Joe Rogan Experience #1673 - Colin Wright

Joe Rogan 0:00 (drumming music) Joe Rogan podcast. Check it out.

Colin Wright 0:04 The Joe Rogan Experience.

Joe Rogan 0:06 Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night. All day. (rock music plays) Hello, Colin.

Colin Wright 0:15 How's it going, Joe?

Joe Rogan 0:16 W- 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, right?

Colin Wright 0:25 It's distilled mead.

Joe Rogan 0:26 Distilled mead.

Colin Wright 0:26 Yeah. So-

Joe Rogan 0:27 So mead is like a beer made out of hon- well, kind of like-

Colin Wright 0:30 Yeah. It's like a honey wine. So when you make rum, that's basically just like a distilled, uh, fermented sugarcane product in beer, or i- and whiskey is a distilled beer. And then if you wanna have brandy, that's sort of a distilled fruit wine of some sort.

Joe Rogan 0:46 Mm.

Colin Wright 0:46 So this is sort of a unique thing. This is distilled mead, so straight from honey. So I think it's one of the most like crafty spirits there are, because like good luck replicating all the stuff that the bees did to, to make that honey and then the fermentation process. And then that was put in a pot still by myself.

Joe Rogan 1:02 Well, I had mead for the first time last weekend actually.

Colin Wright 1:05 Oh, okay.

Joe Rogan 1:06 I was at, uh, Maynard Keenan's place in, um, Scottsdale, Arizona. M- um, uh, American Vineyards. You know Maynard from Tool?

Colin Wright 1:13 Yeah, yeah. For sure.

Joe Rogan 1:14 You know, he's a, he's actually a wine guy. He makes wine. What would you call that? A... What is a wine producer?

Colin Wright 1:21 Viticulturist? Enologist?

Joe Rogan 1:23 Wine maker? (laughs) I'm sorry. Well, uh, 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.

Colin Wright 1:35 Yeah. I'm sort of halfway interested in actual drinking mead itself. Uh, I'm more into like distilling that product and making a spirit. And for some reason... So I w- 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 like the honey and the floral, uh, notes that come through at the very end.

Joe Rogan 1:57 And you made this?

Colin Wright 1:59 I did.

Joe Rogan 2:00 Ooh. How'd you make it?

Colin Wright 2:02 Uh, I have a, a copper pot still, and you just basically make five gallons of mead, wait till it's really dry so all the sugars have been converted to alcohols, pour it in the pot still-

Joe Rogan 2:13 I gotta taste this, brothers.

Colin Wright 2:13 ... and then there you go.

Joe Rogan 2:14 How strong is it?

Colin Wright 2:16 It's 100 proof.

Joe Rogan 2:17 Oh. Wow.

Colin Wright 2:24 There you go.

Joe Rogan 2:25 Whoa, that's intense.

Colin Wright 2:26 But can you taste the honey and the flower or no? Or is it just all-

Joe Rogan 2:30 Um, sort of. Y- y- now that you told me that, I would go, no, it's like a fucking strong turpentine taste.

Colin Wright 2:36 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 2:37 Woof.

Colin Wright 2:37 There's a review.

Joe Rogan 2:38 Oof. It's rough. If you wanna get fucked up, try this.

Colin Wright 2:42 It's good over ice. I'm sure it can make a good mixed drink too, so feel free to-

Joe Rogan 2:45 Oh, for sure.

Colin Wright 2:45 ... experiment here.

Joe Rogan 2:47 Why Reality's Last Stand.

Colin Wright 2:49 Yeah. So that's actually, that's the name of my, my Substack (laughs) and-

Joe Rogan 2:53 Oh.

Colin Wright 2:53 ... that has to do with... I, 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.

Joe Rogan 3:03 Stop. Just cancel this podcast. Turn it off. You can't do this. Hit, hit stop.

Colin Wright 3:09 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 3:09 What are you saying? There's only two sexes?

Colin Wright 3:12 That's, 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, uh, 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 stuff.

Joe Rogan 3:33 Yeah.

Colin Wright 3:34 But I'm not sure if you r- 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 in themselves.

Joe Rogan 3:51 I've had an argument with a professor about that on this very podcast-

Colin Wright 3:55 Yeah. Oh, really?

Joe Rogan 3:55 ... 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, what's happening there? Is it, is there-

Colin Wright 4:13 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 4:13 ... a difference between a boy and girl there? There is. So in every other animal, there's a difference between a male and a female, but not with humans?

Colin Wright 4:22 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 they'll, you'll see them talk about male and female flies. And it's like, and 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, 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, 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 that it's this, like sex is some multifaceted, multifactorial, uh, property and that it's like a statistical, uh, equation that you can just feed in some inputs and then you can find out like where on the sex spectrum you might reside. Uh, when in reality, that's just not the case at all. You have the two camps of people. You have the, the sex spectrum/the sex, uh, social constructivists. I kind of l- lump them into this category of they're like, they're for the abolition of sex altogether. Then you have the other people who are sort of the sex expansionists and they wanna, (laughs) they wanna 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, uh, queer theory, which is from like the whole critical, critical theory, uh, field in, in academia. And what I find is fascinating is you, you, 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's, there happens to be only two sexes, where-

Joe Rogan 6:13 But there's clearly a spectrum inside each two sexes, right?

Colin Wright 6:18 Yeah, so if you were to look within males and females, there are, in a sense, a spectrum of, of characteristics that each sex has. Um, 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, with, um, genitalia that are pretty ambiguous, who might not be classifiable as either male or female, uh, at a, at a glance. And they'll use that and suggest that just because this individual, uh, exists somewhere in between, therefore sex is, is a spectrum, that it's a social construct. You can't really draw the line anywhere, uh, specifically where, w- where, b- 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 B., be 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.

Joe Rogan 7:27 But it really, it's not less male, it's just less testosterone or less what we would consider to be like manly characteristics, right? You, you're-

Colin Wright 7:36 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 7:37 ... you're still dealing with someone who can impregnate a female. Like that's, that should be where the, we draw the line, right? Like one of them has XY chromosome, one of them has double X.

Colin Wright 7:47 Yeah. So there's sort of two levels that you can look at when we're referring to, to biological sex and what that is. There's sort of a population level, uh, way to look at it, where you can say, like, "Well, what is biological sex as a concept?" Uh, and this has to do with, um, having two different types of gametes, two different sizes, and the organisms that have, produce sperm, the smaller gamete, they're considered males. Organisms that produce the larger gametes, the ova, they're considered females. Um, and that broadly speaking, this is how we classify, uh, a population and the individuals within it. But if we're gonna 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 the 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, uh, but otherwise your sexual anatomy is perfectly intact, can we classify them as male or female? Um, so this is sort of the, the game that gets played, uh, along that. And so basically when we are 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 in, it makes the intuitive sense to what most people seem to, to, um... it's what they think sex is when they, when they sort of observe males and females. Has to do with your reproductive, uh, anatomy.

Joe Rogan 9:26 What is going on today where this is such a hot topic? Like, what has happ- I mean, what has been the shift in our culture? Is, is, can you find a patient zero? Was there a- an initial explosion that led 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 to- 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, i- 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, what's causing this, Colin? Help us out.

Colin Wright 10:25 You know, i- it's something I've been tracking for, for quite some time.

Joe Rogan 10:29 Like a bounty hunter?

Colin Wright 10:30 Yes, exactly.

Joe Rogan 10:32 (laughs)

Colin Wright 10:32 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 kind- that movement kind of dissipated and, or at least is not nearly as prevalent and they don't hold as much power.

Joe Rogan 10:44 What happened with the new... There was, I think it's Atheism Plus.

Colin Wright 10:48 I think they just lost the argument. Yeah. Th- I mean, there's actually an interesting segue between Atheism Plus and the, the modern social justice movement-

Joe Rogan 10:55 Oh, yeah.

Colin Wright 10:56 ... as we see it now. I mean-

Joe Rogan 10:56 For sure.

Colin Wright 10:57 Atheism was the first movement to be infiltrated by all the language we're hearing now of, you know-

Joe Rogan 11:02 Yes.

Colin Wright 11:03 ... appropriation and the whole, um, you know, check your privilege and-

Joe Rogan 11:06 Well, I remember that.

Colin Wright 11:07 ... all that stuff. Yeah. It had to do with-

Joe Rogan 11:08 I remember watching Atheism Plus conferences online going-

Colin Wright 11:12 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 11:12 ... "This is like the, 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.

Colin Wright 11:32 Have you heard of Elevator Gate?

Joe Rogan 11:34 Yes.

Colin Wright 11:34 With Richard Dawkins-

Joe Rogan 11:35 Yes.

Colin Wright 11:35 ... involved in that whole...

Joe Rogan 11:36 Yes.

Colin Wright 11:37 Yeah, that was sort of the, the thing that sparked off in a big way the, the rise of a lot of social justice stuff and the fall of new atheism.

Joe Rogan 11:44 Could you explain it to people that don't know what it was about?

Colin Wright 11:46 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, um, there had been, uh, people complaining of sexual harassment and there was one specific example, there was a speaker, her name was Rebecca Watson. She went by Skepchick, and she was giving a talk at this conference, uh, specifically addressing sexism in the atheist movement. And she, I think she might have said that she wasn't interested in, in, you know, hooking up at conferences or whatever. And then on the way back to her hotel later that night, uh, 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. That's like, that's literally what he said. Um, that's, you know, that's a euphemism for, "You want to come back and..."

Joe Rogan 12:38 Netflix and chill.

Colin Wright 12:39 ... Netflix and chill, yeah. And so...She said no. He didn't pursue anymore. They went off to their separate rooms, everything was fine. The 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. It was in a, it was in a, a tight s- a, a 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 were saying like, "Nothing really happened. He, they just used a euphemism for, you know, they, 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 since sort of lost his mind. Um, and on his blog he was talking about this event, and then Richard Dawkins in the comments section wrote what's known as the Dear Muslima letter.

Joe Rogan 13:31 Yeah.

Colin Wright 13:31 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 SkepChick, you know, she was offered coffee in an elevator and she said no and the guy didn't do anything after that." So it was a very sarcastic-

Joe Rogan 13:55 Mm-hmm.

Colin Wright 13:56 ... way he, he approached that. And then that just made the whole atheist movement just in, get engulfed in flames immediately. It was all the factions split up between the super woke people and the classic skeptics, and yeah, that w- it 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-

Joe Rogan 14:30 Hmm.

Colin Wright 14:30 ... uh, the atheist movement never recovered from that. It was, it's gone downhill and when 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 it's sort of erupt all over, erupted all over the country in 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, and-

Joe Rogan 14:51 What do you think is causing it? Like, what, I mean, a lot of people have theories on this, but I wanna know your personal one. Like, what is, why is this a thing today?

Colin Wright 15:02 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, to the word discrimination in a way, where we're been told that discrimination is a terrible thing always. But, I mean it might sound controversial but discrimination just means that we're b- distinguishing between two different things in a certain context. They-

Joe Rogan 15:30 Where we think of discrimination as like prejudice.

Colin Wright 15:32 Yeah, we can, yeah, "I'm, I'm discriminating in this certain-"

Joe Rogan 15:35 Yeah.

Colin Wright 15:35 "... this certain thing." I mean if you, if you have a, a children's sports league, that discriminates against adults and most people would say that that's a good, that's a good type of discrimination.

Joe Rogan 15:43 Right.

Colin Wright 15:43 But we've just sort of adopted this idea that discrimination is really bad and so now when we talk about, uh, trans women in sports or something, w- you know, they think they're being discriminated against and what you'll see in the headlines is, you know, "Women and girls are not able, 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 (laughs) that is the reason why they're not being able to compete. It's the fact that they're, you know, biologically male and that's the, the thing that's being kept, uh, 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 if th- that they're trans, you know, you can't verify it empirically in any way and, um, so there's just, there's no reason to segregate sports by just a, 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, the concept of, uh, the, the idea that discrimination is bad just across the board is, is holding us back from having more productive conversations, and then I know you've had people like James Lindsay on and they, they talk about just the, the critical theory, the queer theory that's out there where it's just meant to just pick apart anything. Anytime there's, they see a binary they need to deconstruct it and deconstruct it, and there's, it's based on this, uh, epistemology of, of relativistic, um, you know, w- relative truth, um, blurring borders between other things, systems of power. This is sort of the ideology that has, is taking root in a lot of different areas in society and, and it's really been coming to a head in the last few years on, on many topics too, on the whole sex and gender debate. We have the critical race theory stuff, we have the postcolonial, you know, uh, decolonize the curriculum and you know, it's just, it's spreading out of control.

Joe Rogan 17:36 (laughs)

Colin Wright 17:36 And then people who, who are not, who are, who are not the postmodern 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, uh, uh, foothold in the institutions, it's now resulting in, you know, people getting canceled.

Joe Rogan 18:04 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 kinda catch up with what you're allowed to say and what you're allowed to talk about and w- 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 die.... not that discrimination's bad-

Narrator 18:39 (laughs)

Colin Wright 18:40 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 18:40 ... as we've discussed. But you know what I mean? It's like, it's ... This is a new thing, th- to, to get to a position where, uh, uh, 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, forced compliance into this ideology. You have to, you have to accept what we view now as sex and gender.

Colin Wright 19:13 Yeah. Th- there's, like, a language takeover.

Joe Rogan 19:15 Yeah.

Colin Wright 19:16 And even when you said just earlier, a second ago, that there's, you know, there's two genders. Well, they've just co-opted the, that word gender.

Joe Rogan 19:24 Mm-hmm.

Colin Wright 19:24 And so what used to be the case, and this was something that I was on board with, I was a good, you know, I 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 wanna expand that, whatever that means. Um, it has to do with identity. It's sort of like sex is your hardware, uh, gender is your software.

Joe Rogan 19:52 Right.

Colin Wright 19:52 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 ha- 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 ... I, my, my, 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 slowly over time, that distinction became more and more blurry where now they would say instead of, "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's seven different sexes, or sex is a social construct. And, I mean, this was ... A- a- as I started pushing back against that, I, 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 XYY, uh, chromosomes, that you're a, your own unique sex now rather than just, you know, variation within, within the male, the male sex.

Joe Rogan 21:15 Do you have a theory as to w- what caused all this, or as to why it's, it seems to be progressing? It's not, it's not like they reached a point and they went, "Okay, I think we made our point. Let's, uh, let's sort of normalize this and have it be accepted into the, the common g- you know, thoughts of people." But that's, that's not what's happening. It's just like it keeps getting weirder and weirder and weirder. It's like they keep pushing the envelope about what it means.

Colin Wright 21:42 Yeah. There's no one to put on the brakes, really.

Joe Rogan 21:45 Right.

Colin Wright 21:45 I mean, they've, they're within the institutions, and the people who would normally wanna speak up, um, like, like I did, they get called names. They, you know, I was looking for tenure track positions and I had people post on, 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, uh, poison the well for my, my, my potential hiring. And so people see that that happens, and then they just, they just don't wanna do it. They stay quiet.

Joe Rogan 22:20 Right.

Colin Wright 22:20 And then, so all you hear is the, the loudest voices, the most activists, uh, they come out and they'll, they'll just say this type of stuff. And then a lot of people don't wanna say anything because they're generally confused because of the jargon that's being used. Um, and then they'll kind of do a human shield aspect where they're, they're portraying themselves as sort of the next evolution of LGBT rights, or in the terms of critical race theory, well, then 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 just, they don't wanna be called a racist because that's the worst thing you can be called. They don't wanna be called a transphobe because we all wanna be accepting people. And, uh, fortunately I think a lot of people are (laughs) 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. You know, we can, we can definitively say for, you know, 4,999 people out of, out of 5,000 that they are unambiguously male or female, uh, and, you know, we can account for the 1% that's not, but, um, that doesn't make all of us sort of in question of what, what our sex is.

Joe Rogan 23:42 So did you start ... You s- you, you're saying you were a progressive. You started out thinking in, in terms of, like, a progressive ideology, but then-

Colin Wright 23:51 I was pro the gay rights movement and, yeah, for sure.

Joe Rogan 23:54 And what, if anything, has changed?

Colin Wright 23:58 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 w- 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, and this is, you know, having the consequences we're seeing for, like, women's sports and-

Joe Rogan 24:23 Yeah.

Colin Wright 24:23 ... males getting admitted into female prisons, um, being able to self-identify.

Joe Rogan 24:27 Including male sexual abusers.

Colin Wright 24:30 Oh, yeah. Yeah.

Joe Rogan 24:31 Which is really so crazy.

Colin Wright 24:32 Which we were, we were promised that would never happen, um, but apparently that is. And you know ...... Laurel Hubbard, the trans woman who's the first, uh, Olympic athlete who just disqualified from New Zealand.

Joe Rogan 24:44 Mm-hmm.

Colin Wright 24:45 So, that's- that's a new thing coming out. This is a-

Joe Rogan 24:48 Yeah.

Colin Wright 24:48 ... 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 power lifting for her, for her weight class. Um, and I think she's favored to win the whole thing, uh, given- given her biology. So-

Joe Rogan 25:12 (laughs)

Colin Wright 25:12 ... it's, uh-

Joe Rogan 25:13 Given her biology.

Colin Wright 25:15 Given their biology.

Joe Rogan 25:16 Their, they.

Colin Wright 25:17 You know, I'm-

Joe Rogan 25:17 Yeah.

Colin Wright 25:17 ... I'm the type of person who-

Joe Rogan 25:19 What's this, Jamie?

Colin Wright 25:20 Oh, yeah.

Narrator 25:21 It's a picture I just stumbled across of, uh, where Laurel Hubbard's (clears throat) falls in, (clears throat) excuse me, falls in line with, I think, the orange line is women. Yeah. Pray, I think M35 is the age.

Colin Wright 25:34 Yeah.

Narrator 25:34 And then she slides right in there at, uh, where all the males are.

Colin Wright 25:37 Yeah, I think there's actually a time thing, so it's 2010 to '19.

Narrator 25:40 Yeah, correct.

Colin Wright 25:41 And so just a few years ago, Laurel Hubbard's total lift would've been just right in line with- with the male category that she's currently lifting in.

Joe Rogan 25:52 Phew.

Colin Wright 25:53 So, it's quite a big jump.

Joe Rogan 25:55 Yeah. It's a huge jump. Um, I wonder, um, how many people support this versus h- I mean, you read comments under when there- there's an article that's written and they post it on Twitter, uh, a- about this kind of stuff. It seems overwhelmingly that most people think it's a bad idea and that most people think it's unfair to biological women. But then there's people that just go all in on the woke side, and they- they want to 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 gonna look at, like, there's gonna be your LeBron James on the high end, and then on the low end, there's gonna 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.

Colin Wright 26:53 Yeah, a- 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 all kind of...

Joe Rogan 27:04 Yeah. Exactly.

Colin Wright 27:04 We know some women out there, like you've met them in your life every day, where, maybe not every day, but you- 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, like, y- you had a woman made it 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- a woman can make it on a man's team every once in a while. And they- they fail to take into account just like, as you kind of move up in how elite you are, the proportion of, or the- the- the representation of women just gets diminished and diminished until, you know, when you're in the top .1% of athletic performance. There's just no women up there anymore.

Joe Rogan 27:46 Are there any trans men that are competing against biological men successfully in sports?

Colin Wright 27:53 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.

Joe Rogan 28:01 Mm.

Colin Wright 28:02 Yeah, so w- 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've, might have some woman somewhere in the world who can lift that- that amount of weight." Or sometimes, there'll be trans women in a competition and they won't win a medal, and so people will say that that-

Joe Rogan 28:23 It's fair.

Colin Wright 28:23 ... shows that it's fair 'cause they're not winning.

Joe Rogan 28:25 Yeah.

Colin Wright 28:26 And I- 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, it's, he's the, he's not fair."

Joe Rogan 28:43 Right.

Colin Wright 28:43 "He's this athletic freak. He can jump five feet in the air, whatever, he can dunk, he's just extremely strong, fast, everything you need. Like, I wasn't born with that, so, you know, is it unfair that, th- uh, 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.

Joe Rogan 29:10 Mm-hmm.

Colin Wright 29:11 So, I could probably take a bunch of steroids, enter a power lifting 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 then when we talk about female sports, these were categories specifically designed to, uh, to control for the effects of male puberty on your body. Uh, 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 male, uh, female sports is meant to control for. And so that's- that's why even if she gets last place in the Olympics, like, she still took that last place away from a- a woman who would have been there. Like, I'll- I'd get last place in a power lifting competition, um...

Joe Rogan 30:05 So, what is happening though? Like, why do you think the- 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. Uh, I would- 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 gonna take my spot."

Colin Wright 30:27 Inclusion, that's just the buzzword of the day.

Joe Rogan 30:29 Inclusion.

Colin Wright 30:29 Everyone...

Joe Rogan 30:30 Yeah. But, I mean...

Colin Wright 30:31 Diversity, equity, inclusion.

Joe Rogan 30:32 I- is it, if we had an overall vote though, I mean...

Colin Wright 30:35 Oh, that'd be done.

Joe Rogan 30:35 ... is the- is the issue that more people who, um, support these things are in the camp of "activists," people that will complain and write letters and emails and call and- 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, they just go, "Well, I don't think it's right that a biological male competes against a female, but what am I gonna do?" You know? Like, they're not organized-

Colin Wright 31:08 If it was-

Joe Rogan 31:08 ... in that regard.

Colin Wright 31:08 ... if it was a vote, it would, it'd be pretty unanimous. It'd be-

Joe Rogan 31:13 It'd be pretty close.

Colin Wright 31:15 I don't think it'd be pretty close. I think... I, I don't, I don't think you-

Joe Rogan 31:17 No, that's what I meant. I meant-

Colin Wright 31:18 Oh.

Joe Rogan 31:18 ... close to unanimous.

Colin Wright 31:19 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Joe Rogan 31:20 Yeah.

Colin Wright 31:20 Um...

Joe Rogan 31:20 I think there's would be a few knuckleheads in there that are in denial.

Colin Wright 31:24 Yeah. I mean, you're gonna get all the, all the woke activists are gonna vote for yes, but most of the people who are outside of that small percentage are not going to. But-

Joe Rogan 31:32 But the result of ad hominems too, or they, um, they just, they can't... The, the idea is that you have to be a bigot if you think this is unfair. Like, that's the only, the only solution, or the only possible explanation for why-

Colin Wright 31:47 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 31:47 ... why you don't think it's fair.

Colin Wright 31:48 Well, I mean, unfortunately it's not up for a vote. And they found a way to sort of get their ideology through without people voting on it by, again, manipulating the language behind it.

Joe Rogan 31:59 Mm-hmm.

Colin Wright 32:00 Where you look at the WNBA, that's the Women's National Basketball Association, and you know, they, they'll talk about what a woman is, is a gender identity.

Joe Rogan 32:09 Hmm.

Colin Wright 32:10 And so, you know, even though everyone knows that the WNBA and all the women's categories in the Olympics, that they were created, you know, for biological females but, um, if they can just insist that a woman is now not an adult human female but is instead anyone who simply identifies as it, then you don't have to change any rules anywhere and sort of stampede through and, and, and change everything and all of a sudden have, you know, people competing in the sex categories they shouldn't be.

Joe Rogan 32:38 Yeah, I just wonder what's going on at 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 gonna go with it? Because if anybody should be concentrating on fairness it's the damn Olympics. I mean-

Colin Wright 32:57 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 32:57 ... 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.

Colin Wright 33:11 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 33:11 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-

Colin Wright 33:24 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 33:25 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, and regardless of whether or not it's fair.

Colin Wright 33:38 The... They put up this facade as though they're sort of being informed by the science, by, you know, if you're gonna 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 nanomols per liter right now for one, for uh, 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, 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 maken us stronger, upper bodies, made us taller, made our grip strength a lot stronger. And before a lot of the activists said, you know, where are the studies, uh, showing that a trans woman who's on hormone suppression is actually stronger and more athletic, um, than, than a cis woman? And then the studies came out. And actually I have, I have them right here. (laughs) So this year there's one by, uh, Emma Hilton and Tommy Lundberg and this is transgender women in the female category of sports and I mean, I'll, I'll read this, their description. This is looked at all the longitudinal studies over time before, uh, and after hormone suppression. So we report that the performance gap between males and females become significant at puberty and often around 10 to 50% 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, uh, strength is usually anywhere between like 30 to 40%, a 5% reduction off that is, is, is minimal. Um, 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 then-

Joe Rogan 35:57 And what study is this from?

Colin Wright 35:58 This is from Sports Medicine. This is the number one sports medicine journal in the world. It's, it's-

Joe Rogan 36:03 This is a recent study?

Colin Wright 36:05 2021, yeah. And then, and then just-

Joe Rogan 36:07 And how... What does the Olympics say about that? Oh, stop.

Colin Wright 36:09 They don't say anything about it. And then-

Joe Rogan 36:11 They're trying to sell granola.

Colin Wright 36:11 And people will say 'cause I know the author, we've co-authored papers before, uh, they'll say that, you know, she's clearly biased because she had written on not having trans women playing sports before and so there's a conflict of interest or something because she's clearly just like anti-

Joe Rogan 36:27 Because she has an opinion.

Colin Wright 36:28 ... anti-trans activist.

Joe Rogan 36:29 Yeah.

Colin Wright 36:29 Even though that's not really what a conflict of interest is really. I mean, um, unless you're like my interest is as a female person not wanting my sports to be, you know, taken over by males. But then so there's a good retort to, you know, the bias thing because there's another study in the, uh, what is it? The British Journal of Sports Medicine? Another top-... top article, uh, top publication. And the first author is a trans woman herself who has, uh, previously argued for inclusion of trans women, and in some sense, still does, even though, uh, she found the exactly, exact same results here. "Notwithstanding values for strength, lean muscle, uh, 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, 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. They just, it was a-

Joe Rogan 37:25 They just wanna push it down.

Colin Wright 37:26 ... ex, expedient way to make you shut up at that given time.

Joe Rogan 37:30 You know, uh, it's just, it seems to me that this is, uh, uh, uh, we're operating in this new realm, you know, where people think this way, or people are discussing these things in a way where, uh, there's a cultural acceptance on, uh, 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, uh, overwhelming overt discrimination against people who are trans, like publicly, other than the sports thing.

Colin Wright 38:15 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 38:15 The sports is the big one. Right?

Colin Wright 38:17 Other than in, in prisons. So, I mean, people-

Joe Rogan 38:20 Prisons, yeah.

Colin Wright 38:20 ... people are mostly okay with the whole social accommodation of trans people. I mean, I myself-

Joe Rogan 38:24 More so now than ever before, right?

Colin Wright 38:26 Yeah, yeah.

Joe Rogan 38:26 It's, which is progress.

Colin Wright 38:28 Absolutely. I mean, I myself am happy to use their preferred pronouns in, in public.

Joe Rogan 38:31 What if they get in the, the weird ones, or they invent ones?

Colin Wright 38:34 Mm. Some of the non-binary ones are a little out there.

Joe Rogan 38:37 What about like-

Colin Wright 38:37 I won't use those.

Joe Rogan 38:38 ... the xers and all that stuff? Like, come on.

Colin Wright 38:41 I might make an attempt, but if I fail, then-

Joe Rogan 38:44 Just-

Colin Wright 38:44 ... I'm not gonna feel too bad about it.

Joe Rogan 38:45 What about theys, theys and thems? Like, I was reading this thing about Demi Lovato.

Colin Wright 38:50 What does, 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, when they're female.

Joe Rogan 39:02 The Demi Lovato thing went-

Colin Wright 39:03 But, but to, to just identify out of sex altogether is just like ...

Joe Rogan 39:07 Well, they just don't wanna have a specific sex, but the Demi Lovato thing was like, uh, now, uh, giving insight on how to address they. That's-

Colin Wright 39:19 Isn't that amazing?

Joe Rogan 39:19 ... that's how they made the sentence. Like, they're, they're trying to explain that there's a way to do this, but you're, you're butchering English and ya got a real problem because there's no reason to do that. (laughs)

Colin Wright 39:33 Well, if, 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 a, m- made an opinion based on something.

Joe Rogan 40:00 But a they is not even saying that, right?

Colin Wright 40:02 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 40:02 A they is-

Colin Wright 40:03 It's, it's still considered in the umbrella of transgender, like 'cause it-

Joe Rogan 40:06 Is it?

Colin Wright 40:06 ... even if you're a gender, even if you're a non-binary, you still don't identify with the gender you were assigned at birth.

Joe Rogan 40:12 Oh.

Colin Wright 40:12 And so I got in, in trouble on this because basically when you id, 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 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, uh, 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, that I'm identifying with. And so people told me that means that I'm, I'm non-binary and then-

Joe Rogan 41:04 Who told you that?

Colin Wright 41:04 And these are, these are activists that attack me on Twitter. They're insisting, all the, the he/she pronoun crowd, they say, "Well, that means that you're actually trans." And then-

Joe Rogan 41:15 You're trans?

Colin Wright 41:16 I mean, according to their own ideology, I am. (laughs) And then there was a situation where they've redefined what it means to be like 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 in any of the ways she presents.

Joe Rogan 41:49 That would make you bisexual?

Colin Wright 41:51 Because I would be willing to have sex with someone who identifies as a man-

Joe Rogan 41:56 (laughs)

Colin Wright 41:56 ... and that's my same gender identity, and so they said I'd be bisexual.

Joe Rogan 42:00 Oh.

Colin Wright 42:00 And then (laughs) and then, I mean-

Joe Rogan 42:03 Oh, I can't do this.

Colin Wright 42:03 You could even go further.

Joe Rogan 42:05 No. Don't. Please don't.

Colin Wright 42:06 Because to me, I don't even care what Scarlett Johansson would identify as. You know, she could identify as a, uh, like a forklift and I would still be attracted to her. So I mean, that would make me a pansexual transgender person.

Joe Rogan 42:19 Hmm.

Colin Wright 42:19 Whereas in the realm of reality, I'm just, I'm just a straight white guy who's just pretty, pretty off the shelf. Um-

Joe Rogan 42:27 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.

Colin Wright 42:34 I mean, I, I mean you could.

Joe Rogan 42:35 Yeah.

Colin Wright 42:35 I mean, apparently I am. I just like, I'm self-hating. I don't know that yet.

Joe Rogan 42:38 But does everybody who doesn't recognize as being like ultra macho, uh, are they all trans? 'Cause if you are and then you-

Colin Wright 42:46 I mean that's-

Joe Rogan 42:46 And, and there's a spectrum of masculinity versus femininity. If you look at, uh, the UFC heavyweight champion of the world, his name is Francis Ngannou, who's this gigantic super athlete of a man. And if you look at him versus, uh, a regular person, most men are gonna identify as being far less masculine than that.

Colin Wright 43:07 Yeah. Yeah. That's the, that's the perniciousness of the whole-

Joe Rogan 43:09 So that means they're all trans.

Colin Wright 43:11 ... gender, gender ideology. Like, most people, if you take the ideology seriously, are non-binary. I mean, most people-

Joe Rogan 43:17 Most people.

Colin Wright 43:18 Yeah. Most people don't... I mean, probably everyone. I mean, who r- really... I mean, there's probably someone out there who would just, all the knobs for masculinity are turned to 11.

Joe Rogan 43:25 Do you know who Tom Segura is?

Colin Wright 43:27 Yeah. I've seen him on your show.

Joe Rogan 43:28 Yeah. Yeah. Tom, uh, used to do this, uh, he had a character that he'd play called DJ Dad Mouth just till he'd 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 rec- he identifies as non-binary.

Colin Wright 43:49 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 43:50 That was like his thing. "I just came out as non-binary," and he could see that they were confused. It... And this was like how many years ago? Five years ago? Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yep. Somewhere in the ne- Six years. 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 it, what the hell he was talking about. He would go this, he's go, "Yeah, you know, I'm just coming out as non-bi- 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 it 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.

Colin Wright 44:46 It's common, but I, I still don't think people know what they're talking about when they say it. Like there's-

Joe Rogan 44:50 I don't think they had to, right?

Colin Wright 44:51 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?"

Joe Rogan 45:03 Hm.

Colin Wright 45:03 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..." Then I have as long as they identify as a... "Well, what are you identifying with?" "With womanhood." What is, it, it just, it spirals down, and it really comes down to... 'Cause 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.

Joe Rogan 45:32 Right.

Colin Wright 45:32 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-nonconforming kids that are, you know, being told that, "Oh, you're behaving very boy-like." You know, maybe, and you're a female, maybe, you know, you're a tomboy. Maybe you're actually, you know, trapped in the wrong body or something. And it's just completely insane the way this is infecting a lot of, of kids minds who are just confused about what their sex is. It's-

Joe Rogan 46:06 Yeah.

Colin Wright 46:06 I mean, that's why, I mean, I, I talk a lot about this stuff and the whole, uh, sex spectrum and stuff on, 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, like there's just not many more levees after this that can hold back the, the flood of insanity. That, I mean, what, what, what's gonna be, what's after male and female aren't real? I mean, what, what's-

Joe Rogan 46:35 Yeah. That's my question.

Colin Wright 46:36 What's downstream from that? I don't even-

Joe Rogan 46:36 'Cause 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, it doesn't seem like it's getting better, like we've reached some sort of a-

Colin Wright 46:46 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 46:47 ... a plateau, and we're like, "Yeah, you know what? Maybe we're wrong about this, and maybe there are some people that are on this, uh, weird biological spectrum." But for the most part, it's clear, male versus female or, you know, there's, there's v- two clear distinct differences.

Colin Wright 47:04 Yeah. I, I usually try to liken it to a, a coin flip 'cause that seems to help in people's minds 'cause if you get... There's been studies like how many times can you flip a nickel before it lands on its edge? And it turns out to be about one out of 6,000 flips you'll get a nickel that lands on its edge 'cause they've got like the flat edge to them. And that's very close to the percentage or the, the p- 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, are put together. Most of us are just unambiguously male or female. And just because we have an edge case doesn't mean that male and female are just sort of these ambiguous categories anymore.

Joe Rogan 47:56 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's it progressing to? Like where does this... Where's, where does reality completely dissolve?

Colin Wright 48:13 That's what I'm, I mean, that's what I'm trying to hold back, hold back the levy there.

Joe Rogan 48:16 (laughs)

Colin Wright 48:16 I mean, have you seen, have you seen the, the genderbread person?

Joe Rogan 48:21 No.

Colin Wright 48:22 Oh, my.

Joe Rogan 48:22 I'm scared.

Colin Wright 48:24 Pull it up, Jake.

Joe Rogan 48:26 Ugh.

Colin Wright 48:26 The, uh, actually if you go-

Joe Rogan 48:28 The genderbread person.

Colin Wright 48:28 There's an article. There, there's a version of it that's... But if you go to, um... 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, a good version on there. They've updated the version a little bit, but they're still, this is being shown in classrooms.

Joe Rogan 48:45 Hf, 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? If it's not... Okay, it is. The genderbread person.

Colin Wright 49:01 Okay, yeah. So this is my article in Quillette that basically debunks the sex spectrum. Now it starts off, it's a, it starts off with JK Rowling on this thing, but actually I have another version on my Substack, Reality's Last Stand, that doesn't start off with JK Rowling because I got... People told me that...... they can't show this to their relatives because they hate J. K. Rowling because she's a transphobe.

Joe Rogan 49:21 (laughs)

Colin Wright 49:21 So, can you write me another version that doesn't have-

Joe Rogan 49:23 God.

Colin Wright 49:23 ... it start off with the J. K. Rowling thing?

Joe Rogan 49:25 What did she say?

Colin Wright 49:27 So, she, I mean, she said what I said, that sex is-

Joe Rogan 49:29 That's it.

Colin Wright 49:30 ... sex is, is real. (laughs) So, we can, uh, ignore the identity stuff and the attraction and ... but when you look at biological sex here, they have femaleness and maleness. Not male or female, just femaleness and maleness.

Joe Rogan 49:48 Yes.

Colin Wright 49:48 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, uh, 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 pitch, body hair, hormones, chromosomes, et cetera. So, if you have a deep voice, that will move you somewhere on the sex spectrum apparently. If you are a hairy woman, are you- you're less female now than you would've been if you had been hairless. Um, body shape, if you're just, you know, a very square woman, you're maybe less of a female, you're more male now. Uh, 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 are all the diff- differences that happen in your body, uh, when you go through puberty. Like, you- m- men get more upper body strength, we get hairier, uh, voice gets deeper. Um, an analogy that I, I have for this that h- helps it stick with people is you can, if you ... it's, 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, of, uh, thing that they're riding. Is it a motorcycle or a bicycle? But then there's all these, like, cultural things that are kind of overlaid, like there's biker culture, which might be correspond with people wearing tattoos or wearing leathers, uh, more protective gear because riding on your bike, uh, your, your motorcycle, is, is more dangerous. And then if you go 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. Um, 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, the, the cyclist helmet on, that you would actually be more of a, of a cyclist, even if you're riding a motorcycle. And so, anyway, the, the analogy is looking at, you know, the, the motorcycle versus the s- the bicycle. That's your, like, primary sex. Th- th- 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, the other things that go along with riding a motorcycle, like more padded, uh, outfits and things like that. So they're confusing the outward expression, the, the, you know, the how big people's breasts are, how hairy they are, with sex itself. And that is just completely not, 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 that's ju- it's just a complete ... I mean, it gets, gets the biology ... It's like it's not even wrong, it's just completely wrong.

Joe Rogan 53:03 And deceptive, it seems.

Colin Wright 53:04 Yeah, I mean, it is totally. I mean, it's ... I, I liken it to just, like, the playground bully logic that you'll get on the playground. Like, uh, uh, I've seen this before in grade school where you have the, the, the boy who might have more effeminate features, they have a higher voice, and you get the bullies going along and telling him that, you know, "What are you, a girl?" And they, they'll bully him. And then according to the sex spectrum, you'll have this chart and some teacher might try to break up the fight like, "What'd you, did you call Billy a girl?" They're like, "Well, he might be according to the sex spectrum." I mean, this is validates that type of bullying where B- 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.

Joe Rogan 53:51 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, 10 years in the future? Because it, again, uh, like you said, it doesn't seem like there's any brakes on this thing.

Colin Wright 54:10 Yeah, I mean, I don't know where it's gonna go and that's why I'm doing my best to not let it get past this final levee.

Joe Rogan 54:19 (laughs)

Colin Wright 54:19 I mean, I mean, does it ... honestly, it could go to just complete chaos. Like, what do, what do you do? People identifying as different ages and animals and, I mean-

Joe Rogan 54:29 Well, they've tried. Some people have tried.

Colin Wright 54:30 I what some people will 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, of, of thinking might exist. Like, we're, we've already gone so down the slippery slope. Like, going down a little further is not even that inconceivable.

Joe Rogan 54:43 And the problem is it normalizes it, right? Like-

Colin Wright 54:46 Oh, yeah.

Joe Rogan 54:47 ... that slippery slope. You ... the crazier you get and the more you identify with things or more you get away with whatever your wacky new thing is, the more-

Colin Wright 54:55 Yeah, everyone thinks this is normal now, like what we're doing.

Joe Rogan 54:57 Yeah, exactly.

Colin Wright 54:58 Yeah. And this, I mean, the problem is when people like, you know, you just had Brett on a second ago and he's speaking up about some stuff that's ... and I wouldn't even say it should be that controversial. He's more just talking about certain matter- matters of medicine and stuff.

Joe Rogan 55:11 Mm-hmm.

Colin Wright 55:12 And I'm talking about ... I'm saying the most boilerplate things I can possibly imagine, uh, that a biologist could possibly say.

Joe Rogan 55:19 Where is all this woke shit coming from? Have you thought about that? Have you tried to figure out, like, what, what, what's the origin story and where does it go?

Colin Wright 55:27 I mean, it, it's coming from a lot of the humanities departments and the women's studies departments, queer theory, the whole-

Joe Rogan 55:33 What's ... But why, why have they shifted culture so much? Like, what-

Colin Wright 55:38 Well, it, 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, it's... The lid has been, been kept on it for a long time. But they've just slowly sort of permeated outside and just got into people's, people's minds. And then they're 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.

Colin Wright 56:08 And no one's, no one wants to say anything about it. I mean, we have ... I'll, I'll bring up the book real quick here from Quillette. Uh-

Joe Rogan 56:16 Can I see it?

Colin Wright 56:17 Panics and Persecutions. Yeah. So what this really does, in this book, um, 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, um, oh, 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 'canceled' are people who have a lot of power. They'll point to JK Rowling, who's like too big to fail. They'll point to you. They'll say, you know, even if, even if Joe gets kicked off of whatever network he's on, like, he's got a big enough audience, he'll go somewhere else. Like, these people can't really be canceled. Um, and the people who, who might act like they're gonna 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 th- they think it's just not a big issue. And so what we did in this book ... Uh, 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 would never think that this would matter. Uh, and this ... 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. You know, they're, 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're, they see what happens to bigger named people when they do speak up, and so they don't even have the chance to get canceled. They just, 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 JK Rowling and yourself. Um, so what we did is ... This is a compend- ... Uh, it's got 20 different essays of people. I've got an essay in there, uh, of, um, just sort of people's everyday lives and how the cancel mob came for them, to something as esoteric as, like, the, an Instagram knitting community where they came after (laughs) some woman because she talked about how she was gonna 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, if you ... This is so othering and this is colonial speak.

Joe Rogan 58:39 Othering?

Colin Wright 58:40 And ... Yeah, othering, yeah.

Joe Rogan 58:41 Is that a new one?

Colin Wright 58:43 I think it's, I think it's been around.

Joe Rogan 58:44 I didn't know about othering. Did you know about othering, Jamie?

Colin Wright 58:49 Yeah. I think it's, I think it's been in the, the lexicon for a while.

Joe Rogan 58:53 Oh, I'm out of the loop.

Colin Wright 58:53 And then people come to their defense and then they get canceled.

Joe Rogan 58:56 Yeah.

Colin Wright 58:56 And then people who are silent about it who have a big platform-

Joe Rogan 58:59 Right, but have you thought about like what's the origins of this behavior? Like, why is this behavior emerging? And is, is it just a function of what's going on with the internet, where you have ... Uh, a lot of it is text based, where there's no social interaction, there's no social cues. You're not looking at each other's eyes, you don't feel any empathy, you're just writing things down. And you're-

Colin Wright 59:21 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 59:21 ... trying to be as either provocative or as aggressive as possible so that people like what you're saying.

Colin Wright 59:27 Social media has made it a lot easier to sort of organize these, these flash mobs that seem like they're intense, uh, and it seems like there's so many people coming at you. But in reality, sometimes it's just like a, a small group of dedicated trolls that will just be sending emails to departments of things. Like, 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 s- don't hire this guy.

Joe Rogan 59:56 Oh.

Colin Wright 59:56 I mean, but, uh, just a few online dedicated trolls can actually d- wreck 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.

Joe Rogan 1:00:09 Especially if they have multiple accounts. But one, one of the things that I've been thinking of lately is like, um, the, the ability to sway people one way or the other in terms of the, the way they feel about either a political issue or a social issue. A lot of times it's based on the, you know, the way the crowd is reacting. It's based on what, what you're seeing from your peers or from the people that follow you or 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, uh, 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, where it's per- personal, where you, you, 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, like, you can erode a democracy. You really can.

Colin Wright 1:01:12 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:01:12 You can erode the way people communicate with each other. You can erode our culture. And it's-... you don't wanna be cynical, but you gotta wonder, like, what starts, what i- what are the wings of the butterfly that start the storm? Like, where... Is this engineered? Because if someone was gonna engineer some sort of a deterioration of society, boy, you couldn't really do any better than what's going on, 'cause morale is at an all-time low in a lot of places. The way people communicate is really weird right now.

Colin Wright 1:01:40 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:01:40 And it's just, uh, it doesn't show any signs of, uh, there being, uh, a, like an end to this road. Like, where does this road stop?

Colin Wright 1:01:49 Yeah. I mean, the, the institution's getting captured, and once you get to a certain threshold, it just sort of spirals down where, you know, the institution's 50% ideologically based, that might, you know, it's pretty sustainable. But once it gets past, like, it's 90%, you know, Democrat or something-

Joe Rogan 1:02:07 Yeah.

Colin Wright 1:02:07 ... then, if they're, especially if they're i- 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, um, where people are actually googling who they're hiring in their departments. And if you were wearing a Trump hat, you know, I'm not a Trump supporter or anything, but good luck ever getting a job in, 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, you probably wouldn't want to keep it.

Joe Rogan 1:02:37 Yeah, you can't even have it ironically. You actually get paid for that hat?

Colin Wright 1:02:40 Yeah. And so, they, they take... Once the institutions sort of get captured in this way, man, there, there's not a way to get 'em out. I mean, I talk about when I used to argue in, a- against the creationism and intelligent design. It was so easy, because I was in universities. None of the biologists around there are creationists. Eh, sometime- at 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.

Joe Rogan 1:03:05 Really?

Colin Wright 1:03:06 Yeah, yeah. He was completely young Earth creationist. Uh-

Joe Rogan 1:03:09 I would stay in touch with that guy.

Colin Wright 1:03:11 (laughs) Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:03:11 Let's see how his life keeps going.

Colin Wright 1:03:12 But for the most part, if I'm, if I'm arguing against creationists and intelligent design people, this is like, you know, you're getting support from your colleagues. They're like, "Oh, yeah, get him." 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... 'Cause before, Christians didn't have any major presence in the university, at least not the ones who were 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, a wave of hate. And it's not even a, "You're, you're wrong." At least the creationists and intelligent design people told me, "Collin, 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, 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 a, I had an opinion that got published somewhere. Like, that's, that's the situation in the universities, and-

Joe Rogan 1:04:37 It's like it's been infiltrated by a religion.

Colin Wright 1:04:39 Oh, yeah. I mean, I'm all there.

Joe Rogan 1:04:42 It really does, it does seem like a religion.

Colin Wright 1:04:43 And ha- and h- having argued with creationists and 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 (laughs) and not really knowing, having the knowledge and tools to, to sort of combat this in- the insanity I was seeing, so I just decided to read a bunch about evolution, and, and I just made it my job, basically.

Joe Rogan 1:05:05 But again, I'll ask you, where does this go?

Colin Wright 1:05:08 I don't know.

Joe Rogan 1:05:09 Like, wh- how's it end?

Colin Wright 1:05:10 That's why I'm, that's why I'm here talking to you. That's why I wanna let people know that this is, this is scary stuff. This is like... Where do you go, where do you go? I, I mean, I don't know. It's, uh, we go to scary places, (laughs) I think, and I, I don't, I don't wanna find out where that is, because if we don't have a f- if we lose this foothold, like, there's just no more footholds to have, I don't know, you just-

Joe Rogan 1:05:27 Well, it's like-

Colin Wright 1:05:28 ... we're just gonna be scraping down as we fall.

Joe Rogan 1:05:31 There doesn't seem to be an alternative model to what, what, what we're going through. You know, it's n- it's not like they're saying, "What we'd like society to look like is this." No, it's just they wanna break down all of the systems that are in place. Where there's the, our monetary system, they wanna break down capitalism itself, they wanna dr- break down the patriarchy, they wanna 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, you keep-

Colin Wright 1:06:06 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:06:06 ... breaking things down. Do you have an alternative model?

Colin Wright 1:06:08 You know-

Joe Rogan 1:06:08 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?

Colin Wright 1:06:13 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 a, this liberal notion of some people are gay, some people are bi, some people are trans. Get over it. You know-

Joe Rogan 1:06:27 Yeah.

Colin Wright 1:06:27 ... just let people live the way they are.

Joe Rogan 1:06:29 Just live and let live.

Colin Wright 1:06:30 And I think that was working. I mean, we got gay rights in the US, you know, they can get married. That all happened before this, the major woke takeover of, of a l- a lot of the institutions. Like, that's good progress. I just say more of that is what I think we just need to do.

Joe Rogan 1:06:45 Right, but what is the attractiveness? This is like... I just don't s- 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?

Colin Wright 1:06:57 So, I... It's hard for me to say as, like, someone who, who considers themself 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?"

Joe Rogan 1:07:20 Yeah.

Colin Wright 1:07:20 Like, that was sort of the way that they would talk about this thing. And at the time, I was like, "Yeah."... religion's all bad. It's like, it's, there's nothing good that 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.

Joe Rogan 1:07:44 Yeah.

Colin Wright 1:07:44 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, the prevalence of, you know, as religion goes down, like how many pronouns and bios are going up-

Joe Rogan 1:08:13 Yeah.

Colin Wright 1:08:13 ... like as the complete opposite of that, and so I think that's-

Joe Rogan 1:08:15 Yeah, it seems like we're, we almost have, like some sort of a gene for religious ideology.

Colin Wright 1:08:21 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, 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 'cause 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 a- attack their argument, you know, about what it means to be, uh, about sex and gender or something, it's not just an intellectual disagreement anymore. To them it's, you know, if, if they s- if they cede any ground, that means they have an identity crisis 'cause they've made this part of their identity. It's, it's part of who they are and, you know, they're, they're identifying with conclusions to arguments, whereas that's just not the way to go about things if you ever wanna have a, um, if you wanna be corresponding to reality as much as possible. So this hyper-focus on identity, I think that's, that needs to go.

Joe Rogan 1:09:40 Yeah, but how do you fix that? Everybody knows-

Colin Wright 1:09:44 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:09:44 ... there's a problem. Nobody seems to have any solution, nor does anybody see like an end of the road. No one says, "Oh-"

Colin Wright 1:09:50 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:09:50 "... you know, if you go just five miles down, there's a brick wall." They're just gonna slam into that and that's it. They're just gonna get to this, uh, uh, 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-

Colin Wright 1:10:04 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:10:04 No one knows where it goes.

Colin Wright 1:10:06 I try to use some of their, their empathy against them in a little way and try to show, like I had a article, um, in the Wall Street Journal with, with Emma Hilton, who, uh, was the co-author on one of these, these, uh, studies here, um, 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's, you know, rolls back sex-based rights and makes sex-based rights impossible to enforce. Um, how this also harms the gay community by, you know, we've successfully normalized a lot of aspects of, 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, all the stuff with Scarlett Johansson.

Joe Rogan 1:11:04 Yeah.

Colin Wright 1:11:04 (laughs) And, and how that harms i- i- it risks the, the future normalizing of homosexuality when people are still being called bigots because, you know, a trans woman considers themself a lesbian if, 'cause they wanna date biological women, and now they'll call lesbians, you know, female lesbians, they'll call them bigots if they don't wanna have sex with a trans woman because I'm a woman and they, now you're just a, a genital, you know, you have a, a, what they call the cotton ceiling is like... I know, it's, it's nuts.

Joe Rogan 1:11:37 Oh, God.

Colin Wright 1:11:38 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 1:11:39 This is so crazy.

Colin Wright 1:11:39 Where you need to be okay with, with lady dick is what they would call it, like you know, it's a, it's a female penis. And so now you get the gay community that's real 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, 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, the women's movements that have gotten them the right to vote and everything. I mean, this is just, it's turning back the clock on so much progress. And if I, if you can just use that own, 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. What I mean is-

Joe Rogan 1:12:32 It just seems like the-

Colin Wright 1:12:32 ... 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-

Joe Rogan 1:12:38 Yes.

Colin Wright 1:12:38 ... I wanna go.

Joe Rogan 1:12:39 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 'cause 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 gotta 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 loo- 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.

Colin Wright 1:13:31 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. So the-

Joe Rogan 1:13:37 I was gonna talk to you about that.

Colin Wright 1:13:38 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 1:13:38 Go.

Colin Wright 1:13:39 But at the same time, I get people who, who agree with what I write. They tell me that, you know, "Oh, I do, I like the way you, you're just the facts. You don't, like, editorialize. You don't do any, uh, not a lot of flourishes."

Joe Rogan 1:13:51 Yeah.

Colin Wright 1:13:51 And it's, it's what Richard Dawkins approached when he was criticizing religion before. Like, if you're criticizing these core things that people believe and identify strongly with, it doesn't matter the language you're using. You could, it just, it's gonna sound offensive if it-

Joe Rogan 1:14:03 Well, Dawkins-

Colin Wright 1:14:04 ... if they feel it's an attack.

Joe Rogan 1:14:05 ... was attacked because he, he, he compared Rachel Dolezal, like someone being, uh, someone identifying with another race as someone identifying with another sex. And that-

Colin Wright 1:14:19 Well, he just offered that up as a thought experiment. I mean-

Joe Rogan 1:14:21 Exactly, exactly.

Colin Wright 1:14:22 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:14:22 But when he did that, they're like, "Enough of you." And-

Colin Wright 1:14:25 You know he got his, his, what was it? The 2001 or something Humanist of the Year Award taken away from him.

Joe Rogan 1:14:31 Exactly.

Colin Wright 1:14:31 I think it was, even though I think it was, like, a 25-year-old award.

Joe Rogan 1:14:34 How do you take that away, by the way?

Colin Wright 1:14:36 Just take him off the website, I guess.

Joe Rogan 1:14:37 But you gotta go back in time 20 years.

Colin Wright 1:14:39 I wonder if, I mean, if he has a plaque, did they seize the plaque on him?

Joe Rogan 1:14:41 Yeah, they come to his house with jackbooted thugs, kick down the door. "Hey, old man."

Colin Wright 1:14:46 Kick him out.

Joe Rogan 1:14:46 "You're a piece of shit now."

Colin Wright 1:14:47 Well, the thing is-

Joe Rogan 1:14:48 They might-

Colin Wright 1:14:48 ... Dawkins had mentioned that he, d- he said he didn't even remember winning it, so-

Joe Rogan 1:14:52 Nah, that's funny.

Colin Wright 1:14:53 He was just like, "Oh, whatever. I guess I didn't care about it that much," so...

Joe Rogan 1:14:55 (laughs)

Colin Wright 1:14:56 So it's all good.

Joe Rogan 1:14:57 It is fucking stupid 'cause 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.

Colin Wright 1:15:05 Yeah, they got a, a whirlwind of hate though 'cause 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-

Joe Rogan 1:15:17 Did they?

Colin Wright 1:15:18 ... the Humanist Association saying-

Joe Rogan 1:15:19 What does that mean?

Colin Wright 1:15:20 "This is the most anti-humanist thing ever." Like, this could've been a teaching moment or something if you wanna actually put your argument of what is the difference between-

Joe Rogan 1:15:28 Yeah.

Colin Wright 1:15:29 ... transracialism or transsexualism.

Joe Rogan 1:15:31 And it is an interesting conversation because, look, I believe in transgender people. I think there are, b- 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.

Colin Wright 1:15:45 Oh, yeah. Absolutely.

Joe Rogan 1:15:46 It's real.

Colin Wright 1:15:46 And they-

Joe Rogan 1:15:47 It's 100% real.

Colin Wright 1:15:47 And th- they should be able to transition and-

Joe Rogan 1:15:49 Yes.

Colin Wright 1:15:49 ... make themselves feel better-

Joe Rogan 1:15:51 Right.

Colin Wright 1:15:51 ... if that's what they need.

Joe Rogan 1:15:53 But what is going on with race? Like, if anything, that's a more slippery one because we're all from Africa. Like-

Colin Wright 1:16:03 Yeah. I mean, the, the-

Joe Rogan 1:16:05 We, we, it's hu- they think primates, the mo- 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