Joe Rogan Experience #1673 - Colin Wright

1. 0:00 – 0:16

   Show kickoff and distilled mead ("honey shine") tasting

   1. JRJoe Rogan0:00

      (drumming music) Joe Rogan podcast. Check it out.

   2. CWColin Wright0:04

      The Joe Rogan Experience.

   3. JRJoe Rogan0:06

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

   4. CWColin Wright0:15

      How's it going, Joe?

2. 0:16 – 2:47

   Maynard Keenan’s mead and Colin’s motivation for distilling

   1. JRJoe Rogan0:16

      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?

   2. CWColin Wright0:25

      It's distilled mead.

   3. JRJoe Rogan0:26

      Distilled mead.

   4. CWColin Wright0:26

      Yeah. So-

   5. JRJoe Rogan0:27

      So mead is like a beer made out of hon- well, kind of like-

   6. CWColin Wright0:30

      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.

   7. JRJoe Rogan0:46

      Mm.

   8. CWColin Wright0:46

      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.

   9. JRJoe Rogan1:02

      Well, I had mead for the first time last weekend actually.

   10. CWColin Wright1:05

       Oh, okay.

   11. JRJoe Rogan1:06

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

   12. CWColin Wright1:13

       Yeah, yeah. For sure.

   13. JRJoe Rogan1:14

       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?

   14. CWColin Wright1:21

       Viticulturist? Enologist?

   15. JRJoe Rogan1:23

       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.

   16. CWColin Wright1:35

       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.

   17. JRJoe Rogan1:57

       And you made this?

   18. CWColin Wright1:59

       I did.

   19. JRJoe Rogan2:00

       Ooh. How'd you make it?

   20. CWColin Wright2:02

       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-

   21. JRJoe Rogan2:13

       I gotta taste this, brothers.

   22. CWColin Wright2:13

       ... and then there you go.

   23. JRJoe Rogan2:14

       How strong is it?

   24. CWColin Wright2:16

       It's 100 proof.

   25. JRJoe Rogan2:17

       Oh. Wow.

   26. CWColin Wright2:24

       There you go.

   27. JRJoe Rogan2:25

       Whoa, that's intense.

   28. CWColin Wright2:26

       But can you taste the honey and the flower or no? Or is it just all-

   29. JRJoe Rogan2:30

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

   30. CWColin Wright2:36

       (laughs)
3. 2:47 – 9:26

   Reality’s Last Stand: Colin’s case for two sexes (and why it’s controversial)

   1. JRJoe Rogan2:47

      Why Reality's Last Stand.

   2. CWColin Wright2:49

      Yeah. So that's actually, that's the name of my, my Substack (laughs) and-

   3. JRJoe Rogan2:53

      Oh.

   4. CWColin Wright2:53

      ... 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.

   5. JRJoe Rogan3:03

      Stop. Just cancel this podcast. Turn it off. You can't do this. Hit, hit stop.

   6. CWColin Wright3:09

      (laughs)

   7. JRJoe Rogan3:09

      What are you saying? There's only two sexes?

   8. CWColin Wright3:12

      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.

   9. JRJoe Rogan3:33

      Yeah.

   10. CWColin Wright3:34

       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.

   11. JRJoe Rogan3:51

       I've had an argument with a professor about that on this very podcast-

   12. CWColin Wright3:55

       Yeah. Oh, really?

   13. JRJoe Rogan3:55

       ... 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-

   14. CWColin Wright4:13

       Yeah.

   15. JRJoe Rogan4:13

       ... 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?

   16. CWColin Wright4:22

       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-

   17. JRJoe Rogan6:13

       But there's clearly a spectrum inside each two sexes, right?

   18. CWColin Wright6:18

       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.

   19. JRJoe Rogan7:27

       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-

   20. CWColin Wright7:36

       Yeah.

   21. JRJoe Rogan7:37

       ... 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.

   22. CWColin Wright7:47

       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.

4. 9:26 – 11:44

   Defining sex biologically: gametes, anatomy, and ‘edge cases’

   1. JRJoe Rogan9:26

      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.

   2. CWColin Wright10:25

      You know, i- it's something I've been tracking for, for quite some time.

   3. JRJoe Rogan10:29

      Like a bounty hunter?

   4. CWColin Wright10:30

      Yes, exactly.

   5. JRJoe Rogan10:32

      (laughs)

   6. CWColin Wright10:32

      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.

   7. JRJoe Rogan10:44

      What happened with the new... There was, I think it's Atheism Plus.

   8. CWColin Wright10:48

      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-

   9. JRJoe Rogan10:55

      Oh, yeah.

   10. CWColin Wright10:56

       ... as we see it now. I mean-

   11. JRJoe Rogan10:56

       For sure.

   12. CWColin Wright10:57

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

   13. JRJoe Rogan11:02

       Yes.

   14. CWColin Wright11:03

       ... appropriation and the whole, um, you know, check your privilege and-

   15. JRJoe Rogan11:06

       Well, I remember that.

   16. CWColin Wright11:07

       ... all that stuff. Yeah. It had to do with-

   17. JRJoe Rogan11:08

       I remember watching Atheism Plus conferences online going-

   18. CWColin Wright11:12

       Yeah.

   19. JRJoe Rogan11:12

       ... "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.

   20. CWColin Wright11:32

       Have you heard of Elevator Gate?

   21. JRJoe Rogan11:34

       Yes.

   22. CWColin Wright11:34

       With Richard Dawkins-

   23. JRJoe Rogan11:35

       Yes.

   24. CWColin Wright11:35

       ... involved in that whole...

   25. JRJoe Rogan11:36

       Yes.

   26. CWColin Wright11:37

       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.

5. 11:44 – 15:02

   From New Atheism to ‘Atheism Plus’: the bridge to modern social justice politics

   1. JRJoe Rogan11:44

      Could you explain it to people that don't know what it was about?

   2. CWColin Wright11:46

      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..."

   3. JRJoe Rogan12:38

      Netflix and chill.

   4. CWColin Wright12:39

      ... 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.

   5. JRJoe Rogan13:31

      Yeah.

   6. CWColin Wright13:31

      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-

   7. JRJoe Rogan13:55

      Mm-hmm.

   8. CWColin Wright13:56

      ... 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-

   9. JRJoe Rogan14:30

      Hmm.

   10. CWColin Wright14:30

       ... 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-

   11. JRJoe Rogan14:51

       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?

6. 15:02 – 23:58

   Elevatorgate and the collapse of shared norms inside movements

   1. CWColin Wright15:02

      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-

   2. JRJoe Rogan15:30

      Where we think of discrimination as like prejudice.

   3. CWColin Wright15:32

      Yeah, we can, yeah, "I'm, I'm discriminating in this certain-"

   4. JRJoe Rogan15:35

      Yeah.

   5. CWColin Wright15:35

      "... 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.

   6. JRJoe Rogan15:43

      Right.

   7. CWColin Wright15:43

      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.

   8. JRJoe Rogan17:36

      (laughs)

   9. CWColin Wright17:36

      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.

   10. JRJoe Rogan18:04

       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-

   11. NANarrator18:39

       (laughs)

   12. CWColin Wright18:40

       (laughs)

   13. JRJoe Rogan18:40

       ... 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.

   14. CWColin Wright19:13

       Yeah. Th- there's, like, a language takeover.

   15. JRJoe Rogan19:15

       Yeah.

   16. CWColin Wright19:16

       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.

   17. JRJoe Rogan19:24

       Mm-hmm.

   18. CWColin Wright19:24

       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.

   19. JRJoe Rogan19:52

       Right.

   20. CWColin Wright19:52

       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.

   21. JRJoe Rogan21:15

       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.

   22. CWColin Wright21:42

       Yeah. There's no one to put on the brakes, really.

   23. JRJoe Rogan21:45

       Right.

   24. CWColin Wright21:45

       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.

   25. JRJoe Rogan22:20

       Right.

   26. CWColin Wright22:20

       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.

   27. JRJoe Rogan23:42

       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-

   28. CWColin Wright23:51

       I was pro the gay rights movement and, yeah, for sure.

   29. JRJoe Rogan23:54

       And what, if anything, has changed?

7. 23:58 – 27:46

   Discrimination, language takeover, and why the debate keeps escalating

   1. CWColin Wright23:58

      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-

   2. JRJoe Rogan24:23

      Yeah.

   3. CWColin Wright24:23

      ... males getting admitted into female prisons, um, being able to self-identify.

   4. JRJoe Rogan24:27

      Including male sexual abusers.

   5. CWColin Wright24:30

      Oh, yeah. Yeah.

   6. JRJoe Rogan24:31

      Which is really so crazy.

   7. CWColin Wright24:32

      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.

   8. JRJoe Rogan24:44

      Mm-hmm.

   9. CWColin Wright24:45

      So, that's- that's a new thing coming out. This is a-

   10. JRJoe Rogan24:48

       Yeah.

   11. CWColin Wright24:48

       ... 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-

   12. JRJoe Rogan25:12

       (laughs)

   13. CWColin Wright25:12

       ... it's, uh-

   14. JRJoe Rogan25:13

       Given her biology.

   15. CWColin Wright25:15

       Given their biology.

   16. JRJoe Rogan25:16

       Their, they.

   17. CWColin Wright25:17

       You know, I'm-

   18. JRJoe Rogan25:17

       Yeah.

   19. CWColin Wright25:17

       ... I'm the type of person who-

   20. JRJoe Rogan25:19

       What's this, Jamie?

   21. CWColin Wright25:20

       Oh, yeah.

   22. NANarrator25:21

       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.

   23. CWColin Wright25:34

       Yeah.

   24. NANarrator25:34

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

   25. CWColin Wright25:37

       Yeah, I think there's actually a time thing, so it's 2010 to '19.

   26. NANarrator25:40

       Yeah, correct.

   27. CWColin Wright25:41

       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.

   28. JRJoe Rogan25:52

       Phew.

   29. CWColin Wright25:53

       So, it's quite a big jump.

   30. JRJoe Rogan25:55

       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.
8. 27:46 – 38:31

   Trans women in women’s sports: fairness, puberty advantage, and IOC incentives

   1. JRJoe Rogan27:46

      Are there any trans men that are competing against biological men successfully in sports?

   2. CWColin Wright27:53

      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.

   3. JRJoe Rogan28:01

      Mm.

   4. CWColin Wright28:02

      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-

   5. JRJoe Rogan28:23

      It's fair.

   6. CWColin Wright28:23

      ... shows that it's fair 'cause they're not winning.

   7. JRJoe Rogan28:25

      Yeah.

   8. CWColin Wright28:26

      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."

   9. JRJoe Rogan28:43

      Right.

   10. CWColin Wright28:43

       "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.

   11. JRJoe Rogan29:10

       Mm-hmm.

   12. CWColin Wright29:11

       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...

   13. JRJoe Rogan30:05

       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."

   14. CWColin Wright30:27

       Inclusion, that's just the buzzword of the day.

   15. JRJoe Rogan30:29

       Inclusion.

   16. CWColin Wright30:29

       Everyone...

   17. JRJoe Rogan30:30

       Yeah. But, I mean...

   18. CWColin Wright30:31

       Diversity, equity, inclusion.

   19. JRJoe Rogan30:32

       I- is it, if we had an overall vote though, I mean...

   20. CWColin Wright30:35

       Oh, that'd be done.

   21. JRJoe Rogan30:35

       ... 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-

   22. CWColin Wright31:08

       If it was-

   23. JRJoe Rogan31:08

       ... in that regard.

   24. CWColin Wright31:08

       ... if it was a vote, it would, it'd be pretty unanimous. It'd be-

   25. JRJoe Rogan31:13

       It'd be pretty close.

   26. CWColin Wright31:15

       I don't think it'd be pretty close. I think... I, I don't, I don't think you-

   27. JRJoe Rogan31:17

       No, that's what I meant. I meant-

   28. CWColin Wright31:18

       Oh.

   29. JRJoe Rogan31:18

       ... close to unanimous.

   30. CWColin Wright31:19

       Yeah, yeah, yeah.
9. 38:31 – 48:16

   The evidence debate: what longitudinal studies say about hormone suppression

   1. JRJoe Rogan38:31

      What if they get in the, the weird ones, or they invent ones?

   2. CWColin Wright38:34

      Mm. Some of the non-binary ones are a little out there.

   3. JRJoe Rogan38:37

      What about like-

   4. CWColin Wright38:37

      I won't use those.

   5. JRJoe Rogan38:38

      ... the xers and all that stuff? Like, come on.

   6. CWColin Wright38:41

      I might make an attempt, but if I fail, then-

   7. JRJoe Rogan38:44

      Just-

   8. CWColin Wright38:44

      ... I'm not gonna feel too bad about it.

   9. JRJoe Rogan38:45

      What about theys, theys and thems? Like, I was reading this thing about Demi Lovato.

   10. CWColin Wright38:50

       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.

   11. JRJoe Rogan39:02

       The Demi Lovato thing went-

   12. CWColin Wright39:03

       But, but to, to just identify out of sex altogether is just like ...

   13. JRJoe Rogan39:07

       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-

   14. CWColin Wright39:19

       Isn't that amazing?

   15. JRJoe Rogan39:19

       ... 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)

   16. CWColin Wright39:33

       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.

   17. JRJoe Rogan40:00

       But a they is not even saying that, right?

   18. CWColin Wright40:02

       Yeah.

   19. JRJoe Rogan40:02

       A they is-

   20. CWColin Wright40:03

       It's, it's still considered in the umbrella of transgender, like 'cause it-

   21. JRJoe Rogan40:06

       Is it?

   22. CWColin Wright40:06

       ... 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.

   23. JRJoe Rogan40:12

       Oh.

   24. CWColin Wright40:12

       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-

   25. JRJoe Rogan41:04

       Who told you that?

   26. CWColin Wright41:04

       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-

   27. JRJoe Rogan41:15

       You're trans?

   28. CWColin Wright41:16

       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.

   29. JRJoe Rogan41:49

       That would make you bisexual?

   30. CWColin Wright41:51

       Because I would be willing to have sex with someone who identifies as a man-
10. 48:16 – 56:08

    Pronouns, non-binary identity, and redefining sexuality by ‘gender identity’

    1. CWColin Wright48:16

       I mean, have you seen, have you seen the, the genderbread person?

    2. JRJoe Rogan48:21

       No.

    3. CWColin Wright48:22

       Oh, my.

    4. JRJoe Rogan48:22

       I'm scared.

    5. CWColin Wright48:24

       Pull it up, Jake.

    6. JRJoe Rogan48:26

       Ugh.

    7. CWColin Wright48:26

       The, uh, actually if you go-

    8. JRJoe Rogan48:28

       The genderbread person.

    9. CWColin Wright48:28

       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.

    10. JRJoe Rogan48:45

        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.

    11. CWColin Wright49:01

        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.

    12. JRJoe Rogan49:21

        (laughs)

    13. CWColin Wright49:21

        So, can you write me another version that doesn't have-

    14. JRJoe Rogan49:23

        God.

    15. CWColin Wright49:23

        ... it start off with the J. K. Rowling thing?

    16. JRJoe Rogan49:25

        What did she say?

    17. CWColin Wright49:27

        So, she, I mean, she said what I said, that sex is-

    18. JRJoe Rogan49:29

        That's it.

    19. CWColin Wright49:30

        ... 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.

    20. JRJoe Rogan49:48

        Yes.

    21. CWColin Wright49:48

        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.

    22. JRJoe Rogan53:03

        And deceptive, it seems.

    23. CWColin Wright53:04

        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.

    24. JRJoe Rogan53:51

        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.

    25. CWColin Wright54:10

        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.

    26. JRJoe Rogan54:19

        (laughs)

    27. CWColin Wright54:19

        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-

    28. JRJoe Rogan54:29

        Well, they've tried. Some people have tried.

    29. CWColin Wright54:30

        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.

    30. JRJoe Rogan54:43

        And the problem is it normalizes it, right? Like-
11. 56:08 – 58:59

    The ‘genderbread person’ and the sex-spectrum model taught in classrooms

    1. CWColin Wright56:08

       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-

    2. JRJoe Rogan56:16

       Can I see it?

    3. CWColin Wright56:17

       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.

    4. JRJoe Rogan58:39

       Othering?

    5. CWColin Wright58:40

       And ... Yeah, othering, yeah.

    6. JRJoe Rogan58:41

       Is that a new one?

    7. CWColin Wright58:43

       I think it's, I think it's been around.

    8. JRJoe Rogan58:44

       I didn't know about othering. Did you know about othering, Jamie?

    9. CWColin Wright58:49

       Yeah. I think it's, I think it's been in the, the lexicon for a while.

    10. JRJoe Rogan58:53

        Oh, I'm out of the loop.

    11. CWColin Wright58:53

        And then people come to their defense and then they get canceled.

    12. JRJoe Rogan58:56

        Yeah.

    13. CWColin Wright58:56

        And then people who are silent about it who have a big platform-

12. 58:59 – 1:06:57

    Cancel culture up close: Panics and Persecutions and the mechanics of online mobs

    1. JRJoe Rogan58:59

       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-

    2. CWColin Wright59:21

       Yeah.

    3. JRJoe Rogan59:21

       ... trying to be as either provocative or as aggressive as possible so that people like what you're saying.

    4. CWColin Wright59:27

       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.

    5. JRJoe Rogan59:56

       Oh.

    6. CWColin Wright59:56

       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.

    7. JRJoe Rogan1:00:09

       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.

    8. CWColin Wright1:01:12

       Yeah.

    9. JRJoe Rogan1:01:12

       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.

    10. CWColin Wright1:01:40

        Yeah.

    11. JRJoe Rogan1:01:40

        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?

    12. CWColin Wright1:01:49

        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-

    13. JRJoe Rogan1:02:07

        Yeah.

    14. CWColin Wright1:02:07

        ... 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.

    15. JRJoe Rogan1:02:37

        Yeah, you can't even have it ironically. You actually get paid for that hat?

    16. CWColin Wright1:02:40

        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.

    17. JRJoe Rogan1:03:05

        Really?

    18. CWColin Wright1:03:06

        Yeah, yeah. He was completely young Earth creationist. Uh-

    19. JRJoe Rogan1:03:09

        I would stay in touch with that guy.

    20. CWColin Wright1:03:11

        (laughs) Yeah.

    21. JRJoe Rogan1:03:11

        Let's see how his life keeps going.

    22. CWColin Wright1:03:12

        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-

    23. JRJoe Rogan1:04:37

        It's like it's been infiltrated by a religion.

    24. CWColin Wright1:04:39

        Oh, yeah. I mean, I'm all there.

    25. JRJoe Rogan1:04:42

        It really does, it does seem like a religion.

    26. CWColin Wright1:04:43

        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.

    27. JRJoe Rogan1:05:05

        But again, I'll ask you, where does this go?

    28. CWColin Wright1:05:08

        I don't know.

    29. JRJoe Rogan1:05:09

        Like, wh- how's it end?

    30. CWColin Wright1:05:10

        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-
13. 1:06:57 – 1:45:53

    Is this engineered? Social media manipulation, institutional capture, and meaning voids

    1. CWColin Wright1:06:57

       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?"

    2. JRJoe Rogan1:07:20

       Yeah.

    3. CWColin Wright1:07:20

       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.

    4. JRJoe Rogan1:07:44

       Yeah.

    5. CWColin Wright1:07:44

       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-

    6. JRJoe Rogan1:08:13

       Yeah.

    7. CWColin Wright1:08:13

       ... like as the complete opposite of that, and so I think that's-

    8. JRJoe Rogan1:08:15

       Yeah, it seems like we're, we almost have, like some sort of a gene for religious ideology.

    9. CWColin Wright1:08:21

       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.

    10. JRJoe Rogan1:09:40

        Yeah, but how do you fix that? Everybody knows-

    11. CWColin Wright1:09:44

        Yeah.

    12. JRJoe Rogan1:09:44

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

    13. CWColin Wright1:09:50

        Yeah.

    14. JRJoe Rogan1:09:50

        "... 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-

    15. CWColin Wright1:10:04

        Yeah.

    16. JRJoe Rogan1:10:04

        No one knows where it goes.

    17. CWColin Wright1:10:06

        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.

    18. JRJoe Rogan1:11:04

        Yeah.

    19. CWColin Wright1:11:04

        (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.

    20. JRJoe Rogan1:11:37

        Oh, God.

    21. CWColin Wright1:11:38

        (laughs)

    22. JRJoe Rogan1:11:39

        This is so crazy.

    23. CWColin Wright1:11:39

        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-

    24. JRJoe Rogan1:12:32

        It just seems like the-

    25. CWColin Wright1:12:32

        ... 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-

    26. JRJoe Rogan1:12:38

        Yes.

    27. CWColin Wright1:12:38

        ... I wanna go.

    28. JRJoe Rogan1:12:39

        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.

    29. CWColin Wright1:13:31

        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-

    30. JRJoe Rogan1:13:37

        I was gonna talk to you about that.

Episode duration: 2:43:09