are as they are.
	OK, that's Generation 2.
	What does Generation 5 look like?
	Well, you know.
	Well, I was just going to say, so for that generation, what's the problem with plagiarism?
	Exactly.
	I mean, everything that you just outlined, they just have reasons for not caring about it.
	It's historical.
	I mean, sorry, we're just following the tradition of Claudine Gay, the president of Harvard.
	And the crazy thing is like every time I have almost any conversation, like literally with anybody, and I'll articulate a position like, well, you know, people who obtain their degrees fraudulently should be fired.
	Not controversial, I would have.
	Like, oh, you're some kind of conservative.
	I guess so.
	What are you talking about?
	Like every time, every position like that, like the whole, you know, when you were talking about everybody who is complicit in that, the thing that was running through my mind, I don't necessarily want to take us down this rabbit hole, but I was thinking about the trans thing.
	Like it's not enough that the surgeon lose their license.
	Like everybody who participated in that sickness has to be held accountable.
	Like we have to create systems in which there's accountability.
	Yeah.
	I mean, if not, we're like a kind of third world, not even third world.
	They don't say they call it global South now.
	I don't know.
	But if not, you've kind of created a, not even a house of cards or a house of straw, but you've liquidated everything down to a sort of South African level where you've got rolling blackouts and you've got the majority of the population on welfare.
	All you've done is humiliated the entire nation and reduced everything to the bare minimum.
	It's atrocious.
	It's not conservative to not want that.
	Correct.
	I would think that's just perfectly reasonable.
	Or thinking about...
	And then we'll get to...
	Yeah, we'll get to...
	Okay.
	So then it's kind of like the same thing of, you know, when I moved out of Portland for safety reasons, but when they were destroying the city for like, you know, days, I kept saying like, you've got to arrest these people.
	Like, you cannot have...
	They're assaulting people.
	They're destroying businesses.
	And you're a conservative.
	Maybe.
	What are you talking about?
	Like, if that's what it takes to be a conservative, then a lot of people are conservatives.
	Like, it was so crazy to me.
	So just piggybacking off of that, so there's somebody, the mayor of Portland is talking about public disgrace, quintessential public disgrace.
	Ted Wheeler, isn't he?
	Yes, correct.
	Ted Wheeler, he, him, his.
	I always make sure I put that in there.
	Pronouns are very important to the man.
	But the city commissioner, Rene Gonzalez, is running for mayor and his car was firebombed.
	This is in the United States of America, by Antifa.
	No, no, no.
	It's not just in the United States of America.
	I mean, it's completely plausible that there are places in America where your car gets firebombed.
	This is in Portland, one of the whitest, most affluent cities in the entire country.
	Correct.
	And his car was firebombed because of...
	This is not some right-wing maniac.
	This is an inveterate Democrat.
	This is a hardcore, never-voted-for, like me.
	Well, I'm not an inveterate Democrat, but he's a hardcore Democrat.
	But he wasn't left enough for the maniacs.
	But my point is, speaking back to the plagiarism thing, it's a kind of institutional capture and organizational corruption.
	The governor, as far as I know, the governor of Oregon didn't come out and say anything.
	One of you guys can fact check that.
	But it wasn't in the local papers.
	It wasn't made a big fuss or big to-do.
	It is becoming a banana republic when people on one, and it really is true, I would love to tell you this is not true, one end of the political spectrum It's not that they're just perpetrating violence against their political enemies.
	It's that people are afraid to make criticisms of that because they don't want to be seen on the right.
	But making a criticism of political violence does not make you someone on the right.
	In fact, René González is on the left.
	So that argument doesn't even make sense.
	He's not a crazy communist, but he's literally a left and he's a minority.
	I think it's a much longer conversation to why that person is suddenly a conservative.
	I mean, it really is, right?
	But honestly, thanks for coming on, man.
	This has been mad.
	Those are my predictions, by the way.
	But I want you to hold me to those.
	I'm buying your dinner if they're under 5%.
	And if they're over 20%, man... I'm not sure I agree to that.
	I'm buying you dinner.
	Yeah, I guess.
	But if they're over 20 percent, your audience will take us out.
	Oh, yeah.
	OK.
	Yeah.
	Right.
	OK, well, let's let's talk about some untrue.
	Start that again.
	Let's talk about some uncomfortable truths in gender ideology.
	Travis Brown is joining us to talk about his documentary about the uncomfortable truths, the reality of gender ideology.
	So you don't have to persuade me, but let's assume that someone has never heard of this.
	What kind of uncomfortable truths might we be talking about?
	Oh, there are so many.
	I use that title for a number of reasons.
	One uncomfortable truth for people caught in this ideology is the fact that you can't change sex.
	It's not possible.
	It's physically coded into every cell in your body.
	Correct.
	XX or XY.
	And some people believe that others don't think that they can actually change sex.
	Actually, Helen Joyce said on Peer's Podcast, people don't actually believe that you can change sex.
	People do.
	There are people who really believe the same thing.
	Technology has caught up to the point where you can do this and science is there, but it's not.
	I've seen postmodernists try to abolish the category of sex as well.
	Correct.
	Well, that's one of their goals because ultimately they have to know at some level that it's real, it's immutable, we have material bodies, you can cut things off, you can put things on, but you cannot change your sex.
	So that's one uncomfortable truth.
	Really the reason I chose that title is because there's a reality that we're kind of butting up against and it's, especially when it comes to children, I mean people are literally transitioning children and I use that term to encompass the use of puberty blockers to make kids sterile ultimately.
	Anything to interfere with their natural development?
	Exactly.
	Hormones, surgeries.
	And the most interesting thing, when I talk to people about this, I used to live in Portland.
	I literally just moved out right before we flew here.
	I would talk to people there, friends of mine, and I would tell them what's happening and they would just, they would deny it.
	They would say, it's not actually happening.
	And then you show them the numbers.
	And then they say, well, it's a good thing.
	Yeah, exactly.
	It's bizarre.
	Yeah.
	Somehow it's good to cut off little girls' breasts.
	Somehow that's a good thing.
	In what world is that a good thing?
	Well, in the world where you're trying to liberate the human will from its own material confines, that's the world.
	Yeah, this is sort of like what we were talking about earlier, this unconstrained vision which is laid out in Thomas Sowell's book, but this idea that you can just be whatever you want to be, you can change the human mind and the human body to conform to some ideal.
	Again, I don't know what that ideal really is or entails because it's ultimately quite miserable.
	It's hard to know what the numbers of detransitioners are because something like 75% of them don't go back to the clinic.
	There's also an ideological investment in Covering that up.
	That's that's true.
	Yeah, but the gender ideologues aren't keeping a good record.
	Correct.
	Yeah, the activists will usually say, oh, it's it's it rarely ever happens.
	It's one or two percent.
	But from the numbers that we do have, it's closer to 30 percent, which is pretty significant.
	And so these people, I've just as a quick aside there as well.
	I've seen studies that suggest that it's between 80 and 90 percent of people who thought they were trans upon reaching puberty end up realizing they're not trans.
	Yes, that's correct.
	So that's a huge percentage who are kind of brought into the social contagion of it.
	Correct.
	And then out of that, 30% are detransitioners as well.
	And even some of them are not necessarily even caught up in the social contagion in the sense that they learned it from TikTok or whatever, but it's just they might be gay, they might be uncomfortable with their body, they might be a more effeminate Males or whatever.
	And yeah, the study, I think it was, um, I'm blanking on his name.
	He's in Canada.
	It was, I think it was the 80, 88% of, of boys desisted once, once they've gone through puberty.
	So that makes me wonder, you know, that other 17% or, you know, that other 10, 10 to 12% could they also desist if given the right treatment.
	And after talking to interviewing many therapists and psychiatrists, I think that's very likely the case.
	So in my view, that's one thing I've learned when making this documentary is that the category of trans just doesn't really make sense.
	I mean, people who have, you know, let's say severe anxiety or BPD or some other kind of psychological problem, we don't put them into a new category of person.
	And this is a psychological problem.
	And so it just seems to me to make perfect sense that it's very likely that everyone could absolve their gender distress.
	Through some appropriate means.
	Sometimes it's physical health, sometimes it's mental health.
	You know, what I find fascinating about this is if a boy goes to a clinic and says, oh, I feel like a girl, they'll say, OK, well, we need to give you estrogen to make you more feminine.
	It's like, well, no sensible world would say, OK, maybe you've got low testosterone.
	Maybe you actually need a bit more testosterone to make you feel more masculine, which is in line with what you naturally are.
	And the fact that they don't do that, Implies that there's an ideological reason.
	Correct.
	And then you think, okay, well, how do these people form their constituency from which they draw their power base?
	And you realize they interrupt and say, do the thing recruiting.
	Yeah.
	Before, before the constituency, the question is why?
	Why do they have that belief?
	And my argument to you would be that they get that from the crazies in academia.
	Oh yeah, absolutely.
	And then, yeah.
	Yeah, it comes exclusively from the sort of woke ideological perspective.
	Correct.
	That they get in academia and then we can, then the constituency.
	But yeah, you are right.
	There's a belief that is enacted into the will.
	And then I think, I genuinely think that these people who are acting against the better self-interest of the kids, they are essentially recruiting for a constituency.
	They're like, okay, well, I've got to bring them in as quickly as possible in order to get them in the pipeline.
	So they will go out and advocate and bring in more.
	And so we can expand the dominion of what we have here.
	Yeah, the problem is that it's multifaceted.
	There are so many reasons why the trans identification has taken off.
	Part of it is the social contagion aspect, which there's data for and it's easy to understand, especially young girls are more susceptible to that.
	But the numbers have increased for young boys and girls who identify as trans now, not just girls.
	But I think in the UK it's like 4,000% increase.
	It's insane.
	Yeah, but there's so many factors.
	So there's just the factor of wanting to make more money.
	So you have actually new surgeries.
	I interviewed a detransitioner who's become a friend of mine and she got a non-binary top surgery, which is slightly different than a regular double.
	What's the difference?
	I could be getting this wrong because it was a while ago that I interviewed her, almost a year ago, but it was something like they left a little bit more flesh or something because they want it to be a little bit more androgynous, I believe, and they shaped the nipples in a slightly different way.
	This is a real surgery.
	And there are now surgeries for eunuchs because that's a legitimate category.
	So look, maybe I'll flesh out a potential point of disagreement we have on this.
	Sure, go ahead.
	So my take on this is, you can do anything you want when you're 18.
	If you're 18 and you want it, best of luck to you.
	I don't think the state should pay for it, but you should have sovereignty and dominion over your own body.
	That is not the issue for me.
	The issue for me is this is being done to children.
	And I do not believe that children can consent to such procedures.
	To be honest with you, I think that at 18 years old, if I look back at my 18 year old self now, and I'd made decisions like that, I'm 44, I'd be very annoyed I was allowed.
	No, I think even in my 30s, I was a moron.
	And I think that when I'm in my 60s, I look back at myself now and go, wow, you were a moron.
	I think that life's a constant process of learning and actually these sort of Decisions that can't be undone.
	Correct.
	Maybe thought about a little bit more.
	We interviewed somebody who had their, who was that guy?
	Miranda Yardley.
	Yeah, who had his penis and testicles cut off, self-identified as a gay man.
	And I asked him if he regretted that decision and he said it's complicated, right Travis?
	I believe so.
	Yeah, we had a disagreement on that that we filmed using our spectrum street epistemology where I thought the age should be 25 when the brain is fully formed.
	Even then, the transitioner that I interviewed, she was 30 and she transitioned three years later.
	So the problem I have with it, aside from they're not adults, you know, what's happening to kids is that even as adults, you can be indoctrinated into a cult-like ideology and do horrible things to yourself and other people.
	And the other tricky part is that Yes, you do have dominion over your own body, and I'm not an authoritarian.
	I don't want to restrict what people can do.
	However, it also does affect other people because men will enter into women's spaces, for instance.
	You know, there's a number of knock-on effects that come from this self-identification.
	And sometimes, again, as we were talking earlier, they don't even have the surgeries.
	They don't do anything.
	They just say, Yeah, that's an entirely separate problem.
	It's not like you're opening the door to a bunch of grifters, essentially, who just want access to vulnerable people.
	Correct.
	Which is obviously not something you want either.
	But assuming we're talking only about the people who have a sincere belief on this, I would be more inclined to believe it's a kind of mental illness.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	I mean, I don't know how else you would describe it.
	You know, I've also talked to people who identify as trans who are happy, you know, with their surgeries.
	Buck Angels, I feature in my series.
	But he didn't have surgery.
	Buck didn't have surgery.
	Double mastectomy.
	Yeah.
	Oh, bottom surgery.
	Bottom surgery.
	No.
	Correct.
	Yeah.
	And, you know, I really enjoyed my conversation with Buck.
	Buck and I disagree about certain things.
	But, you know, that brings up another interesting thing.
	So this whole I've been covering woke topics for a long time.
	I have another series that's 11 episodes long and I was just going to do another episode on the gender topic but it turned into such a complex thing so I decided to make another series on it.
	But where I was going with that is it's been such a depressing just heart-wrenching topic and then what I've come up against recently is that it's even more depressing is You go to people who, like the gender critical feminists for instance, who you'd think would ostensibly be on your side, but they will nitpick every single little thing you say.
	For instance, if I call Buck a he, if I use he, him pronouns, because Buck is biologically female.
	And again, I don't want to say the sentence, he acknowledges that he is a biological female, because that's just weird.
	It's linguistically strange.
	However, I just don't give a shit what pronouns people use as long as we're not obfuscating reality or causing problems.
	But some of these feminists, some of these gender critical people are just as cultish and just as annoying and are derailing our progress.
	Almost as bad, frankly, as some of these trans activists.
	And it's really depressing because you have people like Stella O'Malley, who founded Genspect, who I've interviewed for the series, and she does a lot of amazing work.
	Helps detransitioners, helps families, helps parents.
	And she just gets vilified because she said the wrong thing in a documentary when she had no idea about what, for instance, AGP is.
	And so it's really frustrating when you can't even have a cohesive pushback against this because people are just derailing it for their own I think one of the problems that I guess the gender critical feminists have is that this is a sort of successor ideology to their original position.
	They wouldn't admit that though.
	They don't like to admit it but anyone who knows about the ideological genealogy of these things knows that this comes from essentially Judith Butler and you know this is a tradition that they've been following in for quite some time now.
	So I'm curious.
	So when you've done the documentary and you've interviewed these people, this is heavy, man.
	I mean, this is like, it is.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	I spent all summer in front of my computer editing and I would just, you know, I would literally just break down and cry, which I don't generally do.
	But I, you know, I'm having to research all of this, look at footage, look at just these horrific images and read about these horrible stories.
	So this bit's not going on YouTube, by the way.
	Let's talk about some of the grotesque things that you've seen then because I think everyone's seen the photos of the skin and it is just harrowing.
	Yeah, I saw one the other day on Twitter that was, I think it was missing skin from the leg with the faux penis and it was just so disturbing.
	And have you actually seen those faux penises?
	Yeah, that's what I'm talking about.
	This is not penis.
	And there's no sensitivity in it.
	It's not connected to the nervous system.
	What blew my mind, I interviewed Michael Biggs, this brilliant sociologist who completely demolished the Dutch study or the Dutch protocol, which is basically the only somewhat rigorous, somewhat rigorous study that has been done to sort of prove that we should trans children.
	It's completely fallacious.
	The whole study is nonsense.
	There's a lot of problems with it.
	But in interviewing him, I asked him to describe in detail some of these surgeries and what happens for these kids.
	And at one point he mentioned how Their plan is kind of backfiring because, you know, they want kids to take puberty blockers so they can pass as the opposite of sex more easily, which is true, they can.
	But when boys do that, their testicles and their penis doesn't fully develop.
	So they can't get the surgery.
	Yeah, but some of them do go on to get the surgery and that was the part that blew my mind.
	He said that they will take parts of their intestine or like part of a fish or something.
	I could be wrong.
	Yeah, I've heard about this.
	To line the neo-vagina.
	Is the reason this isn't going to go on YouTube because it'll get censored?
	Doubtless, yeah.
	Okay, but isn't this part of the problem?
	Yeah, to line the neo-vagina because their penis wasn't big enough to invert it.
	Is the reason this isn't going to go on YouTube because it will get censored?
	Doubtless, yeah.
	Okay, but isn't this part of the problem?
	100%.
	I mean, the fact that they're censoring this means they're complicit.
	So we need to go after them too at some point.
	All of the people who are complicit in this need to be punished.
	I mean, there has to be some kind of accountability.
	Because what he just said about that, people need to know about that.
	Yeah, I know.
	And this is why, honestly, Twitter is the best place.
	Yeah I know.
	Just because you can post all of this stuff and it just doesn't make sense.
	So I mean I've seen some of the most horrific things when it comes to this.
	So Travis and I were drowning our sorrows one night and I was asking him like You know, because he was kind of bummed from seeing all this stuff too.
	And I said to him, you know, normally if someone said to me, hey man, this really bums me out, I would say don't do it.
	But I said, Travis, like, you've got to do this, man.
	Like, you have to do this.
	Yeah, yeah.
	I mean, it was kind of a depressing realization.
	You know, I don't have to do it.
	There are other people who can do it.
	However, what's interesting is that, you know, I don't have a child who thinks that they're the opposite sex.
	I don't have a good friend who got caught up in this.
	I mean, now I do because I've met those people.
	But I didn't have any kind of dog in the fight initially.
	However, what interests me in this sort of thing is the kind of Blind dogmatism that comes along with ideological thinking and the kind of cult-like behavior that goes with it.
	And so I feel compelled to tell those stories because I think people need to know about this stuff.
	And hopefully, you know, through the series, people will... I'm especially interested in how parents deal with this and how it affects kids.
	Well, I'm a parent and I'm terrified of this.
	Yeah, you should be.
	Keep them out of public school.
	Off of TikTok for sure.
	Yeah well I don't have any social media.
	That's good.
	TikTok in particular.
	It's just so crazy that there are so many parents who, and I have to say I've noticed the pattern, it's often liberal white women in America who are, oh my child's trans and they derive some sort of pleasure from this.
	Celebrate it.
	Exactly and that's what genuinely scares me.
	Even Buck Angel, when I was interviewing Buck, Buck was very much against, you know, doing any kind of medical procedures for children and was saying, you know, it really creeps me out that all these parents are celebrating their child's disorder.
	And even Buck calls it a disorder.
	It is, yeah.
	And that's how they get out probation.
	My daughter's friend was telling me that in her school, kids pretend to be trans to fit in.
	Well, totally.
	And I was just so taken aback by this a couple years ago, she told me that.
	Well, what's interesting, I haven't heard too many people talk about this, but I think it's abundantly clear.
	I mean, I don't have data on this, but it just makes so much sense, which is that after George Floyd and the coronavirus, everyone was locked down and they started, you know, rioting and all this stuff.
	And then this ideology that you guys have been talking about, it was just exploded everywhere, right?
	And so all these white people, all these heterosexual men are starting to feel guilty about their supposed privilege and it's pushed onto everyone.
	They're all, you know, you're an oppressor if you fit into this category.
	How do you get out of that category?
	Here comes gender ideology.
	Very easy to become LGBT.
	A B requires you to do nothing, actually.
	Or queer.
	Or queer, yeah.
	But I mean, being bisexual, I married a woman, but I'm bisexual.
	Okay, what can you do?
	Make me suck a dick?
	You know, you're not going to demand proof, right?
	And so suddenly, the LGBT category expands.
	And oh, look, a third of people now are LGBT.
	It's like, yeah, are they, though?
	You know, are they?
	Yeah.
	And that's one of the things they say is that, you know, now that in greater numbers, kids are identifying this way.
	And so people will say, well, it's just because there's more acceptance.
	It's not a very good argument.
	Yeah.
	If that were the case, though, then they wouldn't be cohorts.
	Then you'd see it across.
	You'd see it adults.
	Exactly.
	But you don't see that, so therefore, but it's really interesting when you've, it's like any ideology, like if you've decided that something is true beforehand, there's no evidence that someone can show you.
	It'd be like, so would you say like, well what about old people that you're interested in?
	Well, and then, so then they have to do mental gymnastics.
	Yeah, they have to be like, they've got a false consciousness.
	Some unfalsifiable position that they have to have arrived in.
	So yeah, so how many people did you interview for this?
	I think it was about 20.
	Yeah, I think I interviewed a dozen or so for my previous series.
	And then for this one, I was lucky enough to go to a conference in Killarney, Ireland, put on by GenSpect, called The Bigger Picture.
	So anywhere that WPATH shows up, and people should know WPATH is the World Professional, I think, what is it, Authority for Transgender Health?
	Authority might not be the right word.
	Basically, they're just a bunch of activists.
	They put out all these guidelines, these standards of care for all these doctors to follow, which, by the way, they're pretty much all based on the Dutch study, which is fallacious.
	But so anywhere they do a conference, GenSpec will show up and do a counter conference, which I think is great.
	And it gets people talking across this divide.
	But I was able to go to that and interview most people there.
	So it was in Ireland and then in London.
	So I interviewed Helen Joyce, Buck Angel, like I mentioned.
	Helen was amazing.
	We actually had her on Peter's show not too long ago.
	Connor's interviewed her for us.
	Oh nice.
	The next one is in Lisbon.
	Lisbon, yep.
	So when you do this, so one of the things that we spoke of a little bit is you've invited people on who disagree with this and what's happened there.
	Well, so in this case, I actually had a Zoom call with somebody in Portland who sort of rides the fence, thinks that some people are truly trans, some kids are truly trans, and therefore this will help a certain number of them to get these surgeries and cut off their body parts.
	Which is an insane thing to say but it's true.
	I want to help children mutilate their bodies.
	Exactly.
	And I'm the good guy.
	Right.
	Sterilize them.
	And you're the transphobe if you disagree with me.
	You're the bigot.
	You got me there!
	But I'm not the one castrating children so I'm not going to take the moral judgment.
	But she at least feigned some interest in being interviewed and I asked her look if you know anyone else as well I would be happy to interview them, give them a fair shake but then she just didn't get back to me.
	No one ever wants to do these interviews who doesn't already agree with... Imagine that.
	Okay so where can people find your documentary?
	So it's exclusively on Locals for the moment.
	I have the first episode up there.
	It's travisbrown.locals.com.
	I'm also looking for some better distribution because I'd like it to get out into a wider audience and I have some of the clips and stuff on YouTube.
	And the woke reformation?
	Oh yes, that was my previous series which is all available on YouTube.
	I just want to quickly comment on that.
	So one of the reasons I think it's so interesting is that Travis, I don't want to put words in your mouth, you basically were raised in a Christian cult-like environment.
	Correct.
	And we've known each other for a long time and he came up to me and we were talking one night, I remember when your back was bad and you couldn't stand in the bar, and he said that This is years ago.
	The parallels between his experience and this wokeism thing are just so stark.
	And that's when he did the woke reformation.
	You had Douglas Murray in there.
	Right.
	You had a lot of... Diane Hersey-Alley.
	Yeah, I was in there.
	Neil Ferguson was in there.
	Meg Ramoswamy.
	Yeah.
	Yeah, yeah.
	Okay, and so for the third thing I thought we'd talk about is something mildly uncontroversial, which is like gay surrogacy, which is something that people are talking about a lot.
	So I think that we should begin
	um by just explaining what it is and so as I understand it this is where a gay couple pays a woman to be fertilized with one of their correct genetic data and the woman then carries the baby to term and then she gives birth to it and the gay couple take it and this results in lots of photos on the internet of men as if they've just given birth with their baby and lots of people find this rather offensive
	Um, can I just say, instead of going with convicted pedophile, we'll get to, okay.
	Cause there's, let's start with like a neutral thing.
	Well, that's the thing.
	This is just like the excesses.
	Okay.
	Okay.
	Let's begin with the normal stuff.
	Okay.
	Okay.
	What are your feelings on this?
	So, the Pope came out and issued a statement against this.
	This is kind of a hot-button issue right now.
	I wouldn't be surprised, basically, if this factored some mode of a minor role in the presidential election with Republicans falling on one side, which you can... Oh, it's doubtless going to have... Yeah, I think so, too.
	That's why I think this is important to talk about.
	I'm so glad we are.
	So, my feelings are, Ike, And I say this as an atheist, like, I don't believe in the concept of the sacred.
	And I don't think you do.
	I think things are sacred.
	Okay, so then maybe that's… But for different reasons.
	But anyway, so… Okay, so, to me, if you don't impose a category of sacred on something, it just makes it easier to think through.
	My feeling, and I've not really heard a good argument to the contrary, my feeling is that I have no problem, kind of my gut, my moral instinct tells me I have no problem with this, and my rational mind tells me I have no problem with it.
	But I'm wondering to the extent, because I have my son's gay and my daughter's gay, I wonder if that has influencing my thinking.
	I don't know.
	But I haven't heard a substantive disagreement to this.
	So basically, I don't see why everybody thinks that this is all of a sudden such a big problem.
	Right.
	Any thoughts?
	I guess I don't know enough about it to really have an informed opinion as to whether or not it's really the moral quandary that it's made out to be.
	I think it might be.
	I'm willing to be persuaded.
	This isn't an issue for me.
	I'm not raising a surrogate or anything like that.
	So this isn't the issue that I particularly care about but i see a lot of people debating it and i yeah i see that there's not good understanding besides and i think the issue is comes kind of from the trans issue because in the trans issue if we assume okay
	now there is a proper way that a boy or a girl should grow up and actually interfering with that is tantamount some sort of moral crime and i agree that is the case.
	We should allow them to develop naturally and not try to interfere with that.
	Well the same argument also applies for gay surrogacy as in the child is born to a mother and that child should naturally be allowed to develop with that mother and actually interrupting that bond Does something similar to the child, but interfering with them with, it's something artificial that even if it were to show that it was beneficial in some way, it's still not natural.
	And you're still, and so, and what that means is you've deprived them of something you can't quantify.
	So the relationship that you have with your mom or your dad, assuming they're not horrifically abusive people, just the average relationship, there is something a bit sacred about it, actually.
	And it is something that we really should be very careful and have very good justification to interrupt.
	And if a person who doesn't have that I think is deprived of something that they can't easily quantify.
	And so it's a sense of belonging, a sense of purpose, a sense of self, a kind of identity, something that can't just artificially be created somewhere else.
	And I think that the main issue that people on the right have with gay surrogacy is they feel that's being interrupted.
	And the artificialness of the new relationship is almost kind of a vanity project.
	for the gay adoption couple, rather than what's in the best interest of the child.
	Because I think that we would probably agree that the best interest of any child is to be raised by their mother and their father.
	That's probably going to be just spiritually, if nothing else, the best.
	I'll bracken that for a minute.
	Yeah, I'm just trying to lay out their position in a fair way, I think.
	Go ahead.
	Well, it just occurred to me that the argument you're making almost maps onto the argument for the decline of religion.
	Because I don't think any of us are religious, but as I've grown older, I've seen the benefit of religion.
	And you do lose something when you lose religion.
	That's why we have all these insane new cultish religions pop up.
	So I think it's a really difficult problem.
	I don't think it's as analogous to the trans thing because it is not as obvious.
	It's not as obvious to me.
	You're saying this is something more intangible.
	So it's very clear if you cut off a child's penis that it's just clearly problematic and going to cause a problem.
	Well, let me stop you there because the problem is when you kind of instrumentalize it like that, it's like, well, if it can be shown not to be a problem, then there's no moral issue with it.
	That's not exactly what I'm saying, I'm just saying it's not as obvious.
	Sure, but if it could be shown, well actually no, it is beneficial, we've got the data, then it becomes okay to do it.
	Whereas, actually it's kind of deontologically the wrong thing for you to do, even if that was the case.
	That is a truly fascinating argument.
	There's an intrinsic wrong to that.
	No, so this is why you could never make that comment in the university.
	You'd be out.
	That would be it.
	You'd be up for the diversity board.
	Yeah, that's the other thing.
	Okay, so let's talk about that because that's so interesting because what you just said, I think, transcends this issue.
	So, and I want to make sure I capture this correctly.
	So, Travis said cutting off a penis is more conspicuous, and you said, let's say that you looked at data and it said ultimately it was a good thing, then you can't say that it was immoral.
	Is that correct?
	That would be the position that this comes to.
	Okay, so we got a few things going on there.
	I find this just mind-blowingly interesting.
	The first is, Well, I personally can't imagine what that data could possibly be.
	Yeah, I don't know.
	I could not fathom.
	But let's just imagine that it turns up and actually we can't deny it.
	This is a thought experiment.
	We wave a magic wand and it's like, holy smokes.
	I was so totally wrong about that.
	Yeah, yeah.
	And I'm like, wow, we didn't see that coming.
	So then if that's the case, then we can make the argument that That we can judge what's moral by its consequences or its benefits.
	OK, so if that's the case, then all we would need to do is look at the data on the outcomes of kids who have surrogate parents and we can judge the morality of it in the same way that we could with gay marriage or anything else.
	But this is the problem with utilitarianism, because when you have data, data is an abstract collection of things.
	And when you abstract anything away, you are subtracting information on purpose.
	And in this further information are a lot of things that we can't quantify but are real and actually do have psychological impacts.
	So for example, the relationship I have with my mother and father.
	I cherish it, obviously.
	My parents are great.
	I'm so lucky to have such great parents.
	I would loathe to think of a world where I wasn't raised by them.
	This is not in the realm of data, but there is an intrinsic moral good in that relationship.
	The problem with gay service is you deny that.
	Okay, so the two things that you said that I wanted to pick up on was... Even if they might turn into millionaires... Yeah, yeah, for sure.
	There's still something spiritual.
	You said two things that I need to disambiguate.
	You said proper and natural.
	Yes.
	One, what do you mean by natural?
	And two, not everything that's natural is good.
	Like poison ivy is natural and that's not good.
	We don't want to rub that on our face.
	Isn't that a kind of naturalistic fallacy?
	Well, the problem is the way you approach it there.
	It's like, well, just because something's natural doesn't mean it's good.
	But that gets converted into natural things are not good.
	And that's not true either.
	Some things that are natural are good.
	And we can demonstrate goodness of them.
	For example, the relationship between the mother and the baby.
	That's definitely a good.
	We demonstrate that goodness by outcome?
	We demonstrate it by the... I think, and this is controversial, but I think basically the enlightenment framing of morality is just completely wrong.
	Moral content is found in almost every action that we take.
	It's not just in outcome.
	It's not just in virtue.
	It's not just the ontological.
	So, all of these things are moral considerations.
	No one would look at a man who's trying to destroy the world, but accidentally created a really profitable form of energy that was free and abundant, and go, oh, what a good guy!
	You'd be like, no, I was trying to kill you all!
	So, the consequent is not the sole locus of morality.
	And if you do something in the wrong way, but you accidentally end up with the wrong, with the correct outcome, well, then you're still not a good guy.
	You just got lucky.
	Okay, I think that's right.
	I think that's right.
	So yeah, so the entire framework we use to kind of understand morality actually is kind of deformed.
	Because it comes from this idea that morality can be located in one section.
	And that's not true.
	And it's only when all of these sections line up so we can say, yeah, these things are all good.
	That the thing is genuinely good in and of itself.
	There are definitely times and places where these things collapse, like like say, you know, all you say is natural.
	Sure, that's one pillar of morality and definitely natural things that are bad.
	But we can also look at the others as in, you know, the mother holding her baby.
	That's a good thing, you know, and the wholesome life that the child has as a consequence of the good upbringing.
	Well, that's a good thing, you know, whereas it can fall down on any of these pillars.
	But if it doesn't, then I think we can say this is a good.
	Yeah, I guess I'm confused as to why that wouldn't just be factored in as more data if you expand what data means.
	Not just necessarily a particular metric that's super easy to measure, but your well-being, as you mentioned, you know, growing up with your parents.
	It does seem like a data point, maybe it feels cold and removed to call it that, but it does seem like... Well, that's kind of the problem, because a lot of these things might not be measurable.
	Sure.
	The way that you feel that you belong to somewhere.
	I mean, did you grow up in Portland?
	Thankfully not.
	But there are definitely, and maybe it's because England's an older and more settled country, right?
	People in the United States, they move a lot.
	And it's nothing to people in the United States.
	It's like something like 11 times in their lives.
	Oh, way more than that.
	Yeah, but on average people in America, 11 times, whereas people in Britain, my God, man, they discovered a body in Cheddar Gorge.
	It was like 6,000 BC, right?
	So they genetically tested the area around and his descendant lives three miles away from where that body was found.
	This guy was linearly descended from a guy 6,000 years ago.
	And so You can imagine what that guy's feeling of belonging to the area around Cheddar Gorge is, right?
	He's like, no, no, I, I just... They just can't quantify that.
	Exactly.
	This is a spiritual experience.
	Okay.
	So this, this is why I'm reluctant to use the term data because I'm trying, I'm trying to think in a very human paradigm, human centered paradigm, whereas a data centered paradigm is outside of the human.
	It's a universal paradigm.
	Yeah, but you know that as an individual you might be more depressed and therefore might need to do something to alleviate that depression.
	Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
	And I'm not saying these things can't happen or don't exist or anything like that, but what I'm saying is if we take a more sort of human focused and sort of sentimental view of the thing, There's still moral content in there.
	In fact, there's moral content in there.
	It's not captured by the universal scientific view and the data collective view of reality.
	And so we're losing something in the human experience when we don't consider this option.
	That's what I think.
	I have a voice in the back of my head saying don't say this, but I'm going to say it anyway.
	So the problem with that is, you know, like your sense of belonging.
	You just have to change the scale.
	So you just have to go up to like hundreds of millions.
	Like you have to give it some kind of way to make it intelligible to an external observer.
	Like, so like going back to what Travis said about lopping off the penis and, you know, the, the, the electroputative benefits of that.
	I'm trying to think.
	So when, when, when you make a moral decision, lots of things are going on there, right?
	Part of that is, I had a conversation with David Deutsch and I, the Oxford physicist, and one of the things I mentioned in that conversation is that there are people in Africa now, this has been going on for quite some time, who are HIV positive and have sex with infants because they believe that it's... Right, you've heard about that.
	Okay.
	So, in that sense, you can make a kind of pre-moral judgment because the actions, empirically, that's just false.
	You can, but does that really address the real issue?
	No, it doesn't address the real issue, but it goes to show that, well, among other things, that the kind of the data, like in the same way that you said about the penis, which I find it so fascinating, is that if someone chopped off their penis and somehow it could be shown, not only was it in society's best interest, but it was directly in their best interest, what is the relationship between that and morality?
	If it was an intrinsic good to them, like if that helped them lead a good life, Then wouldn't that be the moral?
	If it helps you lead a good life, that's a moral decision.
	But this is my problem with utilitarian morality.
	The greatest good for the greatest number dictates what is right and wrong.
	Then you end up having to find yourself saying, well, I mean, horrifically, the act itself, the virtue of it, is actually a massive vice.
	But if it turns out with an overall, and it can literally be like 51-49%, then this was a morally good thing.
	And I think that's the wrong standard to judge almost anything.
	I agree.
	I agree mostly.
	It seems to me that you would need some kind of utilitarian thinking in your calculus.
	Like if you drew a deontological egoist, it would have to be somewhere in that little triangle.
	Well, like I was saying, I view it as more of a process.
	And everyone makes moral calculations at every point of the So if you had a hero who's like, oh, I just want to save the city and he ends up blowing parts of it up.
	And it's like, okay, look, we know you meant well.
	And then he's like, yeah, okay, but this time I got it.
	And he blows up another part and then third time blows up another part.
	And he's like, right, I'll do this.
	I was like, no, no, this is your own vanity.
	This is not about what you actually can accomplish.
	So in every single part, there are this moral calculations as to what has already contextually happened.
	So it's not that there isn't a place for a consequentialist analysis, it's that all morality encompasses all of that.
	Okay, so let's say you switch to, and if you don't want to accept this, that's fine too.
	Let's say that you switch to a deontological framework and say it's like the right thing to do is to chop off your penis.
	And again, I'm just like... I can't believe this!
	We are facing the... We live in crazy times, and so here we are having this conversation.
	In a sane world, we would never have this conversation.
	You would say that that's the right thing to do because you had some kind of data or evidence to... You wouldn't say it's the right thing to do because of consequences.
	You'd say it's the right thing to do because it's the right thing to do.
	A priori, in and of itself.
	Correct.
	That's the right thing to do.
	And they do say that.
	This is the claim they make.
	They say, well look, if a person is born in the wrong body and they If they would feel as if they are not themselves, then you are oppressing them.
	You are stifling their will.
	You need to liberate them from the physical constraints that they have been cursed with, essentially.
	And so it becomes a priori an intrinsic moral good in and of itself.
	And there are things like that.
	Like the relationship between a mother and the baby.
	So let's go back to that.
	That's important.
	That's an a priori intrinsic good in and of itself.
	And I think that's what the people who are objecting to gay surrogacy are really, and I'm not sure, they can't articulate it like that.
	Most of them are just looking at this in a natural sort of way.
	That's wrong, but they don't know why.
	But I think that's what they're appealing to.
	And like I said, I'm not saying I'm the one saying this.
	- Yeah, yeah, for sure. - What I've noticed in that conversation.
	- So, did you want to say something wrong?
	- No, go on.
	- Okay, so, okay, so I do question the idea of, I don't, I think you're right, in that there is something natural in that bond.
	And it's almost natural by the definition of what natural means.
	It's literally nature.
	Correct.
	I'm not sure embedded in that is good, and I'm not sure And I realize this is going to sound like a crazy argument, but I'm not sure that the same good couldn't be yielded by two – this is assuming all sets of parents are loving and decent human beings – that the same kind of good couldn't be yielded by two gay men.
	I'm not sure.
	You've seen the pictures of the baby on the… Yeah, yeah, yeah.
	So the issue here is That's predicated on the idea that actually these things are interchangeable, right?
	You could conceivably get the same good out of something that is different.
	What if you get a different type of good out of it?
	You may well.
	And it's entirely possible you get a different type of good.
	But the thing is you've deprived a baby of this other unique good that is particular.
	And when we say unique, we're not even talking category now.
	We're talking about the individual bond between this mother and that child is different to the bond between that mother and that child.
	Although we still recognize them as something similar, but the content of it, the spiritual, sentimental, moral content of it.
	Is different.
	And so this is the uniqueness of a human experience that we are interrupting when we engage ourselves with that.
	And we say, well, you'll get something similar with these people over here and maybe you will.
	And I'm not, it could be better.
	Right.
	And I'm not saying it can't be, but there is definitely something that we have interrupted.
	We have disrespected that.
	And that I think actually there's a level of hubris in that.
	Say, no, we know better than the iterative generational learning of the entire human race for all time.
	There's a profound arrogance to interrupt that and say, no, it's fine.
	And just cause these two guys want the baby.
	It's like, well, there are other ways to get babies and it would just require a change in their lifestyles basically.
	And you know, that's fine if it's, you know, there's the other aspect.
	Okay.
	Consenting adults.
	Fair enough.
	The baby doesn't get to choose this and it will never get to choose this.
	And so you're imposing this for the vanity of another couple on this thing.
	And so, and like I said, I'm not, like I said, I'm not committed to saying no, never or anything like that.
	But this is, I think the sort of metaphysics that underpin it that aren't being properly spoken about.
	Yeah, well, you said vanity.
	I'm just curious.
	I mean, is it always vanity?
	I mean, I know your son wants to be a father.
	Yeah.
	So I don't know that it's always vanity unless you're saying they should adopt instead.
	I mean, say, well, you know, your son wants to be a father.
	Totally normal and respectable thing.
	But the locus there is on the importance on your son, right?
	It's not on the importance of the baby themselves.
	I don't have to talk to him, but yeah.
	Conceptually, it kind of has to be because when I say, or when you say, I want to be a father, you have a lineal descent there.
	And so it is a necessary connection between you and your child.
	Whereas actually, if it's not, and it's, you know, for at least one of the men in the relationship, this is I don't want to say arbitrary, but it is arbitrary.
	And so really that actually is an interchangeable position.
	Whereas my sons are destined, it's written in the stars that my sons will be my sons.
	At the very beginning of time in the Big Bang, we knew that if there's a God, he can trace the movement of atoms until eventually my son, I'm holding him after my wife's given birth.
	That was necessary.
	That's an eternal thing.
	And he always was destined to be my son.
	And he will never be anyone else's son.
	Yeah.
	Okay.
	It's interesting.
	Those are really interesting arguments.
	I don't know if they compel me, but I find them... I'm just saying this is what I think these people feel if they don't properly articulate it.
	Yeah.
	And so correct me if I'm wrong, my understanding of that is it comes down to There's something natural, like subspecie aeternitatis, under the watchful eye of eternity between the bonds and the relationship between a mother and a child.
	And I think for honesty in the conversation, I think that that's true.
	I don't think it can be replicated outside of that.
	With that being said, It's not clear to me that that is an overriding moral principle or that that's, I guess I'd have to go back to, that's why I thought your penis chopping off the penis was such a fascinating thing to say, because I guess I'd have to go down to like, how would you How would you make a judgment that that's a good?
	And I know that must sound like it's presupposed in the natural phenomenon itself, but to say that it's a good, you have to import something else onto that.
	Sure.
	Like facts.
	Well, maybe.
	I mean, you are absolutely right.
	There are contingent circumstances.
	Where, for example, if you've got abusive parents, and the parents go on to abuse the children, okay, well, obviously, we have a moral obligation to interrupt the relationship between the mother and the father in order to protect the child, right?
	That's absolutely the case.
	No argument.
	But the thing is, I don't think you can know in advance.
	I mean, maybe there are going to be situations in which you can, where you've got a long-standing pattern of behavior from, you know, a pedophile has a baby, and you're just like, okay, well, we can't really allow them to have that, right?
	But in almost all cases, but even then that's a severely extenuating circumstance.
	Right.
	So it's not the default that you would have.
	It would have to be, no, we've got real strong and legitimate concerns that actually to allow nature to take its course here is going to result in the abuse and psychological harm.
	So it is consequences then.
	So the consequences have to... It's all things.
	Again, it's never not any of these things.
	But this is why you have to have absolutely concrete Uh, and uncontroversial reasons to be able to take that action to simply say, well, these two gay men would like a baby.
	No, I agree.
	Okay.
	So we're, we're totally on a hundred.
	We're on the same page.
	So that's, there has to be a kind of take a child away from their mother, but if the mother is going to literally burn it with cigarettes, right.
	So that we're not talking about those cases.
	So you're absolutely right.
	We can't just.
	And this is where I think I had a Twitter spat with Matt Walsh or he, you know, so you can't just accept that your moral positions should be adopted by the society.
	Like you have to make argument.
	You have to give reasons for this.
	And then they percolate into jurisprudence or we, you know, we, that's why conversation and discourse, dialogue and healthy discussion are so important.
	So yeah, you do have that.
	It is important to make that argument and it is important to trace those steps.
	So for me, this argument comes down to, there is something, I want to say, I don't know, like, it's not morally seductive, but there is something like, I got something inside me telling me that there is something to that.
	I have to crystallize what that is, that bond between a mother and the child.
	Well, this is why it's called spiritual, even though I'm not referring to religion, right?
	Because it's just a sense.
	It's a feeling.
	It's a sentiment.
	It's an intuition.
	You know, it's something Very pre-rational.
	Yeah, I wonder if that's been put in me by society or if that's something I should have.
	Exactly.
	I don't know.
	I don't know anyone who could probably tease that out and explain it rationally.
	But this is the thing, isn't it?
	Like, okay, so we've got a bunch of stuff here that we can't really rationally determine.
	But we know he's real.
	You recognize the sacredness of the bond between a mother and a child.
	I don't like the word sacred, but yes.
	I know.
	But the thing is, this is why when you see a mother mistreating her child, you get a physical repulsion.
	If I see kids skipping school, I don't get the sort of physical repulsion I would get if I saw a mother abusing a child.
	Like that, you would be like, hang on a second.
	You have, and it's almost like a divine thing.
	Right.
	And I can see easily why the religious people go, yeah, obviously God made it that way.
	God made you feel.
	And I can see why they said, I'm not saying I believe that.
	Like you still get the intrinsic repugnance.
	How could you hurt your child?
	You know, how could you do this sadistically to hurt your child?
	And so, you know what I mean?
	It's definitely there.
	It's definitely there.
	Even if we can't properly describe it.
	Yes, I mean, it must be evolutionarily programmed.
	Right.
	And so it is hard to not have it fall into the naturalistic fallacy of it.
	It does seem that in one way or another, we do have to articulate those impulses and then assess them in some way, even if we're not using scientific measurements.
	But yeah, there's some sort of assessment that we have to.
	Exactly.
	And this is what the religious people are saying.
	Yeah.
	They're saying that we've got the fuzzy language that deals with human intuition and feeling.
	We're not going to give you data, but we are going to give you something you feel.
	They have the wrong method of assessment, I'd argue.
	An ancient text is not going to do that.
	Well, you were secular liberalist.
	I've argued this as well, as a secular liberalist.
	I'm coming to the conclusion that reality that we live in is a lot more complex than actually the sort of rationalistic enlightenment is prepared to admit.
	And these really fuzzy sentimental concepts, they have real validity and they definitely inform the way we behave because there's something true about it.
	It is true that the individual relationship between this mother and this child is irreplaceable and unreplicable.
	So, I guess what hasn't come up that I'm curious, the argument that I always hear is, well, you're like renting a woman's body.
	Oh, yeah.
	These are all things I would say downstream from the primary concern, but that is true.
	Okay.
	Well, I mean, can we address some of those secondary or tertiary concerns?
	So, like, I never understand that because like all manual labor is that.
	Have you seen the pictures of those dudes on the oil rigs, like moving those?
	Like, okay, so you're renting some guy's body for that.
	Like, you can't rent a woman's, like, But this is where we get into, again, that some things are noble and some things are ignoble.
	For example, prostitution is an ignoble pursuit in most people's conception of when you make a noble-ignoble calculation, whereas manual labor is a very noble thing to do.
	So let me throw this out, getting back to your point about what evidence informs how we can... Just a quick thing.
	What I'm saying is, essentially, it does come down to the distinction of sacred and profane.
	It genuinely does come down to that.
	Okay, well that's why I was going to try to circumvent that.
	I know, but that's what it's rooted in.
	Well, let me throw this out to you.
	I don't have this data.
	I did see this and I'm sure that there's a lot of cause, but we can just do the magic wand thing where we can pretend something's true for two minutes.
	Yeah.
	Let's say, so your claim, so the claim on the table is that prostitution is ignoble.
	But let's say that I could show you through these rigorous cross-cultural studies, et cetera, go all around the world, and we find every place that's legalized prostitution, and even as an experiment, 20s in Saudi Arabia, rape rates are way down.
	Would that change your, so then you'd have a scale, right?
	With one bucket, rape rates down, the other one bucket, which would weigh heavier on the scale?
	It depends how you're judging it.
	Is it a moral scale?
	Yeah, exactly.
	It's a scale for ignoble.
	Would it still be ignoble?
	Yeah, of course.
	Because the nobility of it is based in this sort of pre-theoretical spiritual view of what it is to have a good human life.
	And for example, the problem that you have is that these sort of metaphysical categories of husband and wife are imbued with moral value.
	Even if it's just coming out of our traditions from an evolutionary perspective.
	These things have moral value, and prostitute interferes with that, actually.
	Okay, but I'll throw a counter example then if I may.
	So for a lot of men... I just want to be clear, I'm not trying to condemn every prostitute or anything like that.
	No, no, no.
	It's hypothetical.
	It's all hypothetical, but that will stop people from meming it out and calling you a Nazi.
	Yeah, I know.
	Everybody's a Nazi.
	- Okay.
	- Okay, so.
	- Gotten that out of the way.
	- Sold that, yeah.
	- Done.
	- But so in that conception of a good life and what it is to have a good life, you have men, and I'll just be very blunt with you, they can't have sex.
	Like, nobody wants to have sex with them.
	And so having a sexual-- - Self?
	- No, I'm actually not speaking for myself, but.
	Some men, I don't know who they are, but... So those people, for them to have a good life, and if they have, maybe they don't like the social skills or what have you, going to a prostitute for them would help them... I'm not going to say it's going to live a virtuous life or a good life, but it would certainly be better than the option of not having sex.
	Sure.
	And I'm not saying that.
	That's why I'm not saying... But it would undermine your argument that it's ignorable.
	No, you can still do things that are ignoble because you have a physical necessity or desire to do that.
	Right.
	I mean, it's always going to be ignoble to take drugs, but people will still do it because there are other aspects to it that they find pleasurable, but they're never going to be proud that they're a drug taker.
	But let me ask you a question.
	I mean, they shouldn't be.
	Let me ask you a question.
	Might be while they're on drugs.
	Well, yeah, maybe.
	Let me ask you a question.
	So let's say that we had a prostitute who who's a woman, and she had rock bottom fees, 50 pence or 50 cents.
	Wow, that sounds cheap to me.
	However, she only slept with disabled individuals.
	Would you still consider that ignoble?
	The very act of prostitution is an ignoble thing.
	Okay.
	So it doesn't matter what the outcome is.
	It doesn't like there's something intrinsic in the act.
	Yeah.
	But the thing is, this is not the only thing to consider about the act.
	I mean, the reason that you present that kind of framework is because there are other things that in a way are goods and you can relate on a human level.
	OK, you know, you like Stealing to feed hungry children.
	Right.
	Right.
	It's always wrong still.
	It's always a wrong thing to do to steal because that's someone else's labor you're stealing from them.
	But that's not the only moral consideration with what's going on.
	And so, yeah, OK, you know, like Aladdin stealing bread to feed to the kids and stuff.
	Yeah, it was a bad thing to do, but it's not the only moral aspect of what's happened here.
	And so, you know, these things are complicated and messy and fuzzy.
	So, I'm asking you that, and I kind of went after you, if you will, for that ignoble thing, because I'm wondering if there's something intrinsic in the concept of surrogacy in the same way that it's intrinsic in the concept of prostitution.
	Like, is there something intrinsic in surrogacy, rather than, like, it's the rift between, or the schism between what's natural, what's not natural, to use a word used for proper.
	Like, is there something inherently problematic in that?
	I think for a lot of people there is.
	I'm not saying it's for me.
	I think that this is what a lot of people perceive on a gut level.
	I think you're right and I think that's what, when you have a conversation about this, we should figure out if the thing that intrinsically bothers you about the act is the thing which ought to bother you about the act.
	Because it could be it's just a cultural artifact or it could be that we have these impulses one way or the other.
	I'm going to defer to Burke on this and just say, look, our prejudices are kind of the lessons of history manifesting unconsciously through our choices and our disgust mechanisms.
	So, I mean, there are definitely reasons why people would not like that.
	They're not necessarily rational, but that doesn't mean they're not good reasons, right?
	So, as in, they may not be able to articulate why, but if surrogacy became something like literally everyone did, then you might find yourself ending up with a society of people who literally can't relate to women.
	I mean, one of the arguments would be like, well, men and women are different.
	And so if all the boys are raised by two gay men, what are they going to know of what women think?
	How are they going to relate to things like this?
	And so who knows?
	But this is a problem that like the ancient prejudice has been like, no, you don't do that because, and it doesn't even happen because you don't do it.
	But underlying it was the, it was the iterative, um, Bayesian learning that no men and women have to spend time in each other's company.
	They don't have to do what a wholesome, healthy thing, you know, that sort of thing, you know?
	Do you think sometimes, I mean it sort of sounds like we're trying to assess intuitions and see, essentially what Peter's trying to do is see the outcome.
	So sometimes that iterative process, it may actually be negative, right?
	I mean, for instance, if we have, let's say that most people are typically a little bit racist because they're worried about someone who looks different from them.
	But we've learned, you know, maybe through another iterative process that it's not really good to be exclusive and to treat people horribly just because they have different skin color.
	So is there a corrective mechanism there?
	Yeah, well everything's a corrective mechanism.
	For example, I actually think the problem with racism isn't discrimination, it's maltreatment.
	It's unfair treatment, actually.
	So now we're not on a rational foundation.
	It felt wrong to watch you abuse that guy because he's black.
	And that's a fair judgment.
	Everyone can make judgments like that.
	And do every day.
	But now if we go out, it's discriminatory.
	Now we've stigmatized the concept of discrimination, which used to be a very positive character trait.
	You discriminate all the time.
	Exactly.
	And it used to be a compliment.
	Oh, he's a very discriminating young man.
	Right.
	You know, that used to be a compliment because that is a compliment.
	You know, but John's pointing out that we are about to hit time.
	So, but there are other moral foundations that we can use with which to address things like racism.
	I mean, it's not fair.
	Is the easiest way to just say, don't be racist to that guy.
	It's not fair to him.
	Right.
	But it's not right to say, don't discriminate.
	No, I have to discriminate.
	Like it's necessary if I want my airlines not to drop out of the sky, I'm traveling to America next, you know?
	So, you know, and it's totally fair to discriminate in circumstances like that.
	So there are different moral frames.
	But anyway, hate to do it, guys, because we've run out of time.
	And so I can't go through any of the comments.
	So I'd just like to thank Peter and Travis for joining us, because I think this has been a brilliant set of conversations.
	Thank you.
	Thank you.
	Where can people find more from you?
	On Twitter, at Peter Bogosian.
	On YouTube, I think it's the same, Peter B-O-G-H-O-S-S-I-N.
	We go all around the world, we make videos.
	We did a video, you did a video with Nido Power.
	I think it went viral on Instagram.
	And I have a substack as well, and there's Travis over there.
	It was very well received by women, wasn't it?
	I think it was, yeah.
	I think it went viral on the internet.
	There's lots of women like, yeah, he's right about men.
	I was like, thank God.
	I'm told I'm far right when it comes to that.
	Lots of women are far right, it turns out.
	Travis, where can people find you?
	On Twitter, I'm at Become The Signal and on YouTube, it's at The Signal Productions.
	And then I also have a lot of content on Locals, which is travisbrown.locals.com.
	Great, okay.
	Well, like I said, thanks a lot for joining us, guys.
	For those Gold Tier members, we'll be back in about half an hour to have the Gold Tier Hangout for the month.

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