The Joe Rogan Experience - #1673 - Colin Wright

Episode Date: June 25, 2021

Colin Wright is a biologist and Managing Editor of "Quillette", a magazine dedicated to freethought. He is also the founder of "Reality's Last Stand", a publication and newsletter exploring the debate around sex and gender.

the joe rogan experience train by day joe rogan podcast by night all day hello colin how's it going joe well first of all it's going great thank you very much first of all uh for this bottle of uh this is distilled honey distilled mead distilled meat yeah so so mead is like a beer made out of what kind of yeah it's like a honey wine so when you make rum that's basically just like a distilled uh fermented sugar cane product and beer or and whiskey is a distilled beer and then if you want to have brandy that's sort of a distilled fruit wine of some sort so this is sort of a unique thing this is distilled mead so straight from a honey so I think it's one of the most like crafty spirits there are

because they good luck replicating all the stuff that the bees did to to make that honey and then the fermentation process and then I was putting a pot still by myself well I had mead for the first time last weekend, actually. Okay. I was at Maynard Keenan's place in Scottsdale, Arizona. I'm a Merkin Vineyards, you know, Maynard from Tool. Yeah, yeah, for sure. You know, he's actually a wine guy.

He makes wine. What would you call that? What is a wine producer? Viticulturist? Enologist? Winemaker? Well, whatever he is, he makes mead as well. It was interesting.

I was like, oh, this is tasty, like a weird sort of wine-ish kind of thing. Yeah, I'm sort of halfway interested in actual drinking mead itself. I'm more into like distilling that product and making a spirit. And for some reason, so the first time I had Honey Shine was in Wisconsin. I was at a conference there and just something I never had before. And you can actually taste the honey and the floral notes that come through at the very end. And you made this? I did.

How'd you make it? I have a copper pot still. And you just basically make five gallons of mead, wait until it's really dry, so all the sugars have been converted to alcohols, pour it in the pot still. I've got to taste this. And then there you go. How strong is it? It's 100 proof.

Oh. Wow. There you go. Whoa, that's intense. But can you taste the honey in the flour or no is it just um sort of now that you told me that i would go no it's like a fucking strong turpentine taste there's a review oh it's rough if you want to get fucked up try this it's good over ice i'm sure it can make a good mixed drink too, so feel free to experiment here. Why reality's last stand.

Yeah, so that's actually, that's the name of my sub stack. And that has to do with, I talk a lot about the whole sex and gender debate and about why there are only two sexes and why sex is not a spectrum. Stop. Cancel this podcast. Turn it off. We can't do this. Hit stop.

What are you saying? There's only two sexes? That's the current, well, I would say it's the current consensus, but you might not know by actually talking to a lot of academics in science right now because there seems to be sort of a chilling effect that's going on for people actually saying there are only two sexes and that it's not a spectrum I know you've talked a lot about like the trans women in sports debate and all that yeah but I'm not sure if you know like the the roots of where that comes

it's not just people who are confused about if men are stronger than women there's like a more fundamental uh ideology that's sort of denying the existence of male and female as stable biological categories i've had an argument with a professor about that on this very podcast who was trying to say that we shouldn't even make the distinction between males and females to which i was like okay if you go to a store to buy a puppy you go to like a pet store and you buy a puppy and you want a boy and they give you a girl, like what was happening there? Is there a difference between a boy and a girl there? There is.

So in every other animal, there's a difference between a male and a female but not with humans? but not with humans? They do play this game where a lot of these scientists who you'll talk to, if you look at their own research papers, they're studying fly behavior or something, and you'll see them talk about male and female flies. And it's like, how are they classifying the male and female flies or newts or whatever they're studying? And it's basically just by the reproductive anatomy,

whether it's organized around the production of sperm or ova. But when they talk about humans, all of a sudden you get this, like, a lot of hand-waving. Things are just so complex. You know, there's some males have low testosterone. Some females have higher testosterone. Some, you know, can't quite be sex chromosomes. They'll try to make it like sex is some multifaceted, multifactorial property, and that it's like a statistical equation that you can just feed in some inputs,

and then you can find out like where on the sex spectrum you might reside. When in reality, that's just not the case at all. You have the two camps of people. You have the sex spectrum slash the sex social constructivists. I kind of lump them into this category of they're for the abolition of sex altogether. Then you have the other people who are sort of the sex expansionists, and they want to insist that there's just more than two sexes. And what they all have in common is this allergy to the number two. They need to break up binaries anywhere they see them. It's based on queer theory,

which is from the whole critical theory field in academia. And what I find is fascinating is you don't hear the activists who are arguing for there being three, four, five, six, or seven sexes argue with the people who think sex is a spectrum and that sex isn't even a real thing. It's all of them versus people like me who are just saying that there happens to be only two sexes. But it's clearly a spectrum inside each two sexes, right? Yeah. So if you were to look within males and females, there are, in a sense, a spectrum of characteristics that each sex has. And one thing they'll point to is the existence of like an intersex individual,

which correspond to, you know, one out of every 5,000 humans is born with genitalia that are pretty ambiguous, who might not be classifiable as either male or female at a glance. And they'll use that and suggest that just because this individual exists somewhere in between, therefore sex is a spectrum, that it's a social construct. You can't really draw the line anywhere specifically between male and female. And this suggests that everyone is sort of just varying degrees of maleness and femaleness. And that like you wouldn't necessarily, Joe, be a 100% male. Rather, you would just be somewhere on the spectrum. And presumably we could look at someone else who had less masculine characteristics and they would be less male than you are.

So that's sort of where the sex spectrum tends to lead the arguments to. But really, it's not less male. It's just less testosterone or less what we would consider to be like manly characteristics, right? You're still dealing with someone who can impregnate a female. Like that should be where we draw the line, right? Like one of them has XY chromosome, Like that should be where we draw the line, right? Like one of them has XY chromosome, one of them has XX. Yeah. So there's sort of two levels that you can look at when we're referring to biological sex and what that is.

There's sort of a population level way to look at it where you can say like, well, what is biological sex as a concept? And this has to do with having two different types of gametes, two different sizes, and the organisms that have produced sperm, the smaller gamete, they're considered males. Organisms that produce the larger gametes, the ova, they're considered females. And that, broadly speaking, this is how we classify a population and the individuals within it. But if we're going to actually try to assign a sex to flesh and blood individuals then you'll hear objections from people they'll say something like well if you're an adolescent male you're not actually producing sperm at the time so can we classify them as a male or if you have some sort of reproductive uh condition where you're you just don't have any you don't produce any gametes whatsoever, but otherwise your sexual anatomy is perfectly intact. Can we classify them as male or female?

So this is sort of the game that gets played along that. So basically when we're identifying whether or not an individual is a male or female, we're not looking at whether they actually produce gametes in any given moment. It really comes down to whether or not your reproductive anatomy is sort of organized around the production of either sperm or ova. And that's just sort of makes the intuitive sense to what most people seem to. It's what they think sex is when they when they sort males and females. It has to do with your reproductive anatomy. What is going on today where this is such a hot topic? What has been the shift in our culture? Can you find a patient zero?

Was there an initial explosion that led to the domino effect? to the domino effect like what what is it that's leading to such an utter fascination culture wide about gender and sex now it's like these these hot these are the big hot topics of today it's gender sex race and those those things seem to i guess also sexual orientation. Gender, sex, race, sexual orientation. Those three, I mean those four, it's just unprecedented in our time that these are the most widely talked about subjects across the board with young people and people that are virtue signaling and people that want to be, you know, air quotes, woke. Like what's causing this, Colin? Help us out.

You know, it's something I've been tracking for quite some time. Like a bounty hunter? Yes, exactly. Well, I was always, so I started off in, like, the new atheist movement, and I was arguing against creationists and stuff and defending biological realities. And then that movement kind of dissipated, or at least is not nearly as prevalent, and they don't hold as much power. What happened with the with the new there was i think it's atheism plus yeah i mean there's an actually an interesting segue between atheism plus and the the modern

social justice oh yeah i see it now i mean for sure atheism was the first movement to be infiltrated by all the language we're hearing now of appropriation and the whole check your privilege and all that stuff. I remember watching Atheism Plus conferences online going, this is like the craziest virtue signaling event that I've ever seen in my life. Because it's people that don't just want to talk about the concept of agnostic thinking or atheism. They want to also attribute a bunch of social values to this movement

that makes it kind of like a religion. Have you heard of Elevator Gate? Yes. With Richard Dawkins involved in that whole? Yes. Yeah, that was sort of the thing that sparked off in a big way the rise of a lot of social justice stuff and the fall of the new atheism. Could you explain it to people that don't know what it was about?

Yeah, it was a while ago. Let me see if I can outline it a bit here. So there had been some complaints at a lot of atheist conferences where there had been people complaining of sexual harassment. And there was one specific example. There was a speaker. Her name was Rebecca Watson. She went by Skepchik. And she was giving a talk at this conference specifically addressing sexism and the atheist movement. And I think she might have said that she wasn't interested in hooking up at conferences or whatever. And then on the way back to her hotel later that night, she went into the elevator.

And then someone went in the elevator with her it was a guy and as they were going up in the elevator he looked over at her and just asked her if she'd like to come back to his room for a cup of coffee I was like that's literally what he said that's you know that's a euphemism for you want to come back and Netflix and chill Netflix can chill yeah and so she said no he didn't pursue anymore if they went off to their separate rooms everything was fine next day on social media she blows up the internet trying to say that how terrible this was how she felt so uncomfortable in the elevator there's a tight tight spot you know small elevator and this

how threatened that she was and it became a really big sort of fissure in the atheist movement because some people are saying like nothing really happened he they just used a euphemism for you know they asked you politely if you wanted to come back and do more you said no like that's the end of the story and then there was this atheist named PZ Myers who's since sort of lost his mind and on his blog he was talking about this event and then Richard Dawkins in the comment section wrote what's known as the dear Muslima letter, which is he was writing a sarcastic response to this as he, as though he was addressing some random Muslim woman saying like, you know, dear Muslima, you have no right to complain about how you're treated, you know, having your genitals mutilated or whatever, because haven't you heard this one woman? Her name is Skepchik. You know, she was offered coffee at an elevator and she said no. And the guy didn't do anything after that. So it was a very sarcastic way he approached that.

And then that just made the whole atheist woman just get engulfed in flames immediately. It was all the factions split up between the super woke people and the classic skeptics. And yeah, that never recovered really. And right after that is when Atheism Plus came out, which was Atheism Plus Social Justice, which really just was woke Democrats who happened to be atheists, basically. And all the new conference topics were just like intersectionality and maybe some vague reference to, you know, disbelief or something. So the atheist movement never recovered from that. It's gone downhill.

And now we've seen how the same type of activism has moved in and taken over, you know, Evergreen State College and has led to what Brett and Heather have gone through and then sort of erupt all over, erupted all over the country and what we're seeing now. So that was sort of a, the canary in the coal mine for a lot of what we're seeing now. What do you think is causing it? Like what, I mean, a lot of people have theories on this, but I want to know your personal one. Like what is, why is this a thing today? Yeah, well, there's so many different aspects to the ideology. So in the specific area of, I guess, the whole sex denial thing, I think there's this sort of this allergy

to the word discrimination, in a way, where we've been told that discrimination is a terrible thing always. But I mean, it might sound controversial, but discrimination just means that we're distinguishing between two different things in a certain context. Right, we think of discrimination as like prejudice. I'm discriminating in this certain thing. I mean, if you have a children's sports league, that discriminates against adults. And most people would say that that's a good type of discrimination. Right. But we've just sort of adopted this idea that discrimination is really bad.

And so now when we talk about trans women in sports or something, you know, they think they're being discriminated against. And what you'll see in the headlines is, you know, women and girls who are trans are not able to play in sports for women and girls. What they fail to mention is that it's not the fact that they're trans that is the reason why they're not being able to compete. It's the fact that they're biologically male, and that's the thing that we're trying to discriminate against, not the fact that they're trans, because trans is just like a state of mind that they can have.

They declare that they're trans. You can't verify it empirically in any way. they declare that they're trans, you know, you can't verify it empirically in any way. And so there's just, there's no reason to segregate sports by just a state of your mind, basically, anymore that you would want to segregate sports by political ideology or something else that's completely irrelevant. So I think an aversion to the concept of the idea that discrimination is bad just across the board is holding us back from having more productive conversations. And then I know you've had people like James Lindsay on and they talk about just the critical theory, the queer theory that's out there where it's just meant to just pick apart anything. Anytime they see a binary, they need to deconstruct it and deconstruct it.

Anything. Anytime they see a binary, they need to deconstruct it and deconstruct it. And it's based on this epistemology of relativistic, years on many topics, too, on the whole sex and gender debate. We have the critical race theory stuff. We have the post-colonial, you know, decolonize the curriculum. And, you know, it's just spreading out of control. And then people who are not the post-modern type, people who are, you know, have the enlightenment values and, and we're modernists in the way we approach the world. We think that, you know, if something's true, if it corresponds to reality and there's certain truths that, uh, can't really be denied by anybody, a lot of us are pushing back. And because we've seemed to have lost a lot of a foothold in the institutions,

it's now resulting in, you know getting canceled yeah it's a strange time in that regard where it just it seems like no one knows exactly what our our cultural framework is anymore for discussing things and every time the the it gets pushed further and further along you have to kind of catch up with what you're allowed to say and what you're allowed to talk about and what's okay like it didn't used to be controversial to say there are two genders there's only two genders but if you say it today you could get fired from your job I mean that's a real thing you can get discriminated against you can not the discrimination is bad as we've discussed but you know I mean it's

like it's this is a new thing to get to a position where talking about biological facts, you really shouldn't, you have to discuss the societal agreement, the cultural agreement we have about like how we view or, you know, this is what, what the, the push is or what, you know, this idea of, uh, compliance, force compliance into this ideology. You have to accept what we view now as sex and gender. There's like a language takeover.

Yeah. And even when you said just earlier, a second ago, that there's two genders, well, they've just co-opted that word gender. And so what used to be the case, and this is something that I was on board with, I was a good, you know, considered myself progressive, was a lot of people would say that sex and gender are different things. Sex referred to your reproductive anatomy, your biology, and gender referred to just the way you identify. You know, you can identify as a man or a woman or, you know, if they want to expand that, whatever that means, it has to do with identity. It's sort of like sex is your hardware, gender is your software, where you can be a male and identify as a woman. And that was something that I was sort of willing to get on board with. And I was like, okay, why do we need to have

the same, you know, we already have male and female to refer to sex why do we need to also use man and woman maybe we can just let you know the those people have have that because as a biologist it didn't really my defense didn't really go up because as long as we're we know what sex is then that's fine I can I'll be willing to manage that and then then slowly over time, that distinction became more and more blurry, where now they would say instead of that identify as a man or a woman, they say identify as a male or a female, and they're using the sex terms where they used to use gender terms. And then I'd started seeing on my Facebook popping up people with PhDs in biology

sharing articles like there are five sexes, or there are seven different sexes, or sex is a social construct. And this was, as I started pushing back against that, I thought they must have been talking about gender identity, but it became very clear that, no, they're talking about actual sex itself, and that there's, you know, every different chromosomal arrangement that someone can have. Like if you're a Klinefelter male or something, you have X, Y, Y chromosomes. You're your own unique sex now rather than just a variation within the male sex. Do you have a theory as to what caused all this or as to why it seems to be progressing? It's not like they reached a point and they went, okay, I think we made our point.

Let's sort of normalize this and have it be accepted into the common thoughts of people. But that's not what's happening. It keeps getting weirder and weirder and weirder. It's like they keep pushing the envelope about what it means. There's no one to put on the brakes, really. I mean, they're within the institutions, and the people who would normally want to speak up,

like I did, they get called names. I was looking for tenure-track positions, and I had people post on job boards in my field that thousands of biologists look every day that I was a transphobe and a race scientist that they just threw in on top of things just to, you know, throw a bunch of slurs at me and see what sticks and try to poison the well for my potential hiring. And so people see that that happens and then they just don't want to do it. They stay quiet. And then so all you hear is

the loudest voices, the most activists, they come out and they'll they'll just say this type of stuff. And then a lot of people don't want to say anything because they're generally confused because of the jargon that's being used. And then they're kind of do a human shield aspect where they're they're portraying themselves as the next evolution of LGBT rights or in the terms of critical race here within this next civil rights movement. And so no one wants to be on the wrong side of history, even though they don't understand what people are saying. Sounds nuts, but who are they to really judge what this is? They don't want to be called a racist because that's the worst thing you can be called. They don't want to be called a transphobe because we all want to be accepting people. And fortunately, I think a lot of people are sort of beginning to see that and they're willing to stand up a little bit more now and at least call it like it is, saying that these people have a really bad concept of what biological sex actually is.

No, there's not seven sexes. No, sex isn't a, you know, a bimodal distribution where we're just varying degrees of maleness and femaleness. distribution where we're just varying degrees of maleness and femaleness. You know, we can definitively say for, you know, 4,999 people out of 5,000 that they are unambiguously male or female. And, you know, we can account for the 1% that's not, but that doesn't make all of us sort of in question of what our sex is. So did you start, you're saying you were a progressive. You started out thinking in terms of like a progressive ideology, but then... I was pro the gay rights movement and yeah, for sure. And what, if anything has changed? Nothing has really changed with me.

I think a lot of just the discourse has moved into a realm that I was no longer sort of comfortable with. When as soon as that wall between sex and gender started being broken down, that's when that's that's where I had drawn the line, because now we can't talk about what sex is. And, you know, this is, you know, having the consequences we're seeing for like women's sports and yeah males getting admitted into female prisons um being able to including male sexual abusers oh yeah yeah it's really so crazy we were promised that would never happen um but apparently that is you know laurel hubbard the trans woman who's the first uh olympic athlete who just just qualified for New Zealand mm-hmm so that's that's a new thing coming out this is yeah this is a 40 I think 43 year old trans identified person who's you know 43 is incredibly old to be competing at in the Olympics for this powerlifting for her weight class. And I think she's favored to win the whole thing, given her biology.

So it's a – Given her biology. Given their biology. Their, they. I'm the type of person who – What's this, Jamie? Oh, yeah. It's a picture I just stumbled across of where Laura Hubbard falls in – Oh, correct. And so just a few years ago, Laurel Hubbard's total lift would have been just right in line with the male category that she's currently lifting in.

So it's quite a big jump. Yeah, it's a huge jump. I wonder how many people support this versus, I mean, you read comments under when there's an article that's written and they post it on Twitter about this kind of stuff. It seems overwhelmingly that most people think it's a bad idea and that most say no it's just transphobic to think that way and that there's a spectrum in every single category like if you look at males or females you're going to look at like there's going to be your lebron james is on the high end and then on the low end there's going to be some completely unathletic people and that's the same with females as well and when you add trans into that mix you're not really messing up the curve any more than you ordinarily would

be by having exceptional female athletes in there yeah a lot of the arguments for including trans women in female sports sort of go along the lines of that bodies come in all shapes and sizes we We all kind of, we know some women out there, like you've met them in your life every day, where maybe not every day, but you've experienced women who are much stronger or faster than most of the guys you know. Like there's really exceptional women out there. Or maybe in your high school football team, like maybe you were on a school and you had a woman made on your team, like a girl made it on your team.

So people sort of have this everyday idea of sex differences. And there's like, you know, a woman can make it on a man's team every once in a while. And they fail to take into account, just like as you kind of move up in how elite you are, the proportion of, or the representation of women just gets diminished and diminished until, you know, when you're in the top 0.1% of athletic performance, there's just no women up there anymore. Are there any trans men that are competing against biological men successfully in sports? Not that I know of. There might have been like one example of a boxer, but not like on any elite level or anything like that. Yeah. So we have this idea of what constitutes unfairness so we'll say that

you know Laurel Hubbard this seems unfair and people will say that like well you know you might have some woman somewhere in the world who can lift that that amount of weight or sometimes they'll be trans women in a competition and they won't win a medal and so people will say that that shows that it's fair because they're not winning. Yeah. And I think an important thing to recognize when we talk about fairness in sports, what they're doing is they're comparing fairness to other athletes. Like, what is your performance relative to somebody else? And by that standard, you could look at someone like LeBron James and say, well, he's not fair.

Right. He's this athletic freak. He can jump five feet in the air or whatever.'s not fair. He's this athletic freak. He can jump five feet in the air or whatever. He can dunk. He's just extremely strong, fast, everything you need. I wasn't born with that. So is it unfair for me? Where I think when we talk about whether something's fair in sports, it's not relative to other athletes. It's kind of, it should be relative to how you would have performed had you not had some performance enhancing drug or something. So I could probably take a bunch of steroids, enter a powerlifting competition. I would almost certainly lose,

even though I'm juiced. And just because I lost doesn't mean that I, it was, it was fair for me to compete in that competition. And when we talk about female sports, these were categories specifically designed to control for the effects of male puberty on your body. And so when we talk about someone like Laurel Hubbard, well, why is it unfair for this individual to compete? It's not because she's just stronger than most women. It's because they're stronger than they would have been had they not gone through male puberty.

And that's what female sports is meant to control for. And so that's why even if she gets last place in the Olympics, like she still took that last place away from a woman who would have been there. Like I'd get last place in a powerlifting competition. So what is happening, though? Why do you think the International Olympic Committee is choosing to do this? Because it seems to me that if I was a biological woman, I would be furious. I would be thinking, I can't believe I spent so many years training for this

and preparing my body for this, and now a biological male is going to take my spot. Inclusion. That's just the buzzword of the day. Everyone, diversity, equity, inclusion. If we had an overall vote though, I mean, is the issue that more people who support these things are in the camp of air quote activists, people that will complain and write letters and emails and call and do something to try to cancel or get rid of something versus people that disagree with it and they don't do much about it. They just go, well, I don't think it's right that a biological male competes against a female, but what am I going to do?

You know? They're not organized in that regard. If it was a vote, it would be pretty unanimous. It would be pretty close. I don't think it would be pretty close. No, that's what I meant. I meant close to unanimous. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I think there would be a few knuckleheads in there that are in denial. Yeah. You're going to get all the woke activists are going to vote for yes, but most of the people who are outside of that small percentage are not going to. But the result of ad hominems too. They just – they can't – the idea is that you have to be a bigot if you think this is unfair. That's the only solution or the only possible explanation for why you don't think it's fair. Well, I mean, unfortunately, it's not up for a vote. And they've found a way to sort of get their ideology through without people voting on it by, again, manipulating the language behind it. Well, you look at the WNBA, and that's the Women's National Basketball Association.

And, you know, they'll talk about what a woman is, is a gender identity. And so, you know, even though everyone knows that the WNBA and all the women's but is instead anyone who simply identifies as it, you don't have to change any rules anywhere and sort of stampede through and change everything and all of a sudden have people competing in the sex category. I just wonder what's going on with the Olympics. It's like, are they trying to appeal to woke people? on with the Olympics. It's like, are they trying to appeal to woke people? Do they think that this is the thing to do with the current cultural climate that, uh, the wind is blowing in that direction. So they're just going to go with it because if anybody should be concentrating on fairness, it's the damn Olympics. I mean, it is the whole, the whole thing about the Olympics is supposed to be no drug testing, no this, no that, no advantages, no EPO, no blood doping. You're supposed to just be natural.

And if you can be competing in the Olympics but competing as a gender that's not represented by your chromosomes or a sex, like whatever you want to call it, gender or sex there, it's just weird that they chose to do that in the Olympics. It just shows you that I think part of it is a marketing thing too. I think part of it is they just think that this is the way the wind is blowing and that people like it regardless of whether or not it's fair. They put up this facade as though they're sort of being informed by the science, by, you know, if you're going to compete as a woman, you need to self declare that you are a woman. And then they say you need to lower your

testosterone to I think it's five nanomoles per liter right now for one for one full year before you compete. And you need to have that down while you're competing as well. And so that sounds scientific. Most people hear that and say like, oh, so that's what it takes to get rid of the male advantage that you've had. But the advantage that a lot of males have isn't just the circulating levels of testosterone. It's not like you just all of a sudden remove my testosterone and I don't have advantages. You know, what we should be focusing on is the effects of past testosterone that has guided, you know, male bodies through puberty and has making us stronger upper bodies, made us taller, made our grip strength a lot stronger. the effects of past testosterone that has guided male bodies through puberty and has made us stronger upper bodies, made us taller, made our grip strength a lot stronger.

And before, a lot of the activists said, where are the studies showing that a trans woman who's on hormone suppression is actually stronger and more athletic than a cis woman? And then the studies came out. I have them right here. So this year, there's one by Emma Hilton and Tommy Lundberg, and this is transgender women in the female category of sports. And I'll read their description. This is looked at all the longitudinal studies,

so over time before and after hormone suppression. So we report that the performance gap between males and females becomes significant at puberty and often around 10 to 50 percent depending on sport. The performance gap is more pronounced in sporting activities relying on muscle mass and explosive strength, particularly in the upper body. Longitudinal studies examining the effects of testosterone suppression on muscle mass and strength in transgender women consistently show very modest change, where the loss of lean body mass, muscle area, and strength

typically amounts to approximately 5% after 12 months of treatment. And given that the gap in strength is usually anywhere between 30% to 40%, a 5% reduction off that is minimal. Thus, the muscular advantage enjoyed by transgender women is only minimally reduced when testosterone is suppressed. Sports organizations should consider this evidence when reassessing current policies. And what study is this from? This is from Sports Medicine.

This is the number one sports medicine journal in the world. This is a recent study? 2021, yeah. And what does the Olympics say about that? Oh, stop. They don't say anything about it. And then people will say, because I know the author, we've co-authored papers before,

they'll say that she's clearly biased because she had written on not having trans women play in sports before, and so there's a conflict of interest or something because she's clearly just an anti-trans activist, even though that's not really what a conflict of interest is, really. I mean, unless you're like, my interest is as a female person, not wanting my sports to be taken over by males.

But then, so there's a good retort to the bias thing because there's another study in the, what is it, the British Journal of Sports Medicine, another top, top article, top publication. And the first author is a trans woman herself who has previously argued for inclusion of trans women, and in some sense still does, even though she found the exact same results here. even though she found the exact same results here. Notwithstanding values for strength, lean body mass and muscle area in trans women remain above those of cisgender women even after 36 months of hormone therapy. So these are the biggest studies that we have right now. And you'll still get people saying, like, where's the data? And I think it's pretty clear that they never really cared about the data to begin with.

It was an expedient way to make you shut up at that given time. You know, it's just, it seems to me that we're operating in this new realm, you know, where people think this way or people are discussing these things in a way where there's a cultural acceptance on transgender people to the point where you're supposed to ignore advantages they would have doing things that are traditionally female things, like sports. Sports being the only one, really. Other than that, like, no one really, I mean, it doesn't seem to be – there's not a lot of overwhelming overt discrimination against people who are trans publicly other than the sports thing. The sports is the big one. Other than – and prisons.

So, I mean, people are mostly okay with the whole social accommodation of trans people. More so now than ever before right yeah which is progress absolutely I mean I myself I'm happy to use their preferred pronouns what if they get the weird ones where they invent ones hmm some of the non-binary ones are a little out there what about I won't use those and all that stuff like come on I might make an attempt but if I fail then I'm not gonna feel too bad about it. What about they's, they's and them's?

Like, I was reading this thing about Demi Lovato. What does it even mean, though? I mean, to not identify. I can imagine people, like, identifying or thinking that having this anxiety, they feel that they've been born in the wrong body. They feel masculine when they're female. The Demi Lovato thing. But to just identify out of sex altogether, it's just like. Well, they just don't want to have a specific sex,

but the Demi Lovato thing was like now giving insight on how to address they. That's how they made the sentence. They're trying to explain that there's a way to do this. But you're butchering Englishering english and you got a real problem because there's no reason to do that well if you look at what they're actually doing though like demi lovato and a lot of like the non-binary crowd the way that they're identifying as trans has nothing to do with like your biological sex anymore it's just like what is your how do you identify and that is does that differ from and then their jargon is the gender or sex you were assigned at birth as though it was you know some doctor just made it

made an opinion based on something but a they is not even saying that right yeah but it's still considered in the umbrella of transgender. Is it? Even if you're non-binary, you still don't identify with the gender you were assigned at birth. And so I got in trouble on this because basically when you say you identify as a man or a woman or a boy or a girl, what you're assenting to is that you identify with these stereotypes of masculinity and femininity. And most people, I mean, there's some people who to varying degrees do sort of identify with those. I mean, you've got like Randy Macho Man Savage on the super far end of males.

And, you know, because I don't identify with this like hyper masculine, aggressive male type, you know, in a way, I'm sort of maybe more towards the feminine scale than Randy Macho Man Savage. So I'm not quite binary in that sense. Like, I don't even know what it means to identify as a man. Like, there's not something that I'm identifying with that I'm seeing as some paragon of manhood that I'm trying to, you know, that I'm identifying with. And so people told me that means that I'm non-binary. And then these are activists that attack me on Twitter. They're insisting, all the he, she pronoun crowd, they say, well, that means that you're actually trans. And then...

You're trans? I mean, according to their own ideology, I am. And then there was a situation where they've redefined what it means to be a homosexual, where it's not being attracted to the opposite sex anymore. It's being attracted to the same gender identity, regardless of your sex. And so I was told that I was bisexual because this is insane stuff, because I said I would still be attracted to Scarlett Johansson if tomorrow she just came out and said that she identified as a man but otherwise changed nothing else about her biology you know that would make you bisexual because I would be willing to have sex with someone who identifies as a man and that's my same gender identity and so they said I'd be bisexual and then and then I mean I can't do this

you can even go further no don, don't. Please don't. Because to me, I don't even care what Scarlett Johansson would identify as. She could identify as a forklift, and I would still be attracted to her. So that would make me a pansexual transgender person. Whereas in the realm of reality, I'm just a straight white guy who's just pretty pretty off the shelf yeah but if you call yourself a straight white guy you don't get any social brownie points you should think about going pansexual transgender apparently i am i just like i'm self-hating i don't know that yet but does everybody who doesn't recognize as being

like ultra macho are they all trans because if you're in any i mean there's a spectrum of masculinity versus femininity if you look at uh the ufc heavyweight champion of the world his name is francis ingano who's this gigantic super athlete of a man and if you look at him versus uh a regular person most men are going to identify as being far less masculine than that. Yeah, yeah. That's the perniciousness of the whole gender ideology. Like most people, if you take the ideology seriously, are non-binary. I mean, most people.

Most people. Yeah, most people don't. I mean, probably everyone. I mean, who really, I mean, there's probably someone out there who would just, all the knobs for masculinity are turned to 11. Do you know who Tom Segura is? Yeah, I've seen him on your show. Yeah, Tom used to do this, he had a character that he'd play called DJ Dadmouth.

Just he would get bored and he was doing like morning radio or morning television and they made him do these ridiculous morning TV shows. So he decided to do them with like a fur coat on and a gold chain. And he would tell these people that he identifies as non-binary. That was like his thing. I just came out as non-binary. And you could see that they were confused. And this was like, how many years ago? Five years ago?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Somewhere in the, yeah, yeah. So five years ago, he just decided it'd be funny to just say something that nobody understood. Because five years ago, no one knew what the hell he was talking about. He would go, yeah, you know, I'm just coming out as non-binary. And they'd be like, okay, what does that mean? Like, so all this activism, air quotes, and one thing it has done is it's made people like super aware of that term now so in half of a decade the idea behind has completely changed where before 2005 nobody knew what the

fuck you were talking about but 2021 they absolutely do it's not that long that this has been going on or 2015 even no one no one had any idea what that meant now it's super common it's common but i still don't think people know what they're talking about when they say it like there's i think they had to right it tends to i mean you'll talk to the activists who are saying this stuff about well what does it mean like just ask anyone who's of this ideology what is a woman of this ideology, what is a woman? And you will get just insanity back. Anyone who lives and identifies as a woman.

Okay, how do you live as a woman? Well, you know, a woman can live any way she wants to, as long as they identify as one. Well, what are you identifying with? With womanhood. It spirals down, and it really comes down to, because when you see how they're presenting then it's usually extremely feminine and it's like okay you're basing what a woman is on just stereotypes of femininity right and same thing with with being a man that's what

they're doing they will just deny that that's what they're doing but there's just no other there's no other option that's clearly what's going on in these situations and then you so you get these gender non-conforming kids that are you know, being told that, oh, you're behaving very boy like, you know, maybe you're a female. Maybe, you know, you're a tomboy. Maybe you're actually trapped in the wrong body or something. And it's just completely insane the way this is infecting a lot of kids minds who are just confused about what their sex is. This is infecting a lot of kids' minds who are just confused about what their sex is. Yeah. I mean, that's why I talk a lot about this stuff and the whole sex spectrum and stuff on my Substack Reality's Last Stand. Because, I mean, I do feel like if we can't get these questions right on what sex is, that there's only two sexes, male and female.

on what sex is, that there's only two sexes, male and female. Like there's just not many more levies after this that can hold back the flood of insanity. I mean, what's going to be, what's after male and female aren't real? I mean, what's downstream from that? Because it does seem to be going in that direction where it's not, it's getting more crazy and more frantic, right? It doesn't seem like it's getting better. Like we've reached some sort of a plateau.

I'm like, yeah, you know what? Maybe we're wrong about this. And maybe there are some people that are on this weird biological spectrum. But for the most part, it's clear. Male versus female or, you know, there's two clear distinct differences. Yeah, I usually try to liken it to a coin flip because that seems to help in people's minds because if you get there's been studies like how many times can you flip a nickel before

lands on its edge and it turns out to be about one out of six thousand flips you'll get a nickel that lands on its edge because they got like the flat edge to them and that's very close to the percentage, the probabilities of someone who's born intersex. And so, yeah, you can have people land on an edge. They can be sort of an ambiguous case. But for the most part, a coin flip is unambiguously heads or unambiguously tails. Tails doesn't come in percentages. It's either 100% or 0%. And that's just kind of how human bodies are are put together most of us are just unambiguously male or female and just because we have an edge case doesn't mean the male and female are just sort

of these ambiguous categories anymore but the thing is people don't want you to say that because they feel like somehow or another you saying that is eliminating progress and my question is where is it progressing to? Like, where does reality completely dissolve? That's what I'm trying to hold back the levy there. I mean, have you seen the gender bread person? No. Oh, my.

I'm scared. Pull it up, Gene. Actually, if you go go there's an article there's a version of it that's if you go to it's an article I wrote on Quillette it's called JK Rowling is right sex is real and not a spectrum I have a good version on there they've updated the version a little bit but they're still

this is being shown in classrooms. It's amazing how aggressive people are if they disagree with you on this stuff, too. This is like one of the most aggressive subjects. You got it? The gender-bred person. So this is my article on Quillette that basically debunks the sex spectrum.

Now, it starts off with J.K. Rowling on this thing, but actually I have another version on my sub-stack, Reality's Last Stand, that doesn't start off with J.K. Rowling because people told me that they can't show this to their relatives because they hate J.K. Rowling because she's a transphobe. So can you write me another version that doesn't start off with off with a JK Rowling thing what did she say she mean she said what I said that's it sex is real so we can ignore the identity stuff from the attraction and but when you look at biological sex here they have

femaleness and maleness not male or female just femaleness and maleness. Not male or female, just femaleness and maleness. Yes. And there's a bar that you can slide, you know, the spectrum. And then if you look at the text beneath it, it says, describing what biological sex is, the physical sex characteristics you're born with and develop, including, I mean, genitalia is okay, but then body shape, voice body hair hormones chromosomes etc so if you have a deep voice that will move you somewhere on the sex spectrum apparently if you were a hairy woman are you you're a less female now than you would have been if you had been hairless.

Body shape, if you're just, you know, a very square woman, you're maybe less of a female. You're more male now. This is what they're, this is what they're teaching kids in classrooms. Even in college classrooms, this thing shows up. And what they're, so what they're confusing here is the difference between like primary sex characteristics, which is like your, your genitalia and your gonads and secondary sex characteristics, which is all the differences that happen in your body. Uh, when you go through puberty, like men get more upper body strength, we get hairier, uh, voice gets deeper. Um, It would get hairier.

Voice gets deeper. An analogy that I have for this that helps it stick with people is you can, if you, it's kind of out there a little bit. But if you think about bikers, people who ride motorcycles and cyclists, what defines a biker and a cyclist is the type of thing that they're riding. Is it a motorcycle or a bicycle? But then there's all these cultural things that are kind of overlaid, like there's biker culture, which might correspond with people wearing tattoos or wearing leathers, more protective gear because riding on your bike, your motorcycle is more dangerous. And then if you go to the cyclist, they have the more lightweight, streamlined,

different types of helmets. And so all the helmets and to the cyclist, you know, they have the more lightweight, streamlined, different types of helmets. And so all the helmets and all the other stuff, that's sort of like the secondary sex characteristics, the analogy goes. So what these people are essentially saying is that if you're riding a motorcycle, but you're wearing like a spandex bodysuit and you have like the cyclist helmet on, that you would actually be more of a cyclist, even if you're riding a motorcycle. And so anyway, the analogy is looking at, you know, the motorcycle versus the bicycle, that's your like primary sex, that defines your sex, basically. Whereas the secondary sex characteristics, if you have breasts, if you have deep voice and stuff, those are sort of analogous to the other things that go along with riding a motorcycle, like more padded outfits and things like that. So they're confusing the outward expression, how big people's breasts are, how hairy they are, with sex itself. And that is just completely not the case. They try to break

sex down into these multivariate phenomena where you have, you know, we can presumably plug in all these things like voice pitch and how much hair you have into some equation and then out pops, you know, where you are on the sex spectrum. And it's just a complete, I mean, it just gets the biology. It's like it's not even wrong. It's just completely wrong. And deceptive, it seems. Yeah, I mean, it is, totally. I mean, I liken it to just like the playground bully logic that you'll get on the playground. Like I've seen this before in grade school where you have the boy who might have more feminine features.

They have a higher voice. And you get the bullies going along and telling them that, you know, what are you, a girl? And they'll bully them. voice and you get the bullies going along and telling them that you know what are you a girl and they they'll bully them and then according to the sex spectrum you'll have this chart and some teacher might try to break up a fight like what'd you do you called Billy a girl like well he might be according to the sex spectrum I mean this is validates that type of bullying where Billy might actually be more of a female because he's got a high voice like

that's just completely insane that this is the type of stuff we're teaching kids where does this go have you ever tried to extrapolate you ever try to look at like how nutty this has gotten over the past five years and and then five years before that and then look to five years in the future ten years in in the future? Because, again, like you said, it doesn't seem like there's any breaks on this thing. Yeah. I mean, I don't know where it's going to go,

and that's why I'm doing my best to not let it get past this final levy. I mean, honestly, it could go to just complete chaos. Like, what do you do? People identifying as different ages and animals and... Well, they've tried. Some people have tried. I would say that's like a slippery slope, but, like, I would have said where we are right now

is the end of the previous slippery slope I was accused of thinking might exist. Like, we've already gone so down the slippery slope, like, going down a little further is not even... And the problem is it normalizes it, right? Like that slippery slope. The crazier you get, the more you identify with things or more you get away with whatever your wacky new thing is. Yeah, everyone thinks this is normal now, like what we're doing.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And the problem is when people – like you just had Brett on a a second ago and he's speaking up about some stuff that's, you know, I wouldn't even say it should be that controversial. He's more just talking about certain matters of medicine and stuff. But I'm talking about, I'm saying the most boilerplate things I can possibly imagine that a biologist could possibly say. Where's all this woke shit coming from? Have you thought about that?

Have you tried to figure out like what's the origin story and where does it go I mean it's coming from a lot of the humanities departments and the women's studies departments queer theory the whole what's but why why have they shifted culture so much like well it's it's sort of always well since like the 60s it's been in the humanities departments but it's sort of kept it's the lid has been kept on it for a long time but they've just slowly sort of permeated outside and just gotten to people's people's minds and then the piggybacking off of you know the lgbt rights and the civil rights movement um they've just sort of attached on, they've just, they're like, they're like ambulance chasing basically their ideology through, through our institutions.

And no one wants to say anything about it. I mean, we have, I'll bring up the book real quick here from Colette. Uh, can I see it? Panics and persecutions. Yeah. what this really does in this book, it covers a lot of the stories that don't really make it out of the academy or people's lives

because there's this sort of this narrative that you see and people like AOC and Charles Blow from the New York Times, they would say something like cancel culture doesn't exist. This is just made up. The people who are getting quote-unquote canceled are people who have a lot of power. They'll point to J.K. Rowling, who's too big to fail.

They'll point to you. They'll say even if Joe gets kicked off of whatever network he's on, he's got a big enough audience, he'll go somewhere else. These people can't really be canceled. And the people who might act like they're going to get, or might be in the process of getting canceled, well, they get like an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal. And so there are these coddled pundits now. And so they think it's just not a big issue. And so what we did in this book, so for the magazine Quillette that I work at, we get a lot of these people that submit these essays to us about sort of just how the cancel mob came for them in just these small little nooks and crannies of society that you never think that this would matter.

So there's this double standard you have where the people who get canceled that are too small to make the news that you never hear about, well, they never show up as a blip. They're never a data point. And then you get a lot of the people who never speak up in the first place because they see what happens to bigger name people when they do speak up. And so they don't even have the chance to get canceled. They just self-censor beforehand. And so there's like a damned if you do, damned if you don't situation where, yeah, we can only point to the big people who people hate, like J.K. Rowling and yourself. So what we did is this is a – it's got 20 different essays of people.

I've got an essay in there of just sort of people's everyday lives and how the cancel mob came for them. Something as esoteric as like an Instagram knitting community where they came after some woman because she talked about how she was going to fly to india and she compared india as like akin to going to mars for her because she's never left the country and then she got attacked because you know this is so othering and this is colonial speak other and yeah othering yeah is that a new one i think i think it's been around i I didn't know about Othering.

Did you know about Othering, Jamie? I think it's been in the lexicon for a while. Oh, I'm out of the loop. People come to their defense and then they get canceled. And then people who are silent about it who have a big platform. But have you thought about what's the origins of this behavior? Why is this behavior emerging? Is it just a function of what's going on with the internet where you have a lot of it is text-based, where there's no social interaction, there's no social cues, you're not looking in each other's eyes, you don't feel any empathy, you're just writing things down.

And you're trying to be as either provocative or as aggressive as possible so that people like what you're saying. Social media has made it a lot easier to sort of organize these flash mobs that seem like they're intense and it seems like there's so many people coming at you. But in reality, sometimes it's just like a small group of dedicated trolls that will just be sending emails to departments and things. People sent emails to departments that I was applying to for a job saying that, you know, we're just sharing your work more broadly and calling me a bigot and don't hire this guy. But just a few online dedicated trolls can actually wreak a lot of havoc on people because they've just never had that mechanism before where people are actually somehow paying attention to what they're getting back on Twitter.

Especially if they have multiple accounts. But one of the things that I've been thinking of lately is like the ability to sway people one way or the other in terms of the way they feel about either a political issue or a social issue. A lot of times it's based on the way the crowd is reacting. It's based on what you're seeing from your peers or from the people that follow you, the people that are in your mentions. If China wanted to do this, and I'm sure they're doing it, just like the Russian Internet Research Agency was doing it,

they would create a gigantic amount of fake accounts, use those fake accounts, and they can shift the public narrative on a lot of different issues just by attacking people and by getting multiple other people to attack people in a really personalized way where it's personal, where these people feel terrible. And then you don't want that to happen to you. So again, self-censorship. these people feel terrible and then you don't want that to happen to you so again self censorship but if they just decide to do this as a concerted effort

you can erode democracy you really can, you can erode the way people communicate with each other, you can erode our culture and you don't want to be cynical but you gotta wonder what starts, what are the wings of the butterfly that start the storm like where is this engineered?

Because if someone was going to engineer some sort of a deterioration of society, boy, you couldn't really do any better than what's going on because morale is at an all-time low in a lot of places. The way people communicate is really weird right now. And it doesn't show any signs of there being like an end of this road. Like, where does this road stop? Yeah. I mean, the institution's getting captured.

And once you get to a certain threshold, it's just sort of spirals down where, you know, the institution is 50 percent ideologically based. That might be, you know, it's pretty sustainable but once it gets past like it's 90% you know Democrat or something yeah then if they're especially if they're influential on who gets hired they can sort of self-select and it's never been easier to go on social media and Google someone you're hiring and saying you know does this person what's their politics like you know that happens in academia all the time where people are actually googling who they're hiring on their departments. And if you're wearing a Trump hat, you know, I'm not a Trump supporter or anything, but good luck ever getting a job as an academic scientist if you have a Facebook picture of

you wearing a Trump hat and you're not being ironic about it, even if you're joking about it. Yeah, you can't even have it ironic. Were you actually paid for that hat? Yeah. And so they take, once the institutions sort of get captured in this way, yeah and so they take once the institutions sort of get captured in this way yeah there's not a way to get him out I mean I talked about when I used to argue against the creationism and intelligent design it was so easy because I was in universities none of the biologists around there creationist sometime in my community college we had one and he was you know he didn't teach carbon dating because it was like the devil or something really yeah yeah he was

completely young earth creationist I would stay in touch with that guy yeah yeah his life keeps going for the most part if I'm if I'm arguing against creationists and intelligent design people this is like you're getting support from your colleagues or like oh yeah I get them you know no one says you're too strident when you're writing an essay against them but then when I started seeing a lot of this ideology bubble up around my colleagues and then I started pushing back a little bit well now like the the craziness is inside the walls of the university where because before Christians didn't have any major

presence in the university at least not the ones who are creationists and intelligent design people so there was no chance of them taking over the university and now creationism is in all the textbooks and that type of stuff. But now this sort of, this thing is happening within the universities. And then, you know, I would just make my straightforward argument about there's two sexes and it's important to acknowledge them in certain situations. And then it's just a wave of hate. And it's not even a you're wrong. At least the creationist and intelligent design people told me, Colin, you're wrong.

Maybe they called me stupid, whatever. But now it's, you're not even wrong. You're just a bigot. You're a horrible person. You're literally leading to the lives of trans people getting killed. You're making students on Penn State when I worked there feel unsafe on campus because I'm working on my ant experiments there or something. And I had an opinion that got published somewhere. Like that's the situation in the universities. And-

It's like it's been infiltrated by a religion. Oh yeah. I mean, I'm all there. It does seem like a religion. Having argued with creationist intelligent design people for a good part of my life, I mean, that's what got me into wanting to be an evolutionary biologist in the first place, is knowing that these people are nuts and not really knowing, having the knowledge and tools to sort of combat this, the insanity that I was seeing. So I just decided to read a bunch about evolution and then I just made it my job, basically.

But again, I'll ask you, where's this go i don't know like where how's it i am that's why i'm here talking to you that's why i want to let people know that this is this is scary stuff this is like where do you go where do you go i mean i don't know it's we go to scary places i think and i i don't i don't want to find out where that is because if we lose this foothold, like there's just no more footholds to have, we're just going to be scraping down as we fall. It doesn't seem to be an alternative model to what we're going through. It's not like they're saying, what we'd like society to look like is this. No, it's just they want to break down all of the systems that are in place.

Whether it's our monetary system, they want to break down all of the systems that are in place. Whether it's our monetary system, they want to break down capitalism itself, they want to break down the patriarchy, they want to break down male-dominated blank and this and that and toxic male that and this and female stereotypes and gender stereotypes and just like, oh my God, Christ, where does this go? Like, where is this going? Like, you keep breaking things down. Do you have an alternative model? Do you have a better version of what you would like society to be?

And is it like, does it make sense? Is it tenable? I mean, I think where we were going before was sort of the way things were going. We made a lot of progress just on sort of this liberal notion of some people are gay, some people are bi, some people are trans. Get over it. Just let people live the way they are. Just live and let live.

And I think that was working. I mean, we got gay rights in the U.S. They can get married. That'll happen before the major woke takeover of a lot of the institutions. That's good progress. I just say more of that is what I think we just need to do what is the attractiveness this is like I just don't I don't I'm trying to figure out what happened like what started out this this whole what was the first step of the parade so I it's hard for me to say as

like someone who considers himself an atheist but I think a lot of the new atheists got something really wrong like I'm a big fan of Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins but a lot of the narrative back then was well what do you replace religion with when you get rid of it and people like Richard Dawkins would say well what do you replace a tumor with when you remove a tumor like that was sort of the way that they would talk about this thing and at the time I was like yeah religion is all bad it's like it's there's nothing good can come of it it's just people who believe silly things but I think what and I think people like Jordan Peterson are addressing this is not necessarily do you need to believe in God or something but you need some sort

of meaning making overarching thing to your life yeah And if you just get rid of that meaning, whether it's a God or something, which I'm all for people not believing in God anymore, but I do sort of realize there's, maybe there needs to be some sort of replacement that can fill a meaning void in your life. Because I think a lot of people are less and less religious, which I would think is a good thing. But I think you can probably plot the prevalence of, you know, as religion goes down, like how many pronouns and bios are going up as the complete opposite of that. Yeah, it seems like we almost have like some sort of a gene for religious ideology.

Yeah, we have a hyper focus on identity as well. And if there's anything I can recommend for people, it's to really try not to identify with as many things as possible. Try to keep your identity as small as you possibly can. Because before, you know, like I don't identify as a man. I just happen to be a male. And that's just how I live my life because I'm acknowledging biological reality. People who are gay, do they identify as gay? Well, no, they just how I live my life because I'm acknowledging biological reality. People who are gay, do they identify as gay? Well, no, they just are gay. They just are attracted to the opposite sex. This is, I think, is where we need to go because now we're getting people who are identifying with political beliefs, with conclusions to arguments. And that means that if you were to

attack their argument, you know, about what it means to be about sex and gender or something, it's not just an intellectual disagreement anymore. To them, it's, you know, if they seed any ground, that means they have an identity crisis because they've made this part of their identity. It's part of who they are. And they're identifying with conclusions to arguments, whereas that's just not the way to go about things if you ever want to have a – if you want to be corresponding to reality as much as possible. So this hyper-focus on identity, I think that needs to go. Right, but how do you fix that? Everybody knows there's a problem. Nobody seems to have any solution, nor does anybody see an end of the road.

No one says, oh, if you go just five miles down, there's a brick wall. They're just going to slam into that, and that's it. They're just going to get to this ideological choke point where like, okay, this stuff doesn't make any sense anymore because of blank. There's none of that. It's just no one knows where it goes. I try to use some of their empathy against them in a little way and try to show, like I had an article in the Wall Street Journal with Emma Hilton, who was a co-author on one of these studies here,

that would outline what biological sex is. But then it went into these other things about how replacing sex with gender identity across the board, how this actually harms people, how it harms women, how it rolls back sex-based rights and makes sex-based rights impossible to enforce. How this also harms the gay community by, you know, we've successfully normalized a lot of aspects of the gay community and gay marriage and things like that. But how now identifying being gay with being attracted to the same gender identity instead of sex, well, then there's just insanity beyond that point. You know, I'm pansexual now because, you know know all the stuff with Scarlett Johansson yeah and and how that harms it risks the the future normalizing of homosexuality when people are being called bigots because you know a trans woman considers themselves a lesbian because they want to date biological women and now they'll

call lesbians you know female lesbians they'll call them bigots if they don't want to have sex with a trans woman. Because I'm a woman and now you're just a genital, you know, you have a, what they call the cotton ceiling. Is like, I know, it's nuts. Oh, God. Where you need to be okay with lady dick is what they would call it. Like, you know, it's a female penis. And so now you get the gay community that's all pissed off about this because they know what it means to be gay.

They're not attracted to your gender identity. They're attracted to your sex. And then it harms children too with confusing them about what sex and gender is and identifying gender with stereotypes of masculinity and femininity. So I just try to highlight, like, look at all these harms that you're actually doing to these groups that you had previously supported endlessly, all the women's movements that have gotten them the right to vote and everything. I mean, this is just turning back the clock on so much progress. And if you can just use their empathy against them in a certain way and also accompany that with some scientific facts that's all we can

do I mean there's nothing else to do it needs to be conversations without conversations there's nothing else on the table besides just like violence and stuff and that's not where I want to go well also the conversation we're having are all on social media and they're all these little short little just bites of text without context.

And even when you do describe the context, it's inefficient because it's not, it's like talking to people the way you and I are doing it right now is the way to go. This is the way people understand how we get a look in each other's eyes and talk to each other and you understand where that person's coming from. But you could say so much crazy shit on twitter and the person doesn't even know you're you're a knucklehead like no one knows

how dumb your life really is and what you're like and what kind of an emotional mess you are and how you fall apart but if they read your text your text just looks like any rational person's text it's just print it's just like it's right there. It's like you don't get the context of who that person is and how screwed up they really are. Yeah, I mean I get accused of my essays coming across as being like overly strident and I come across as an asshole in it. I was going to talk to you about that. But at the same time, I get people who agree with what I write they tell me that you know I like the way you're just the facts you don't like editorialize you don't do any not a lot of flourishes and it's what Richard Dawkins approached

when he was criticizing religion before like if you're criticizing these core things that people believe and I identify strongly with it doesn't matter the language are using you could it just, it just, it's going to sound offensive. Well, Dawkins was attacked because he compared Rachel Dolezal, like someone being, someone identifying with another race as someone identifying with another sex. He just offered that up as a thought experiment. Exactly, exactly. But when he did that, they're like, enough of you.

You know, he got his, what is it, the 2001 or something Humanist of the Year Award taken away from him. Exactly. I think it was like a 25-year-old award. How do you take that away, by the way? Just take them off the website. But you got to go back in time 20 years? I wonder, I mean, if he has a plaque, did they seize the plaque?

Yeah, did they come to his house with jackbooted thugs kick down the door hey old man you're a piece of shit now well the thing is dawkins had mentioned that he'd he said he didn't even remember winning it so that's whatever i guess i didn't care about it that much so it is fucking stupid because they probably took it back from him just to make a stink for publicity and to virtue signal and let everybody know they're on the right page yeah they got a whirlwind of hate though because people like steven pinker and a couple other people who had also won the humanist award uh from the same humanist association they wrote these letters just blasting the humanist association saying what does that mean this is

the most anti-humanist thing ever like this could have been teaching moment or something if you want to actually put your argument of what is the difference between transracialism or transsexualism and it is an interesting conversation because look i believe in transgender people i think there are for sure there are people that for whatever reason they feel way more comfortable being a different gender other than their biological sex would indicate. Absolutely. It's real.

It's 100% real. And they should be able to transition and make themselves feel better if that's what they need. But what is going on with race? Like, if anything, that's a more slippery one because we're all from Africa. Yeah. slippery one because we're all from Africa. Yeah.

They think primates, the latest information is they think primates originated in Asia, made it over to Africa, evolved into humans. So every single human being has an origin in Africa. So if someone just decides that they identify with African-American and they're American and they hang out with a bunch of African American people and they just decide you can't do it. But it's like, there's, there's one bridge that we will not let you cross. You cannot, there's people that are willing to let people identify as fairies or wood elves or foxes. You could be a foxkin. They're cool with that, right? But if you say I'm transracial, like no one's going to accept that.

There was a guy that was doing that on Twitter as a joke. God, I'm trying to – Elwick? What the hell was his name? But they kicked him off Twitter for parody because he was too close like what he was doing was too close to social justice warriors but he was transracial and he would he would always write hashtag wrong skin and like say some really ridiculous shit and they just decided that he was mocking protected groups and they got rid of him but he was mocking everything like his this whole account was a parody account of like ridiculously woke people but this is like pre-woke the word like what when did woke show up woke was

like four years ago something like that i think it has an origin um in some some literature about um racism and stuff usually woke originally was was not just what we refer to now as just all the social justice stuff. It was sort of more innocuous about just like a racial awakening to injustices around you and things like that and seeing different systems. So it had like a valid origin, but now it's sort of used pejoratively and I do it myself because it does sort of describe

all of that wokeness yeah i saw there i saw a whole thing about people uh furious that people are using woke as a pejorative and to not let people do it it's like okay well that's where the problem is the problem is like what your little game is is forced compliance like you want everybody to comply it's a weird power game and that's one of the things about woke ideology and one of the things about this this whole movement to shame people and shut people down and cancel people it's like a lot of it is like forced compliance and if you attack one person and it's effective and they back off then other people that might have similar controversial ideas are going to shut the fuck up because they don't want to have that emotional pain of having the the group pile onto them yeah and the word woke is something that

those activists use themselves to describe themselves still i don't know if they do anymore i think i think they didn't like the fact that we're started yeah okay we'll call you woke because it's because it sounds corny it does sound corny it sounds it sounds very cultish you know it's a majority. I think they didn't like the fact that we started doing, okay, we'll call you woke because it's – Because it sounds corny. It does sound corny. It sounds very cultish. It's just like I'm so enlightened. You sound like a fraud.

Yeah. It's like in the atheist movement, Dan Dennett had a movement called The Brights where it was just like, oh. It was so pretentious. The Brights? They're brighter than other people? Yeah, because the other side of it is like they didn't specifically say the other people are dim, but that's sort of implied. And I just hated the brights.

It was just so corny. God, that's so on the nose. And it makes atheism sound culty, too. It's just like, we're the brights. And I see the same thing with woke. That's just such a culty thing. It's so unironic to call yourself the brights. That should be like a joke.

Yeah, it's just like an own goal big time. It's just... The Brights. I think they still have a website, but it's... I don't think they're still tabling. It went the way of Atheism Plus. Atheism Plus integrated. The whole atheist movement is just...

To the degree that it exists as something you can Google, it's just all woke right now. It's really bad. I got blocked by some of my old atheist heroes on Twitter just because I said, I think you're taking J.K. Rowling out of context. Block is like my hero. Blocking people is another one. That's a weird one when you're interacting with someone and you disagree with them

and it's like a respectful disagreement and then you block them. I've seen people do that. Like, look, if someone wants to insult you and you don't want to deal with that, you just like rather not have that in your life, I get the blocking thing. But blocking people for just disagreeing with you? Like, I've seen it. I've seen, like, intellectual discussions where someone will say something that's outside of the ideology, and then next thing you know, blocked.

One-way street. You can't be talking to people, sharing a platform, because you're legitimizing them by your proximity to them. Colin, it's so exhausting. This is what I deal with every day. But isn't it exhausting to you? It's exhausting to me. It is exhausting.

You're saying this and I'm like, God, I don't know how anybody can tolerate this. I can't imagine working for a corporation that's gone full woke because there's quite a bit of them, right? There's quite a few of them where you you know you're in that corporation you had better be woke and then if you want to move up the corporate ladder which i'm sure you do don't you want to get ahead don't you want progress well you're going to have to adopt that ideology and then you're going to have to be

just like everybody else it's really hard for me to come up with like new and exciting ways to say the same thing over and over again about there being just two sexes like yeah well i think you don't have to i think well the the people that you're arguing against like what if i shut up there's this no one's gonna be i don't think there's other people out there beside you there's a few other people talking about it but we got like heather hyang we got emma hilton on twitter yeah there's a few others who are doing their thing but really it's actually quite shocking how few people yeah i don't like saying anything about this but then listen to what you just said though it's twitter twitter is a fucking mental institution with a bunch of inmates throwing shit at each

other it's just such a occasionally people talking about it in my daily life either. I mean, but do they does it come up in your daily life? Not really, but we're seeing the way the ideology is actually I mean, yeah people say no It's just online but like it's pretty they're pretty effective. I mean, it's more than a trickle I think I mean, that's they've successfully mobilized people getting fired. They've mobilized getting trans women in sports through these ideologies. I mean, it's, I don't know where else, where. I mean, I'd like to go on these woke people are doing it. I would attack the... Yeah, it really is. If you wanted to go full tinfoil hat, you would say, how many of these people that are doing this are actually really who they think or who they say they are? And how many of them are Russian agents and Chinese agents? And how many of them are just constantly trying to fuel the fires of strife and disagreement

online. It's almost like a Darwinian process of how they've been able to like modify their arguments and what they do to just make this like perfectly adapted earworm that just like it just takes over. I mean, we had the previous, you know, the Sokol hoaxes, this Alan Sokol wrote those papers for these was a physics journals or something about he just wrote a bunch of nonsense like postmodern jargon and he got it published in these these journals that were like the goes Ian yeah kind of like what they did it was but he was like the og like I was first first round they often called the one that Lindsay and

Bogosian and pluck Rose did is like the Sokol squared it's like the nude new version of it but he was just arguing with people who were had like this relativistic notion of reality and he used a bunch of jargon but that was stamped out really quickly because it was just clearly insane and there wasn't a lot people did with it but they've now sort of morphed where they're using that same jargon the same ideology but they're doing that ambulance chasing now, as I mentioned, with the gay rights, LGBT rights, and the civil rights movement. And so they've sort of, they're using the same insane relativistic,

you know, everything's a social construct, everything's power dynamics, using that same language, but now they're just using the shield of people's, you know, empathy towards these movements. But these are not natural extensions of civil rights or LGBT. It's a completely new ideology. It's illiberal. It's very authoritarian. And people need to be speaking up against this stuff because it's not what they claim to be. It's Hannibal with the mask on.

You know, he just pretended to be the dead cop. Well, unfortunately, too, a lot of the people that combat against this, they find themselves stuck in a place where the only people that take them in are the right-wingers. That's where I found myself. I mean, no one's – I went on very early when I started writing about this. I went on Glenn Beck's show briefly to talk with him. And how dare you go on Glenn Beck's show? It's like, well, CNN's not contacting me.

Sorry. Like, I'd be more than happy to submit my articles to the New York Times if I thought they'd print them. When you went on Glenn Beck's show, did he bring out one of them big crazy charts and connect everything? It's amazing how he's evolved over time. He actually says reasonable things nowadays. How's that possible? Did he change his medication i don't know but he he was a little nuts before yeah sorry glenn i think you're better now well when the um obama administration was in that's when he was that's when he was at full nutty he decided that obama didn't like white people and he was like charts and graphs and shit expanding circles with insanity

whenever dudes do that when they have like these ideas and they branch out like they have like a you know the brains and connect yeah he's come a long way has he? from what I've heard I've seen him interview

some other people that I respect and he seems to be pretty reasonable. And he just does stuff online now, right? That's like his whole thing. I think he's got his podcast and the show. I think it's a live. It's kind of like this. Interesting.

Because he was one of the big guys over at Fox News, but even back then they decided that he went a little too crazy. Yeah, too nuts for Fox. He had some sort of come-to-Jesus moment or something. Yeah? Yeah. Well, he had a legit come-to-Jesus moment, right? Didn't his wife turn him into a Mormon?

I thought he was a Mormon for a while. I'm not even— I think he became a Mormon in his 40s. Okay. Was that pre-Fox? I'm not sure. I tend not to have much of an issue with him. I'm sure we disagree on religious stuff because he's a Mormon,

but apart from that, he does seem to be liberal in the classical broad sense that I tend to be partial to nowadays. Yeah, it does seem like more and more people who find themselves politically homeless at least find that they can get an audience on the right you know whether it's uh the ben shapiro show or now dave rubin is right wing and there's there's a few of these places where you can have these kind of conversations and even if you disagree with the host at least they'll give you a platform to discuss it, whereas the left seems completely closed off to the idea of rational discourse with someone with either a competing, opposing, or varied ideology. You have to stick to the orthodoxy, or they don't want to talk to you, and then you don't want to platform someone who has harmful or hurtful ideas.

And as a comedian, it becomes a real problem because then people start conflating. They start pretending that jokes are true statements. And, you know, I've always said, like, you can only do that with comedy where you can pretend someone isn't joking. You don't really think Bob Marley shot the sheriff, right? You know he didn't. But I shot the sheriff. Oh, you piece of shit. You shot a sheriff.

You're like, no, no, no. It's a song. If you say something crazy on stage about like I used to have this bit about, um, it was one of the things that people got mad at me, uh, during that whole thing where, uh, I said, I probably vote for Bernie Sanders. And they took a bunch of jokes out of context, you piece of shit. And one of them was saying that women who wanted to be, um, president were greedy. And it was a whole joke about a conversation that I really had with my mom, where my mom was telling me that she wanted Hillary to be president. But my mom's not

paying attention to politics. I mean, she might like peripherally watch MSNBC. But her thought was, and she actually said this, I think it's about time that a woman does the most important job in the world. And I was like, okay, I see what you're saying. But you know, you already make all the people. I'm like, you make all you're saying but you know you already make all the people I'm like you make all the human beings if that's not the most important job in the world we're looking at things crazy there's more than seven billion people in the world all of them came out of a woman's body you guys make all the people you guys you make food with your breasts like literally the most nutritious baby food known to man Changes the child's IQ changes the child's immune system. I go you do that and

You want to be president to you fucking greedy bitches? I go what else you want you want a big dick you want all the money like it's a joke right but in quotes They put it in an article as proof that I am But in quotes, they put it in an article as proof that I am a sexist because I think that women who want to be president are greedy in quotes. Like that kind of shit is why people go on to Tucker Carlson show. They're like, I give up. I can't talk to you, fucks, because you guys, you're playing games with the truth. You're not even interested. you're playing games with the truth you you're not even interested it's like there's so much frantic crazy thinking on the left that people are scared of being left now and they're they're

going off to it and i'm clinging nailing tooth and claw just clinging to all of my progressive ideas even though i'm consistently labeled as some alt-right person because I talked to Milo Yiannopoulos seven years ago or whatever. It's like there's this weird forced compliance on the left that's at a fever pitch. And I've never seen anything like it. It's like a religious fanaticism that doesn't seem to exist right now on the right. We're all in the realm of like impact over intent. Yeah.

You might have heard that slogan all the time where, you know, they'll diminish the use, mention, distinction between things like the N word or something. Even in a mention context for an academic thing, you know, you can't even mention the word otherwise, you know, it't even mention the word otherwise you know it's it's equivalent of saying it's almost a you you called someone that word right and so i mean it's and after a while even your joke even if you're making a joke on stage as a comedian it's well the impact of that joke that that still hurts somebody and you you did them wrong in some way so you need to make it better to them it's just yeah I've heard that argument too and it's hard to even know what's considered left and right anymore

because I mean that the magazine I work for Quillette we just I consider them very centrist and as a Nazis I heard I mean depending you mean we get accused of that daily I've seen it it's just so crazy it's just rational discourse almost everyone on the editorial board is left of center I would say there's Daily. I've seen it. It's just so crazy. Yeah. It's just rational discourse. Almost everyone on the editorial board is left of center, I would say. There's maybe two people that identify as conservative, and I think we're all atheists. And yet, if you talk to people on the woke left, we're far right, alt right, race science, all that stuff.

But if you talk to people on on the far right they they think we're just communist left yeah communist everything so yeah so it's just there's nothing we can do i think that's kind of where we want to be i guess because we really just try to stick to publishing stuff that's well argued that's you know you can start from the ground up first principles get your argument out there. Yeah. I gotta say though. We'll publish controversial stuff if, if, as long as it's doing its, doing its job. The right has been, um, much better at embracing the other side's ideas and having conversations

with them. You know, I mean. Yeah. This is, it's insane. I never thought that was, I mean, the left was always been the, the free speech people. That's why I considered myself on the left for so long. I just sort of eschew any of these political labels now. I'm just, my philosophy now is just ask me what I think on any topic and I'll tell you what it is. I'm not going to say I'm on the left or the right or I'm a this or that. So it's just, I can't tell you what I believe in with one label and it makes no sense, right? Well, there's certain Mutually there's there's certain things that if you no matter what you believe if you believe that they won't have you on the left like Second Amendment is a good one You know They like gun rights the idea that people should be able to protect their home with a firearm like that is that is outrageous have you not seen all the mass shootings and

they'll just conflate those two in some sort of a weird way you know they'll they'll conflate gun violence with you know it's with reasonable gun ownership responsible gun ownership it's like god damn they're they're so different. Like that's like when a guy has a car and he drives into a crowd and it's just run, starts running over people like that. You don't equate that with a reasonable use of responsible use of an automobile. You don't, right? Cause it's a malicious intent thing. It's a tool. It's what it is. But there's certain things like on the right you have to have pro-life. Like pro-life is on the right. Pro-choice is on the left.

And if you are open to all left-wing ideologies, all left-wing ideas, whether it's gay rights, civil rights, go across the board, women's rights, but you get to abortion, to abortion you go man i think that's a baby they'll go what you fucking nazi and they'll they'll want you out you can't even say you can't even have the reasonable argument like okay when is it a baby is it a baby at seven weeks when it has a heartbeat 10 weeks what about months? Is it a baby at three months? Like they'll get super uncomfortable and start getting angry at you. Like is it five months? Like when's it a baby? When's it a baby?

Is it when it exists out of the womb or when it can exist out of the womb? Like when's it a baby? Nobody likes that. I think that's how a lot of their ideologies on the left, though. They're very much for breaking down binaries and thinking in terms of spectrums but then they have such like a black and white view of so many issues like pro-life pro-choice you know even yeah and i'm the first one to say that i think there's actually maybe a spectrum there you know maybe at past a certain, maybe I'd be less comfortable or completely uncomfortable

with aborting that, what do you call it? Fetus? The fetus, yeah. Sorry. The biologist. Thank you, Joe. And in reality, I think there is sort of a spectrum there, but we just get lumped into these two sides. And I see the right dude all the time too, where you need to be pro-life and that means the moment of conception yeah even though like we're just talking it really is yeah it's technically a human cells and people don't like the whole bundle of cell thing but it is technically human but is it a person you know

there's I don't that's like a philosophical question right like the morning after but like is that the same as a six month old abortion? A fly is more sentient than a fertilized zygote. I have no problem swatting a fly like. Right. So, yeah. Like or people that are pro-life and pro-war, you know, especially interventionist foreign policy wars that are completely avoidable where thousands, if not millions of civilians die. There's a lot of people that are pro-life, but also pro-drone attack. And pro-capital punishment too. That's a big one. I think there's probably a big overlap between pro-life and pro-capital punishment. My friendship with Josh Dubin and his work with the Innocent Project and having Jason Flom on the podcast and Josh and discussing these cases where people are unjustly accused and spend decades behind bars. to deny these people the ability to get out or to even, in some cases,

to even show evidence that would exonerate them. They shield DNA evidence. Amazing. It's crazy. And so the people that want an eye for an eye, like, I get it. If you're talking about very specific people like monsters, like a Ted Bundy- type character or something like that, and you say, hey, that person shouldn't be alive.

They shouldn't be on this planet. If you're fucking really sure, if you're really sure that that's the person that did that, if you're real sure, but man, people get accused of things all the time. And then one of the things that Josh Dubin was talking to me about is cops that think that a person's guilty, and so they come up with a justification for planting evidence. They don't even think they're doing anything bad, so they'll leave some hair. And they're like, look, found some hair, and they left it themselves. And they're like, look, found some hair. And they left it themselves.

And meanwhile, it comes out 10 years later, 16 years later, that this bad cop did this. And this guy's been in jail this whole time. He was completely innocent. And then the actual real perpetrator is out on the street because they're playing a game. The game is you're trying to win. I'm trying to prosecute. He's trying to defend. I want to beat him.

I'm undefeated in that courtroom. I'm going to get in there and I'm going to lay down he's trying to defend I want to beat him I'm undefeated in that courtroom I'm gonna get in there and I'm gonna lay down the smack on this motherfucker because like it becomes your part of your identity is you're a successful prosecuting attorney or you're a successful defense attorney even though you know the guy's guilty like the people that represented OJ Simpson you know there had to be when they said not guilty they had to be like what have we done what the fuck have we done you know like both those things but the fact that we know that there's a massive problem with people unjustly accused of crimes put in jail for long periods of time and it we don't even know how many of them there are but the innocence project has uncovered countless numbers right i guess you can count them there's, but the Innocence Project has uncovered countless numbers, right? I guess you can count them. There's a lot.

I think the going number was in a paper in PNAS that said around 4%, but they said that was a fairly conservative estimate. That's a fucking lot, man. That's a lot. That's a lot. That's 100 people. Four of them are going to go to death, and they didn't do shit. That's crazy. That alone makes you go, man, this fucking, but then, then you hear about people getting out of jail really early for

things that are terrible and you go, Whoa, Hey, like that's not good either. It's not good to be too lenient. Like, um, I was reading about, uh, the new Los Angeles district attorney, the ones they're trying to recall who, uh who put someone in jail for a fucking gang murder for nine years. And everybody's like, what? Nine years? That's someone's kid. Someone's kid, someone's baby got murdered. And you're going to give this guy nine years?

What are the chances the gang member is going to get out of prison and just he's gonna be a normal life he's gonna yeah like prison's gonna make him less of a gang member yeah dude nine years ago is not that long ago you know i mean go back nine years ago that's that ain't shit i was just starting down the the pathway to become a science professor and then it's 2012 i mean that's not that long ago that's back when we thought that's when i just started going back to college yeah we thought that um the mayan calendar was going to be the end of the world were you one of those people i wasn't i had a uh i had a rapture party on that did you yeah we did we did a rapture show we did an end of the world show it was me

doug stanhope joey diaz and honey honey the band we did a show at the wiltern in los angeles did you have a plan for the countdown well we were hoping it would just the world would just blow up or something and you know then we wouldn't have to have a countdown or not it turns out it was just what they call it like a the long count it was a like everyone out it was just, what they call it, like a, the long count. It was a, like everyone thought it was going to be the judgment, but then when nothing happened, it was like, well,

it was, he passed judgment then, but then it was, that's when we were judged. Well, I thought it was supposed to be just the end of the count. Oh, I'm thinking of the,

I'm thinking of the Herald camping. There was another one in 2012 with that old preacher, Harold camping.ing, thought that there was going to be another, the Rapture. Yeah. Okay, yeah. I think that was before 2012 because that guy had billboards out. Because I remember he took out these billboards in L.A. And I was standing there once at this Thai food restaurant that I go to, staring at this fucking billboard going, what is this guy going to do the day after this date and the world's still around?

I remember they had businesses that people were paying to take care of your pets. There it is, May 21st. It was in 2011. Yeah, a little bit before. That's it, Judgment Day. Cry mightily unto God. They had those geniuses that made money just taking care of people's pets if they were to get raptured. Look at the gold star.

The Bible guarantees it. That's convincing. It's official. But I mean, the way, it's just so corny. It's so corny with that sticker. The Bible guarantees it. What do you want to put in the upper left-hand corner? We have an empty space.

How about a nice little sign that says the Bible guarantees it? Yeah, you know, it's going to be a few people that are on the fence. But once they see that the Bible guarantees it sticker, that gold sticker in the upper left-hand corner, yeah, that's going to be convincing. That's nice. I do miss the atheist movement and what it used to be yeah i still that's stuff i wish i could still talk about but it's just like no one gives a shit about that anymore but let's talk about this like why do things like that get corrupted they start off good and they start off where you know what the

atheist movement and the skeptics movement it's essentially there's a there's a real place for those things right skept? Skepticism is important because so many people go down these rabbit holes, and I've been guilty of it many times, where you believe nonsense because you haven't looked at the evidence correctly, or maybe you're looking at it, you have a biased perception and you're confirmation bias, and you're only looking at things that go along with this stupid idea that you have in your head. You know, like flat earth people. Like, have you ever gone down the rabbit hole and done a flat earth search?

Not too much, but I know that it's... Oh, my goodness. I watched a video last night. Last night I watched this video where this guy was explaining all these different things that indicate that the world is flat and how stupid it is for anybody to think that we're going a thousand miles an hour and X amount of thousand miles an hour through space. And yet things stand on the table. Yes. And that the water's flat, even though we're on a globe. Come on. The water's flat and calm, even though we're on a globe.

You know how stupid that is? And the way they say it is like if no one who understands why all these things work says it to them because like don't you think you'd be able to feel it if you're going 1,000 miles an hour? I'm like, okay. And the people that were agreeing with them are like, yeah, yeah. It's like if you're in a car and you're going fast and then you maintain your speed. Or a plane. You don't feel like you're going. And you're on a plane. You're on a plane, yeah.

You're going 500 miles an hour and you get up to go to the bathroom unless you hit turbulence. You don't feel like you're going. When you're on a plane. You're on a plane, yeah. You're going 500 miles an hour, and you get up to go to the bathroom. Unless you hit turbulence, you didn't even notice it. I'm trying to reboot the atheist movement a little bit. Just don't. Just leave it alone. There is one anti-woke atheist movement out there. They're called Atheists for Liberty, and it's run by a guy named Tom Sheedy, and he had me on their board of advisors.

So I recommend going there. Atheists for Liberty. I just think the problem is with groups. I really do. I think that's the same problem we have in this country when it comes to political parties. Like there's ideas, but when ideas get coalesced, when they get sectioned off into categories then you get tribalism and as soon as you get tribalism you get you you get a dehumanizing of the other you know those fucking idiots on the right are those stupid liberals like

these fucking losers are ruining America with their stupid ideas and it's so easy to do it's so easy for people to do where they categorize people as one or the other, as the good or the bad. And it's just infuriating. That's when they just adopt. They turn it into identity. So I'm for having there be an atheist movement even if I don't want to make it about my identity because part of the reason I want to have these conversations about atheism is because I want to hear the best arguments against it. I'm willing to change my mind. So, you know, and I won't have an identity crisis if someone were to show me like, oh, here's some really excellent evidence.

Have you done psychedelic drugs? I've done mushrooms a fair amount of times, maybe 10, 15 years ago. When you say you've done mushrooms, how many grams? I think I did an eighth of T. An eighth. What is that in grams? I think I did an eighth of T. An eighth? What is that in grams? What's an eighth? Like 3.5.

Three? And in T? It hits you harder, faster, but it's not as long of a trip. Oh, yeah? I had mind-melting experiences off that. Yeah. There's certain psychedelics that leave you questioning all of reality itself. Well, I remember having experiences where like, I just felt so enlightened

that like, I know the, the keys to the universe. And then of course, you know, you come down off and you're just like, no, I don't know. I just, I was just, it was just pure euphoria and whatever. Yeah. Well, I think there's,, I think there's certain moments where you grasp ideas that maybe aren't available to you. Carl Sagan talked about that. Yeah. Ideas that are available to you under the influence that just aren't. You're just not going to make those connections and pathways without it. There's definitely a before and after psychedelics.

Just sort of the way I know that what I'm seeing right now is being very stable like just a few little twists of a knob and you know things just kind of melt away in ways you never thought possible like yeah it's it's it's insane yeah well that's that's the argument against atheism it's about particularly DMT it's the argument like, okay, what is this? Is this really enlightenment and enlightened beings you're communicating with? Is this really another dimension? Is this really a well of souls or is this just massive hallucinations that are so spectacular that you can't discern between them?

Yeah. I mean, you're taking a chemical of some sort that we know is like interacts with your brain and you know it's gonna it's gonna cause things it's it's so there is like a one-to-one relationship between I'm taking this thing and it's maltering altering my mind in a way so the weird part is that your brain makes it though that's yeah I mean you're up yeah yeah I would just be the one to say like well you're taking a substance that alters your your perceptions and so there's no it seems like that just makes that makes sense i don't know if you have to like say that it's attached

on to something more cosmic or anything if i wasn't so lazy i would try to get really good at kundalini yoga because apparently the people that do kundalini that really go deep with it can experience DMT-like states. What's the difference between normal yoga? It's got some weird head bobbing. There's a lot of like weird shit to kundalini. Just something about the movements releases a certain kind of? There's specific movements that they think are designed to accentuate the release of endogenous DMT. Because the people that I know that are into it, that have done the actual drug and then done the yoga, say you can get there.

You can actually get to a full-blown DMT trip with like an hour or two, two hours of kundalini yoga when you practice it on a daily basis you get it apparently it's like what they did was they figured out a way to physically trick your body into releasing that stuff you know that we know your your brain and your liver and your lungs and different parts of your body produce. But in so many different religions, there have always been these sacraments that they take to get in touch with the gods. And if you think of all of the different religions that have to do with betterment of the mind, addressing the soul, the way we interface with each other, and there's like some real knowledge and wisdom in there that they think is coming from these psychedelic

compounds and then these psychedelic compounds are often equated to religion and religion sacraments and all these Those are the like the real questions like well, what is going on? What is going on? That's so many different religions seek Enlightenment through these substances and through these substances. they believe that they're in communication with a higher power. the spirituality they put around their religion is based on the fact that they found that particular hallucinogen and they built a religion sort of around those experiences. I'm sure. Yeah. Yeah, I'm sure a lot of them. Rather than having the religion beforehand and then having that correlate with their

experience. Well, I think with a lot of them, the ancient religions, it's so old. They don't even remember what came first, the chicken or the egg. You know, like the Soma and the Rig Veda and, you know, the Amanita Muscaria in the ancient Christian religion. Yeah. And the fact that we even know what plants do that. I mean, someone had to go out there and eat everything. And nope, this one killed him.

Nope, this one, oh, he looks like he's having a good time on that one yeah put it in that bin well the really nutty stuff everything everything everything every animal every everything that moves everything that stays still people ate rocks they've tried it all you know when you're really hungry like i'm i've read this book recently called a land so strange about cabeza de vaca and theaca and the Spaniards that landed in Florida and they thought they were in the Gulf of Mexico and they tried to make their way across the country and just were literally starving to death and just eating fucking anything they could, deer dung, like, and anything they could eat. And you just realize, like, what it must have been,

eat and you just realize like what it must have been the one of some of them went to cannibalism and you realize like imagine what it's like when you have just this unstoppable desire to like stuff something in your mouth to to stop this pang this hunger pang that's literally torturing you and then you realize what it must have been like to be ancient man what it must have been like and then when you did find something and you know whether it's uh some some fruit that kept you alive and sustained you or the milk of a cow like you worship that animal you worship that food that food became your god yeah i mean it makes sense it's they're so dependent on it that yeah why wouldn't you i mean you don't know where it came from it's it's magic yeah the atheist movement has always been weird it's because like some people like the same thing is like the skeptic movement some people don't want they don't want any wiggle

room they don't want any room for like weirdness, but some things are weird, you know, there's room for weirdness. I think a lot of them are okay with weirdness. They're just not okay with the saying, this is, this is weird. And then ushering in some other explanation that isn't,

you know, justified. I think a lot of skeptics are okay with like, yeah, that was weird. Let's wait to see what might explain it. Or if nothing explains it immediately, you know, we're willing to wait to see, uh, for more data to come in on it. The UFO thing right now is fucking a lot of skeptics heads up because the government

themselves, like the Pentagon themselves, they're like going, look, we don't know what the fuck this is. We have these, this video footage. We don't know why're like going, look, we don't know what the fuck this is. We have this video footage. We don't know why it's moving this way. We don't know how it's doing this. We don't know how it goes in the water. We don't know what this guy saw. It went 50,000 miles an hour or whatever. We don't know.

I'm sorry. We have no idea. And the skeptics are scrambling on themselves to try to figure out what the hell these things are. You should have Michael Schumer on to talk about that. Oh, I have. Yeah, I've had it. For the recent ones?

No, not the recent ones. He wrote a good article for us at Colette about, what's it called, something documenting the unexplained or something. I think it might be the name of his essay. But he kind of went through all the new films and just sort of, I guess, did a pretty big debunking on a lot of them. Yeah, I doubt it. I bet he didn't.

I bet he thinks he did. He seemed pretty good. Listen, man, that Commander Fravor footage where they went off the Nimitz in 2004, whatever that thing was, it went from more than 50,000 feet above sea level to 50 feet above sea level in less than a second. They have it on video footage accelerating off at thousands of miles an hour. They don't even know how it did it. It paused, dead stop, and then instantaneously took off going thousands of miles an hour with no visual propulsion system

whatsoever, no heat signature. You've got two different fighter jets looking at this thing. You've got the people in the Nimitz say that they've been spotting these things every couple weeks. They don't know what it is. They have zero idea. And neither does Michael Shermer. The reality is there's some shit that's happening right now in terms of unidentified flying objects or UAPs or whatever the new term they like to do. Where legitimate scientists and physicists are shaking their head they're scratching their head going what the fuck is that what is that well i'm fine with head scratching

i mean what do you what do you think it is drones from it's either someone's it's either some like human yeah it could be it could be some black ops that we don't know about, some military operation where they've developed some sort of nuclear-powered drones that can move at insane rates of speed. And there's some sort of an alloy that can protect it from going thousands of miles an hour. And maybe they've developed some sort of a magnetic propulsion device. Apparently, they were trying to work on something like that quite a long time ago. They were trying to work on some magnetic propulsion device decades ago. And it's, who knows, man? We have no idea what the fuck they're doing.

Like in the middle of the desert, some random crazy laboratory they've got carved into the side of a mountain and camouflaged from the general public they could have some drones there that operate in some wild way that we just really are not aware of the technology we're not even aware it exists

and maybe the great smoke screen is to tell the general public that these things are unexplained maybe that's why the Pentagon is the one talking about it like we have no idea these things are beyond our control meanwhile maybe it's theirs it could be it could be yeah or I'm I'm always of you know I prefer that the hypotheses of you know it's maybe it's a technology or something we just don't know about I don't but it's when people go for the you know must be aliens it's right technology or something we just don't know about. I don't. But it's when people go for the, you know, must be aliens.

It's where I kind of get lost. Well, look at what we're doing, right? We have a rover right now on Mars. We have this thing just hovering around Mars, moving around. We got little propellers that can work on propellers. We got some that work on tracks and they roll around like a tank. We can do that without any biological life powering it you know like on the spot why would we assume that like these things have to have bodies in them

like why would they want to have bodies in them if we could do that on mars and do it remote control with our fucking crude little janky technology imagine with some civilization that's a million times more advanced than us or a million years more advanced exponentially imagine what they could do yeah i think we talk a lot about just like driverless cars and driverless semis but i mean yeah i think we're if we're not there already driverless like spaceships 16s or just you know oh yeah all those types of things or attack drones i mean there, there's got to be, you've seen those drone shows, the drone light shows where they're all moved. They can do the most insane things.

Like, imagine just putting guns on those things. I mean, you know they exist. Like, they have to be, some government has those things. And just imagine how easily they could just assassinate anybody they want to. Just fly those things in. Have you seen those speed drone competitions where they're just yes like it's insane how incredible and so agile agile like yeah put a little gun on there in and out like well you've seen those cgi robots that shoot guns where they pretend it's like an actual real robot but it's not quite yet have you seen

those just the ones that are like walking with the weird backpacks? No, they run and shoot at things. Like the Boston Dynamics? Yeah. They have the dogs and they have the... But these are not real. Oh, okay. Like a lot of people thought they were real, including me, but it's fake. But it's like what it is is it looks like a robot person that jumps and does flips

and then shoots targets perfectly. Ding, ding, ding. And then they'll run up behind it and kick it. And the thing falls down and it jumps up and perfectly hits the target every single time. Ding, ding, ding. And then they'll run up behind it and kick it. And the thing falls down. It jumps up and perfectly hits the target every single time. But it's not real. Probably not too far away. Not far.

No. I mean, they already got, for real, absolute acrobatic Boston Dynamic robots where they do backflips and all kinds of Cirque du Soleil type shit. It's not hard to imagine them with guns. Has this ever come up when we were talking about any of this UFO, UAP stuff? What is this? I stumbled across this recently. This is from 1979, Washington Post.

It says during the first two weeks there's a string of low-flying objects that the Air Force tried to find and could not. Yes, this was one of the things that was discussed in the Air Force tried to find and could not? Yes. This was one of the things that was discussed in the movie The Phenomenon. Okay. There's been a few of these things that happened at missile launch sites where unidentified low-flying objects that they couldn't track or trace. They didn't know where they were coming from.

Yeah. But, again, maybe that's drones i mean i know there was a lot of like headlines that were misinterpreted because the government would say like these are real videos you know it's real right and then people would take that to mean these are real aliens but whether all they're saying is that you know the videos are not fabricated by some guy in a basement or something he didn't it's not like CGI or anything like that they're saying that the videos are real we don't know what's going on in them like they're authentic footage yeah but people sort of take that and run my

favorite quote was it I don't know is the Harry Reid quote or who made it off-world crafts not made on this earth that's my favorite one instead of ufo no no they were talking about things that they have experienced that they definitely have a knowledge of off-world crafts not made on this earth how do they know they weren't made on the earth they don't they don't that's why it's so silly but it's fun to think about it that's the problem with all this stuff is that it's so intoxicating to think that something is visiting us from another planet and just checking up on us, making sure we don't blow things up.

That's horrifying, I think. Well, it's great if it's, like, protecting us from nuclear bombs. Just for what we talked about earlier, Michael Shermer, I'm looking through his article, the three main videos, he's just using Mick West debunking, so he didn't have anything additional on that. Oh, he adds Mick West's videos? He's just talking about how Mick West debunked them.

He didn't, though. Right. Well, that's all I'm saying. He didn't add anything to that. Yeah. If you listen to people that actually, if you listen to Commander Fravor, there's actually video footage of actual fighter pilots debunking Mick West debunking because he doesn't understand the sophistication of the

instrumentation on those things it's not as simple as you saw something you thought it was a balloon no they they lock in on these things they can determine the altitude the speed they they know exactly where they're at and these these if you look at there's videos of uh there's a fighter jet pilot debunks Mick West debunking. And he's explaining, like, you have no idea what you're talking about. Like, you don't understand the systems, the weapon systems that are on board on these crafts. There's no room for misinterpretation. And he said that trying to find one of these things through these weapon systems, just randomly coming across it and locking onto it would be like trying to find something looking through a straw, like looking

through a straw and looking at a mountainside and trying to pick out a very specific tree. You're looking at the whole totality of the sky itself and they're locking in on this thing that's going a thousand miles an hour or whatever the hell it's going. guy itself and they're locking in on this thing that's going a thousand miles an hour or whatever the hell it's going. He explains it the way the fighter pilot explains it by the very specifics of all the instrumentation and how it works and why these aren't errors or mistakes. The same thing that Commander Fravor said. When Commander Fravor broke it down and described how these systems work, you realize to the

casual person that doesn't know anything about fighter jets, you can come up with all sorts of reasons why there's no way that that could be a UFO. But when you listen to these guys talk, especially a guy like Commander Fravor that was there and experienced that thing and saw it and how it mirrored him and it mirrored his movements and then jammed radar, It jammed tracking systems. Like they don't know what the fuck these things are.

I mean to say they're from another planet is kind of crazy because they're right there. Why wouldn't you assume it's from here? Yeah, they're on this planet. Yeah, it's right here. That's what we know at least. But it's so fun. That's the problem. It's so fun to say it's from another planet.

It's really enticing. If you see a Chinese sign on it, you're like, oh, no. You look really close. There's a tiny little CCP sticker. Oh, God. It'd be the most exciting thing ever to discover that extraterrestrial life is real. Yeah. I mean, I keep going sort of back and forth between whether or not I think it exists out in the universe

Because we when it comes down to we only have One instance that we know of and that's us and so it's hard to like extrapolate from a single data point But then when you you know the whole Fermi Equation stuff in paradox. Yeah It's hard not to think that we're just it's like teeming with life, but then there's the whole, like, where are they question. Well, they're so far away. The thing about it, just the distance between us and the closest stars. How far?

Hundreds of light years? What's the closest star to us outside of our galaxy? I mean, how many light years is it? It's like a couple. Four how many light years is it it's gonna take a couple for four light years 4.3 so alpha Centauri so that would be convenient Proxima Centauri so Proxima Centauri so if something could go wicked fast and it was only four light years around that's like living in San Antonio so an hour away no big deal right, right? Four light years. If you've got some kind of supersonic or super light-powered, faster-than-light jet,

something that operates on gravity. Yeah. I mean, even if you had a planet teeming with life too, I mean, we're only one species out of a million or so that is even capable of doing anywhere approaching what we're able to do here. So there could just be, how many planets? There's just a bunch of dinosaur-like type things out there that will never. That's a trillion, correct?

That number? 40 trillion? Kilometers. That's a trillion, yeah. That's a lot. It's a lot. It's a ways. Yeah.

Yeah, what you're saying is correct but also the universe is infinite so you know the way neil degrasse tyson explained it is like not only is there most likely life there's you you're out there there's so much variety because the the infinite means there's literally no end to any of it so So every single combination of things has happened. Even every single version of your... It's the whole multiverse thing. Yeah. Well, it's not even multiverse.

Like just in this universe itself. And then there's the multiverse. But in this universe itself, if this universe really is infinite, if there's an infinite number of stars and an infinite number of planets connected to those stars, that means there's an infinite number of stars and an infinite number of planets connected to those stars that means there's an infinite number of you and me and jamie in a room somewhere having the exact same conversation with the exact same pauses and then there's an infinite

number of varieties of ways we branch off from these conversations and disagree or agree I thought the consensus was that their universe is of a known size you know and mass and everything like that but I always get confused when they try to talk about like you know there's no center of the universe and they'll use the analogy they'll have like a balloon with dots on and like you know if you expand the balloon all the dots are moving each other you know no matter what dot you're on like all the planets look like they're moving away from you and that's sort of like what with situation we are in our universe only we're in three dimensions so you have to like use take that balloon analogy and that is dots on a single dimension and you need to like upgrade that one other dimension because we live in you know

the three-dimensional or four plus time world and that's when i just can't wrap my head around how do we have how can we extrapolate like the surface of the balloon situation to a three dimensional world situation that's just when people like neil degrasse tyson and they just they lose me yeah my brain just broke listening to you talk about that. Well, then there's the black hole thing. I probably didn't say it very well. The black hole hypothesis that inside of every galaxy there's a supermassive black hole that's like one half of 1% of the mass of the galaxy itself.

And the thought is that inside that black hole might be a whole nother universe like a gateway to an entirely different universe with hundreds of billions of stars and hundreds of billions of galaxies and each one has a black hole in the center and you go through that and each one of those is a whole nother universe i mean fractals like we see in nature, we see, I mean, if that's what the universe is, and people are like, oh, that's too crazy. Well, what it is is crazy enough. Everything's crazy. Yeah.

When you like really look down on it. Or look out. You look inside just in the center of an atom. I mean, things just get nuts. Nothing. Yeah. It's like, what's going on here? Things in superposition?

Yeah. I mean, why would it be more crazy if there's an infinite number of universes that exist in an infinite number of black holes out there, and each one of those has an infinite number of universes inside an infinite number of black holes? Like, oh! But why is that crazier than what you see? When you look up at the sky and you see all those stars, like, those are fucking flying fireballs.

Yeah. Everything's insane. What is it? I think Dawkins calls that like the anesthetic of familiarity where people are just so used to things they're familiar with but then when you just start like really thinking about anything it's just insane that's a great expression the anesthetic of familiarity that's great that is what it is right you just get accustomed to it so people just need to go outside and look at the stars for a bit

or look in a microscope or whatever. That's one of the nice things that psychedelics do too is they sort of reset that familiarity. You start looking at things like, God, this is weird. Every ordinary object you see, it's like brand new again. Yeah. Or you almost like look at the layer of clouds over the Earth, and you get a sense like, oh, this is a thin sort of crust of air and gases and vapor and the magnetosphere.

And then above that, you have the blackness of space, and it's all right there. It's all right there. We're just accustomed to, oh, pretty clouds. Like, pretty clouds, that's the light reflecting off of the oxygen that's making it blue, and these clouds are just water vapor, and above that is fucking chaos. You've seen, like, the original Carl Sagan Cosmos series? Yeah. That's what did it for me back then.

That's what made me want to be a scientist. I had to have that on before I go to bed every night and just blow my mind. His version of UFOs was really bizarre too. His version of aliens and that contact film, that was great. That was great stuff. That was really interesting because that was so away from the beaten path of extraterrestrial contact and the whole way they they they traveled and you know what they did to to get to wherever that other thing was that Jodie Foster got to yeah he was a great great author well he's a great mind right and it must have

been even more difficult to have those controversial thoughts back then and by the way he was a huge pothead. He talked favorably about it, helping him think and come up with ideas for physics. I think he did it initially under a pseudonym. Oh, really? Yeah. I think the initial things that he – I'm pretty sure – we've pulled this up before, right? The initial things that Carl Sagan wrote about cannabis he wrote under a pseudonym because he didn't want to be discredited.

I don't know. I'm finding right now, but I feel like it was like Mr. X, Dr. X, something like that. Something like that. Dr. X. It's hilarious. Like some X-Man shit. Yeah, but I mean.

Mr. X. Mr. X. Back then, I mean, talking about being a pothead and also being like one of the most prominent public science influencer, at least when it comes to the cosmos and space. That was the guy. To find out he's actually just a dopehead, just a goddamn dopehead, out there teaching my kids. He got a lot of flack for being the popularizer, too.

teaching my kids he got a lot of flack for being the popularizer too like there's a stigma that you're either like an actual scientist doing research or you're a popularizer you're not like a real scientist even if you have the phd and everything and so he he was for a while when he like left doing actual academic science and became a popularizer he got a lot of a lot of flack for that even though that's clearly clearly his calling and he was also involved with He got a lot of flack for that, even though that's clearly his calling. And he was also involved with, I think, a lot of the extraterrestrial search, like SETI and all that stuff. So he's definitely left his mark.

Getting angry at someone for popularizing something is really hilarious. That is one of the purest forms of hate. Yeah, yeah. Or just jealousy. How silly and how pompous well how arrogant you have to be think there's something bad about promoting science I mean it's all of us well I can speak for myself like I got into science

because of people like Carl Sagan and Steven Jay Gould and yeah I mean just these people like Dawkins Neil deGrasse Tyson like these these are enormously influential and if we are not having these people and not having them promote real science you know that's based in fact and evidence you know he was gonna fill that void is gonna be the crazies I mean there that's what that's what they're currently doing now. And so, I mean, I'd like to write some more stuff about just popular science and, you know, I'd like to sort of move away from a lot of culture war stuff at some point because I can only write the same essay, you know, in various

forms so many times. Is that mostly what you concentrate on now is culture war stuff? Mainly sex and gender. Yeah. Although I will dabble in some of the critical race stuff, but no one wants to hear a white guy talk about critical race theory. So I'll just stick to it. And as a biologist, it's in my wheelhouse to talk about when people are conflating things in biology. So that's what I stick to because that's kind of what I feel the most comfortable talking about.

Science entertainers are so important So that's what I stick to because that's kind of what I feel the most comfortable talking about. Science entertainers are so important because it's hard for people to absorb otherwise. Without a guy like Neil deGrasse Tyson or a guy like Carl Sagan back in the day, like there's something about when someone can put it into an entertaining form that it'll at least get the sparks going of of curiosity oh yeah I mean Carl Sagan got me into well I thought I was gonna be an astronomer at first and then he got me into the science and then it was the Dawkins is and ghouls that got me into evolution and then the whole science and religion debates that erupted after that kind of just hooked me in the whole thing. There aren't really that many science versus religion debates going on anymore.

Yeah, it's all woke, anti-woke now. They've sort of realized there's a bigger battle to have. And, you know, I find myself around more and more Christians. Not that I'm agreeing with their ideas on God or anything, but we just, it doesn't even enter the conversation. We were just like, whatever, we can table that for now. Like, I can just sit there because, you know, we'll have time to argue about that in the future, but at least we can all agree, you know, we're all modernists in the sense that we, you know, value science and evidence. You might interpret the facts differently than I do,

but at least we can make the same basic observations about the world whereas with a lot of the other activists like we don't even have the same starting point like right if they're coming from a place of reality and truth is relative well that's just we can't even connect out of the gates whereas I'll talk to a religious person and they might have a lot of weird beliefs and sort of certain degree of magical thinking, but at least they're able to look around and, you know, things are where they are and they can be making the same basic observations about things. And so I can have a conversation with them. And also they're not

going to think I'm a horrible person. They might think I'm going to hell or something in the back of their minds, But, um, that's only for the really extreme, you know, religious conservatives that are going to go down that route. It's maintaining some of these ridiculous ideas. It's, it makes you wonder like how much of that could be fixed with hard labor? Like how much of like these people like had to do something very difficult for a

living. Like, you know, when they say there's no atheists in foxholes, there's probably no woke people in foxholes either. You know, it's like you have to, you know what I mean? If they've experienced some sort of strife in their life. I know it's like offensive to talk about them being like infantile. But it's offensive to talk about them being infantile. But it's true. The reason you see a baby, and they'll bump their arm on the table, and they'll just wail. And you'll think, you just barely touched your arm.

I've seen kids that have been babysitting. But when you think about it, that might be the most painful thing they've ever experienced in their life. Because if they're super small, they've only been around for a couple months or a year. experienced in their life because if they're super small yeah they've only been around for a couple months or a year like hitting your head on a wall that might just be you know it's the yeah they're relative pain it's the worst ever I think we're kind of getting that point with a lot of some of the really far woke activists where they've just never been challenged on their beliefs on anything and so I'll say something like you know sex is not a

spectrum and they'll just they'll wail like it's the worst thing that's ever happened to them because it might actually be like, that's, it seems, it does seem like I'm dealing with children on a daily basis. Well, a lot of ways you are, right? Because they, there's an infantilizing of them in high school and they're, they're taught a lot of this stuff in high school. And then they go directly from that to college. And they go directly from that. They attempt to enter the workplace with the same ideologies. And a lot of times, these ideas have been nurtured rather than when you get to college, instead of being challenged on these ideas, everybody agrees with you. And they're like, you're not even taking it far enough.

There's actually no such thing as gender. It doesn't exist. You're like, oh, shit. Is this a new thing? And then you're just following this preposterous trail of breadcrumbs deep into the woods of Bananaville. And just things get more and more crazy. Well, I think like we used to tell them the way till they get out in the real world then they'll see now there's no real world then they've changed the real

world like now they've we were wrong about that now they're they're in the institutions they're in the the corporation yeah and they're they're just changing the rules they just need the power grid to go down for a few years I mean you've had like what Coinbase and Basecamp and a few other places that have successfully done a purge by offering them big exit packages just to get politics out of the workplace and off the Slack channels

because it's just turning into just these intra-corporation witch hunts for anyone who says anything that's not completely in line with what they believe it is, even if it's nothing to do with crypto or whatever Basecamp does. Do you feel like you're making any progress with all these essays that you're writing? Do you feel like sometimes you're just spinning your wheels? Does it get frustrating? It can be frustrating.

I do get a lot of feedback from people saying that it was very helpful for them. They shared this essay with their friends. I've had parents call me and say that they, based on some of my writings, like their kid had decided for themselves that, yeah, maybe they were using stereotypes to identify themselves as male or female and they're no longer deciding to go through with their transition. So I've had one of those happen, and that was just super powerful to hear someone say that

based on something that I wrote. I mean, that's like a life-changing thing. And I think one big thing that I'm helping to do along with a lot of other people is get people to be more, I guess, bold and to see these arguments that are being made about sex and gender or whatever it is and be and have the tools to push back and to identify which before to them was just this this fire hose of jargon that they had no idea how to even respond to they just would stand like a

deer in the headlights at it because holy crap there's just so much ideology just this buttressing and they try to sort of do this uh this tactic where they just hit you with so many buzzwords that you possibly can makes you feel like an idiot yeah nobody wants to feel like an idiot they need to go do the work and then they read it and they still don't understand what it is and they just you know you know, like old religions, we're just going to let you interpret the text for us. And they just give it to these activists. And that's what they do. Well, it's also in the way they promote these ideas. It's so aggressive. And so it's an attacking form that makes you back off, which is a very effective strategy for getting people to not resist. Because you put them on a defensive, you make them super uncomfortable, you confront them, and then they back. So it's like, it has all the elements of something that's not real in that it's not really an intellectual debate. What

it really is, is you're trying to play a game. And part of the game is forced compliance. Part of the game is getting people to agree with these new demands or this new framework for how to view the world. And the way they do it so aggressively, it's like they don't really want to know if their ideas can be challenged. They don't really want to know if there's someone who has an opposing idea that might be even better. And maybe they might want to rethink things. They go at it guns blazing with 100 percent confidence that they're correct. But not really. They're doing it that way because it works.

Because when you say something to a person and say that this person is a homophobe or a this-a-phobe or a that-a-phobe, when you do that and you get aggressive with them and then they feel the impact of it, they tend to back away. And you tend to, you know, you enforce this idea on them. They get all, you know, they get scrambled by it. It works. It's effective. So the more aggressive you are, the louder you are, the more shitty you are to people, the more sometimes it has an impact on them. Yeah, I mean, they make people feel as much shame as possible.

Yes. And no one wants to be yelled at or called those names. Jamie likes it. Whatever he likes. Sometimes. Yeah, he likes when people spit on him, too, that's why. I mean, a lot of times they have a conclusion that their ideology tells them they need to have. a conclusion that their ideology tells them they need to have. Like I brought up the queer theorists before, and they're all about breaking up binaries no matter where they exist,

basically. And so how this manifests in sort of the whole sex and gender debate is you'll get the people who need there to be more than two sexes or sex isn't even a thing, it's just a spectrum. And so when I said there's like the sex abolitionists who think it's a spectrum or social construct then you have the people who think there's seven sexes or five they're actually not separate groups they're the same people who will use any of those arguments on any given day if they feel like one is just more convincing to get you away from the conclusion that there's only two. Like, they don't care how many sexes there are as long as it's not two. Don't you get the feeling, though, that when you talk to people like that, that they're really playing a game?

Yeah, it's just, that's all it is. They're playing a game. They're trying to score. They're trying to score on this game, and they're trying to say things that put you in some sort of an ideological checkmate. And then you've got to go, ugh. And then they win. I just wonder how much of it is just purely driven by the whole virtue signal,

how much they want people to see them with the right opinions. There's a lot of that. Did they actually believe these? I mean, I had friends that were, I've co-authored papers with them, and early on they said, they compared the statement trans women or biological women to, you know, flat earth type stuff. And that's where they were at one point. And then they got a job later at a university. And then pronouns and bio went up the next week.

And then now they're full, full blown sex spectrum denial people. And I just saw, and this is a person that I knew pretty well and this is like what happened are you you can tell me like blink twice if they're behind you if they're listening because we had we were good friends and we know i you if you were faking it you could tell me and i wouldn't tell anyone but do you think they're faking or do you think it just changed their mind i think they might be a true believer. I think it changes people's mind. I think people are super malleable. I mean, I think that's why cults exist.

Cults exist because people can talk people into all sorts of shit that doesn't make any sense. And if your livelihood depends on you adopting an ideology, a lot of people just— It does in the academy for sure. I mean, just me saying there's two sexes and saying it loudly. People came after for you. But do you feel like there's an opportunity because something like Quillette, which is really appreciated by a lot of folks because it does have this unusual platform where it's not really ideologically driven and there's a lot of skepticism and there's a range of philosophies and ideas about the world that exist on Quillette that, you know, it's not quite all the way left and it's not all the way right. It's very centrist in a lot of ways.

Yeah, we're trying to bridge that gap. I mean, that's what I see. But do you think that that can also move to the universities, that somehow or another that kind of thinking can eventually manifest itself in a university? It's really tough. We're actually going to be doing a series of articles addressing this question, like, can the university be saved or do we need alternative institutions? And I think most of the people I talked to in the centrist position, they think the universities

might just be, might just be screwed. Is it a function of having to go to a location though? Is it like, would it be more difficult if people were taking courses online where i mean i'm sure you get some indoctrination but maybe it would be less effective i always have to think i always want to think rather that there's something about the experience of going to a place and enrolling in this school that's there and then sleeping on the campus and all the different things that people do that bring them into this hive mind of a university. Because I have so many friends where their kids go away to college and then they come back and start talking wacky, like woke shit.

And they're like, oh my God, who are you? Like, what happened to my daughter? What happened to my son? I mean, a lot of it started with, well, there's like the faculty who are, I think they're in sort of like a spiral of, you know, they're going to be doing their search committees. They're going to be looking at the people who they're hiring. And a lot of times the HR has a first pass where you need to have a really good diversity, equity, and inclusion statement. And if you don't score high on the first, on just that statement, which is

basically a political litmus test, you don't even get passed along to the department. And so we're already making basically a political test before you can even apply for the university. Not all universities do it, but it's happening more and more, especially in the wake of like the George Floyd stuff. Diversity, equity, inclusion statements need to be almost everywhere and then you have the other administrators at the university like the campus life people who you know who are in charge of the dorms and all that stuff and they tend to be extremely woke and they're involved in the day-to-day stuff of all the all the students there and there's just no there's no mediating force

that's that's pushing it back. It's just I don't see a way where you could actually start getting more diversity of thought in the universities, given that social media is so ripe to people just, you know, Googling you and looking at your pictures on Facebook. Whereas before, before the Internet, for instance, if you were applying to a university, you'd send in your application, and I had years of papers. I published in Molecular Biology and and journal of evolutionary, whatever. And they would just see your CV that had everything on there. They saw your name and they didn't know your political views. They didn't know anything about you. You might go

out for an interview, but there's an agreement when you're being interviewed that people don't ask you about politics and religion because that's just not relevant to the job of a molecular biologist or something. And so they would hire people who they had no choice, but because they were the most qualified candidate, they didn't know about their political views. So you had more political diversity just organically in those departments. They usually do skew left just because I think that's just people who are scientists usually skew left. But now we're in the situation where people are being super

screened before they get the job and they have not only the equity diversity inclusion statements but people searching you online i mean i applied for a university um no actually not when i applied to i was i spoke to a dean the chair of a department in somewhere in the midwest and they said that they liked my essays I was applying to a bunch of University assistant professor jobs And he straight-up told me that he liked my writing he uses so my essays is just like debate things for his class He'll have the whole class read it and they'll debate the points on it and that he would like to hire me as a

Assistant professor and that he thinks the rest of the faculty would also probably be on board but but and that he thinks the rest of the faculty would also probably be on board. But? But HR has to look at the applications first. And he said there's almost a zero chance that your application will be passed along to the department to even be considered to be hired. And so that's why I left. Because of? Once I heard, just because of my article in the Wall Street Journal talking about the dangerous denial of sex,

articles I've written in Quillette, my Twitter presence where I'm talking about this stuff. You Google me and that's what you see. And it's just a liability at some point. I mean, students are going to say they feel unsafe. And even if I were to get hired, what are my chances of getting tenure after six years if students are constantly saying they feel unsafe with me on campus? And I disagree with the whole diversity and inclusion type stuff and they want you to have a whole diversity equity and inclusion component to your research even if I just I studied wasp behavior so like how am I gonna include I'm gonna dedicate my

time where I should be studying wasps to doing a diversity equity inclusion project do we really want Einstein's not saying I'm Einstein, but someone who's an Einstein figure, how much time do we want them dedicating to a diversity, equity, and inclusion part of their research? Is there any good argument for a diversity, equity, and inclusion department? Well, it depends on what those words actually mean because they tend to just mean the opposite of what they are. I mean, diversity is just the most surface-level diversity ever. They just want people of different colors, basically,

where they don't account for ideological diversity, viewpoint diversity, which is what a university should be doing. But the thing is they don't assume there is any ideological diversity diversity viewpoint diversity which is what a university should be doing but the things they don't assume there is any ideological diversity once you get into college they assume everyone's on the left yeah and they make and they're correct but they do like a self-fulfilling prophecy but making that happen essentially but that is pretty wild that they're able to do that because that's colleges and universities in this country are basically left-wing factories. They promote out these – they pump out these people that are left-wing ideologues.

And then a few that are like rebels that are resisting the gravity of everybody around them and they figure out a way to be closet conservatives. I was told to wait for tenure before even talking about this stuff, which would have been six plus years in the future. But it sends us a weird signal because people's claim to value tenure because you get to have academic freedom and speak your mind. So they pretend that speaking your mind and being bold is a virtue. But then if you happen to be the type of person that would need tenure because you have bold views about things, you're weeded out before you even get a chance to get tenure. So they're specifically filtering out the people who could actually use tenure.

So the people who get tenure are the people who are just either just shut up because they're too scared and probably won't ever use the tenure that they have, or people who just fall in line completely and have no use for tenure because they just, all their beliefs fall perfectly within the norm. Do you think there's any room right now for, or demand, or even the potential to have a centrist university and to promote it that way? And to, you know, like if someone bankrolls it and says, listen, it's very clear what's happening in this country. You've got your right-wing universities,

which are always connected to religion, but there's no, like, legitimate, centrist, ideologically free university where they're not trying to pump out right wing or left wing people. They're trying to allow people to debate ideas and you give them free reign of thought and allow them to make up their own minds and draw their own conclusions. Yeah. I mean, to me, a centrist university isn't like a university necessarily composed of centrists, but as long as like you can have the Marxist professor, as long as they're not

training their students to be Marxist. You know, they can talk about Marxism. They could even say this is the idea that I'm I'm partial to. But here's other ideas. Here's the best challenges to these ideas that Marxism faces or instead of just indoctrination, instead of just indoctrination. And you hear from the people who take a lot of these gender studies classes that it's not a back and forth. It's just like here's the way it is. Same with, you know, some of the people who take a lot of these gender studies classes that it's not a back and forth it's just like here's the way it is same with you know some of the diversity trainings like you're not being taught to think you're just being taught what to think and they're basically just they're preachers they're giving you the truth is as revealed to them uh and there is one college

that i know of it's called ralston college and a guy named stephen blackwell he's founded the college and they're they are dedicated to sort of the enlightenment values um and i wouldn't say they're like anti-woke they're just pro debate truth let's hash things out um and so i'm hoping i get some I'm hoping it gets some traction over there. I think most of it's online. I think there might be campus coming and they've got accreditation and, uh, I'm hoping it becomes something.

It's one step to the alternative institutions. Do you see as things get more and more crazy, there becomes more of a demand for articles, like the kind of articles that you write, or at least more enthusiasm behind the, the people that, that do agree with you or that are are interested in these thoughts yeah more and more people are being aware of the problem

for a lot of the time they just didn't think it was an issue but i think for example laurel hubbard playing in the olympics if if they win gold like if they if they win gold if she wins gold that'll be a lot of people are going to wake up to that. They're going to be, people are going to realize how insane this is. I mean, the world can only get too close to idiocracy before people just shake it off. And then hopefully they can see essays like the ones I have written and other ones that Colette. I hope you're right. I'm skeptical though.

I think you can keep sliding. So there's like, and I'm getting more partial to this, is the accelerationist view where just like let the crazy go. And then once people realize the insanity that's unleashed on the world, then it'll quickly be stamped out because no one is going to stand for that craziness. Right now we're sort of doing this. The craziness is just getting this getting trickled in you know sometimes it's more of a quicker flow sometimes it's it's just a trickle but it prolongs the the change and it might actually be more difficult to get out if it's if it's slower than if it's faster i'm not sure which one i actually

think is true but i can see the proponents of the accelerationist approach i'm becoming more and more partial to that every day well the craziness is now attached to violence with things like antifa like what they've done to portland and what's going on in seattle it's like now the left-wing radical left includes fire and weapons and all the crazy shit that Portland has sort of embodied. Portland's a wild place now. It's almost unreal. I see Andy Ngo's Twitter feed where he's just documenting that stuff every day. And it's just like, this is every day.

How are they trying to extract him from a hotel to beat the shit out of him? Yeah, I saw that. He had to hide in a hotel. He went back. Yeah. He can't do that by himself anymore well i don't know why he thinks he can infiltrate and wear a mask and sneak around with those people all they have to do is hear him talk and they go hey yeah no he's gonna i mean he could have got killed at that last one they were yes trying to get in the hotel

he well he certainly could have gotten the fuck beaten out of him. I mean, I don't know if they would have killed him. They might have accidentally killed him. It's just strange that they've become violent. Like the left, far left, like they're embodying these Marxist ideas and what you would think of. I mean, and inclusiveness, right? They're all about like non-cruelty. A lot of them are even vegan.

And yet they're super violent to get their point across. And now the Portland mayor is like, turn them in. Fuck defunding the police. Call the police. Get their photographs. We've got to arrest them. We've got to do something. He's done an about-face for sure.

Crazy about-face. We've got to arrest them. We've got to do something. He's done an about-face for sure. Crazy about-face. Are they still letting people off for writing? Because that was the big thing is they'd let them in and then they would just release them even if they're about to burn down a bank. I don't know. Do you have hope?

I do, yeah. I see a lot more people speaking up about this. I think it's going to get worse before it gets better, but more and more people are speaking up and they're identifying the problem and they're able to articulate the problem. And I think we're still going to see the crazy go, but there's at least this other force that's beginning to push back. And at some point, I don't know if it's maybe five years from now, I think we might start seeing some real progress. Five years from now? We have to wait five years? I always say that I think the ideology isn't stable on itself, too,

so it'll either just eat itself or a combination of people pushing back and it eating itself. I just don't know how it comes back around. I do think it's eating itself. They are attacking themselves, and you really can't be woke enough. They'll find someone who's not quite as woke as they are, and they attack that because it's a little status game they're playing. Oh, yeah. Big time.

In the whole article in here on the knitting wars on Instagram, I mean, it was just one-upmanship. What's the knitting wars? the knitting wars so it started I mentioned it a little bit earlier about someone who made a post on Instagram that they were going to India and that there was this dream that they always had and it was to them they mentioned that it was like going to Mars and then someone said you know you're othering people this is like colonialist language and then so someone came to their defense and then they got canceled and then some big person in the knitting industry just didn't say anything about it. And they came after her because the silence is violence type thing. And it was just this,

like this snowball effect of you. There's no right response. You can either say something or you can, if you're silent, you're going to get canceled. So it's just, yeah, you just think stories are everywhere.

It's unsustainable. I just, I don't see how it could be. I think more people are getting sick of it. I think in a lot of think it's... These stories are everywhere. It's unsustainable. I just, I don't see how it could be. I think more people are getting sick of it. I think in a lot of ways it's pushing a lot of people that were in the center or even left, but left, reasonable left. It's pushing them towards the right because it makes them angry. They don't feel like they belong anymore. And then, you know, they find that the right is more accommodating to their ideas and they're willing to talk to them.

And, you know, they seem more reasonable in a lot of ways. Yeah. I mean, I'm more comfortable talking to right wing people because I can disagree with them. And it's they're OK with that. Yeah. I mean, that's I don't become a Nazi instantly. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I've I voted for Democrat my entire life. Even the last election, I voted for Tulsi Gabbard. I couldn't bring myself to do the Biden or Trump. I did Joe Jorgensen. Dichotomy. What was what was she about? Libertarian. OK. Yeah. I mean, that's more open. I appreciate that more. But I'm I'm I'm right there. I'm almost about to vote Republican. I don't think I could vote for Trump if he was running again. I couldn't vote for Trump if he was running again. I think he's just a toxic figure.

But if someone like DeSantis was running, I would probably vote. I would vote for him. Yeah, he seems a really reasonable alternative to a lot of the nonsense, woke bullshit. And I haven't changed in my views either. It's like I've remained, I used to be what I consider on the left, and then the left just expanded out, and now relative to where the left is now, I've just sort of crossed over the threshold.

But I still have the same beliefs and values that I've had when I was voting for Democrats. Let's talk again in a few years and see if anything has changed. I'll be a Trumper or something. You might be. You might be. So the book? The book is Panics and Persecutions by Quillette. And it's various authors writing essays.

20 Tales of Excommunication in the Digital Age. So just all the little nooks and cranny stories you've probably never heard of, of just how pervasive a lot of the cancel culture is. Just because you don't hear the stories on the news doesn't mean it's not affecting people's lives. And so it's an important book, I think, a compendium of just these everyday stories from people who might not make the the news but it's still big in their life and it's important to to to look at and then also if anyone's interested on the whole sex and gender thing i have a um a sub stack that's reality's last stand i do like a weekly news write-up on the new stuff that's coming out in the realm of sex denial which is getting hard to maintain

because there is just so much insanity every single week. But if you want to take a look at that, so you can please subscribe to that. You might want to drink this before you do it. Drink some honey shine. I wish I had enough to give everybody. Do you sell it? I don't. No, it's already not allowed to be made.

And so if I sold it, it would be a double whammy. Well, don't get double whammied. All right. Thank you, Colin. Appreciate it. And tell your mom I said thanks for the beef jerky too. It's very nice. She'll love hearing that.

All right. Bye, everybody.