AS156: Cognitive Dissonance on Tim Hunt

Transcript

This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors — the audio is the record.

0:00:31 Thomas: Hello and welcome to Atheistically Speaking episode 156 with your host Thomas Smith. We are going to continue with cognitive dissonance, and just as a reminder, this episode is quite long because it's pretty much two episodes. Just want to make sure you got your bang for your buck with the guys, because Tom and Cecil are great and I love them. So let's just get back to that, shall we?

0:01:03 Thomas: All right, now, We're going to move on. We're going in a smooth transition. We'll just just start like this. Will be this will be episode two. Hey everybody, we're back after getting canceled. So I got Tom and Cecil here now. We're gonna do a real show, here's the real show we're going to do. Recently there was a big stir, there was a gigantic, one of the biggest, I would say, Twitter kind of social justice meltdowns that we've had in a while, and it involved this guy Tim Hunt. And the reason I wanted to talk to you guys about Tim Hunt was, there's so many bigger themes, like obviously just the minutia of like, do we care whether this guy is a sexist or not? Like, that's not terribly interesting, but everything around it is very interesting, I think, because there are all kinds of themes going on. There's free speech themes, there are themes of the way we just can sometimes just ruin people's entire reputations on Twitter.

0:01:04 Cecil: I

0:01:17 Tom: I Don't

0:02:05 Thomas: Maybe they deserved it, maybe they didn't, like regardless. Um, and I know, um, that one guy, oh, who's the guy who just wrote a book about that? Do you guys know offhand, or I'll move on.

0:02:13 Cecil: Haven't heard of it. No, but I'd read it though, that sounds like an interesting book that doesn't sound like a person.

0:02:14 Thomas: Oh it's it's um uh no

0:02:19 Tom: How do you spell that in the card catalog. He's

0:02:20 Cecil: Oh

0:02:21 Thomas: Guys it's hold on, I'll I'll uh I'll edit this out, but I'm gonna, I'm going to look it up real quick because I I if you do if if you were interested, it's uh on

0:02:27 Cecil: Goodness I can't wait to hear yeah because is that a G or a J to start this all out, I oh okay I like John Ronson

0:02:33 Thomas: Twitter shame yeah burpity oh. So you've been. Oh, it's John Ronson, I think. Do you know? Yeah, he wrote a book called So You've Been Publicly Shamed. And it's about, I

0:02:42 Cecil: Oh okay yeah

0:02:47 Tom: The guy who wrote a Psychopath Test, right? Okay.

0:02:49 Thomas: Think So.

0:02:49 Cecil: Yeah same guy yeah he

0:02:50 Thomas: He's written a lot of interesting books, none of which I've read, but every single one I'm like, oh, I should read that. And then I haven't.

0:02:56 Tom: But you're aware that they're interesting, right? What was your evidence for that out of curiosity

0:02:57 Thomas: Exactly, because of the people.

0:02:58 Cecil: Reads he reads part of it on This American Life I've listened to some of those this

0:03:00 Thomas: Well, the thing is, either they're interesting or they're not. Yeah. And I have evidence.

0:03:07 Cecil: Show is going, going literally nowhere. Like, we are literally going nowhere because

0:03:09 Tom: This is great

0:03:11 Thomas: Oh, man. So he wrote, so you've been publicly shamed.

0:03:13 Cecil: Of Tom. It's all because of Tom. Never

0:03:15 Thomas: And it's it. I just bring that up because it's kind of related to that. The theme of pretty much we're in a day and age and maybe all of us primates, because we are in the end, just a bunch of idiot primates who think Adnan was innocent. Isn't. I'm just kidding. In the end, is it wise that we have this ability? We have this ability to all of a sudden, instantaneously, worldwide, everyone to kind of share their thoughts on badly quoted speech that someone made at a given thing. Ultimately, is this a good thing? So there are lots of bigger themes here that we can talk about. I wanted wanted to bring it up with you guys because I kept reading things on this story.

I would see one thing on Tim Hunt and I'd say, oh yeah, that's definitely very sexist and I don't really feel sorry for him. Next story would come out and it would have maybe a little more context. And then I'd go back, I'd be like, wait a minute, there's some more context here. Okay, well, this may have been overblown. And I really did switch back and forth on this.

0:03:30 Tom: Yeah

0:03:33 Cecil: Goes anywhere sure

0:04:21 Thomas: And when we talked last, um, you guys mentioned that I think you had a somewhat similar experience of of getting one idea from one article and then another idea from another article, and I thought it'd be interesting if we talked it out here. Did you guys have that experience? Yeah, hmm

0:04:31 Cecil: In this particular instance I did, yeah, because I I remember, I didn't, I didn't know anything about this. I don't follow a lot of Twitter. What happens is I'll go on Twitter and I'll look at, our, like, people will talk to us and I'll try to respond to them, but I almost never look at a Twitter feed. I just, it's just not an interface that I I like, so I don't bother reading it most of the time. So I missed all this, I didn't know that any of this stuff was happening.

So when you sent the person's name, I did a quick Wikipedia search for him, and immediately this this article comes up, um, the Wikipedia article comes up, and it starts talking about him and what he said, and I read what he, and when I first read just the quote of what he said, and this was what was sent out to everyone, I immediately thought, he's just kidding around, guys, like he's clearly making a joke. Now, it's a shitty joke and it's not a funny joke, and and it kind of fails, and it's clearly relying on stereotypes. I think it's a know-your-audience joke, that if you're already sort of working your way down a path and you know your audience, you can throw this joke out there and it may get laughs and it may not, but I think that it was clearly a joke.

0:04:53 Thomas: Yeah well maybe we should say we should quote it yeah, let's let's go ahead and quote it then.

0:05:40 Cecil: So I'll read what he said. He said, let me tell you the trouble with girls. Three things happen when they're in the lab. You fall in love with them, they fall in love avec vous, and when you criticize them, they cry. That was what was quoted. That was the main piece of what was coded all over the place initially, right? So that was what was set up. So I immediately read that and thought to myself, well, the guy is clearly just kidding around. Like that's not, I don't expect that from anybody who's, I also tell this to Tom earlier.

I always assume everybody on the internet is kidding until they say they're not, because I feel like, I feel like sarcasm is completely lost on the internet because you just don't have any of their body cues that allow you to recognize something as sarcasm. So many times in text form, especially, you just can't tell whether or not someone's kidding around. So I just presume they are until they come out and say, no, no, I really did say that and I really meant that I'm a misogynist or whatever. I just assume automatically that everybody is kidding. And I think people take things way too seriously. I think the internet is serious business for a lot of people, and when they read something, they immediately want to get outraged by it.

And this is a perfect example of that. Everybody just sort of got all, I'm going to get real outraged. Okay, why are you mad? The guy was clearly making a joke, and he comes out later on and says he apologized for it, and then he even says, in one of the points, one of the uh one of uh follow-ups to that particular piece that you get a chance to read later on, he says, now seriously, I'm impressed by the economic development of Korea and women's

0:05:40 Thomas: Okay right initially yeah, yeah true okay

0:07:07 Cecil: And women scientists played, without a doubt, an important role in it. Science needs women, and you should do science despite the all the obstacles and despite monsters like me. So again, he's digging, can get himself, he's kind of making a joke, but he's sort of saying, look, this is important, you guys should do all this work. Well, I don't understand what the big, the big uh, the the attack was about. I don't understand why they attacked him on this unless you, unless you only read that first part and you shut your sarcasm sensor off. Yeah.

0:07:34 Thomas: Well, Tom, did you were you gonna say that's

0:07:36 Tom: You know I think that this belies a sort of like a larger sort of internet culture where we treat people like Yelp reviews, you know, where we feel, you know, we feel entitled to treat all people like they get a certain number of stars from me, and I can, you know, I can write whatever I want, and you can right, you can, you can write whatever you want, and your fucking outrage meter goes off and you start doing your your witch hunt.

Right, but the thing is, like, people have, they like go hunting for specialty witches, like they have their their special causes that they care about, that they're activists for, and then they go looking for, and we do it for the show, I will be very upfront, I do I am the guy that does this, I'm the fucking witch hunter for our show, so we have our special causes for our program, right, and I go specialty witch hunting, I'm looking for a special kind of witch, um, to to throw on my pyre, and that's kind of like the basis for for our shows shtick, right, um, but if you're not really

0:07:49 Thomas: A good quote by

0:08:13 Cecil: They're yeah absolutely yeah yeah no

0:08:41 Thomas: That you just mean dumb things that religious people say

0:08:43 Tom: Right yeah I mean I'm not trolling the internet, like I'm trolling the internet looking for people to do wrong. Right. And it doesn't take me very long to do it, so that I can, you know, throw them on the pyre of our humor. Like that's the game. That's the that's the shtick that we have established in our show. But I think it's it's important that there be some context that sources get checked and that there's not a rush to judgment, because if you take out of context something like, you know, when I first read the Tim Hunt thing, I was kind of appalled. You know, I had an opposite reaction to see. So I was like, fucking why would somebody say that. It didn't occur to me that it would be a joke, because without the no seriously, and then at the end, despite monsters like me comment, like that frames it, that puts it in context. You get three or four lines in a speech and it's it's doesn't it doesn't necessarily mean anything. You have to break the whole thing down, you have, and especially

0:08:43 Thomas: Or what, yeah okay yeah yeah

0:09:38 Tom: If it's if it actual spoken word, it's best to hear it, um, yeah

0:09:43 Thomas: And we should we should emphasize that the sort of the timeline of what happened is one journalist who was there tweeted her recollection of the words and also said that there was no laughter and it died and blow and and kind of she put her spin on what the the feel of the room was. And I'm not maybe she was right. Maybe she was wrong at that point.

0:09:54 Tom: Sort

0:10:05 Thomas: No one knew.

0:10:04 Cecil: She's clearly right if that's the case, right, she's right that it failed and she's right about you know was

0:10:09 Thomas: Well, well, it turned out that there was a recording that they found and there was. Yeah, there was laughter. It wasn't like it didn't kill, but I think it was people. People acknowledged it was a joke.

0:10:14 Cecil: There laughter, well then yeah

0:10:22 Tom: Of like your show, like people are like oh yeah I know I know it was I for

0:10:23 Thomas: But yeah, yeah. Well,

0:10:23 Cecil: Oh no that is mean, Tom I mean as true as it is it's still very mean

0:10:29 Thomas: I was going to say it's only mean because it's totally true, like that's

0:10:30 Cecil: Yeah I

0:10:32 Tom: A moment I almost regretted it

0:10:33 Thomas: Yeah yeah

0:10:34 Cecil: Want to say too, I just want to mention really quickly that, you know, Tom and I do a lot of, there's a, it's mostly sarcasm, like it's mostly sarcasm that we do, that's kind of like it's an easy form of humor, and it's something that we yeah

0:10:46 Thomas: Well just just want to make clear when you're bashing my show, that's not the sarcasm part, just to make sure to to make clearer to everybody that's the very sincere side of Tom and Cecil, yeah

0:10:50 Tom: Yeah

0:10:51 Cecil: We we do it, we do it all the time on our show, though, and if someone were to take some of those pieces and pull those out of context and not play the laughing or the kidding around or the thing that leads up to it, you could sound so horrible, you could sound absolutely horrible, but the problem of course is that you're just pulling a tiny little snippet of this guy's speech. You you have no idea of any of the other mannerisms that he was presenting the speech with. So you're stuck with this tiny little soundbite. And I will say that tiny little, tiny little soundbites are what's going to get you retweeted a lot, right?

0:11:11 Thomas: Yeah

0:11:29 Cecil: That's going get your, that's going be really popular. There was a, there's an example of this very recently. Um, one Texas pastor, his name is Rick Scarborough. Okay. He had said, he had said um, now I want to quote what he said, which was something like, Like, we're not going to bend. We're not gonna break. If necessary, we'll burn. And he's talking about in response to gay marriage. If gay marriage comes up, he's going, he says, if necessary, we will burn. He said that, right? But they spun it to say, he's willing to be burned to death to oppose gay marriage, which isn't really what he said.

You know, he is saying something completely different, but the whole, what sells that story is someone saying, well, I'm willing to like, Like, you know, I will immolate myself. I will light myself on fire like a monk or something in protest. But that's not what he said. He said, if necessary, we will burn. He's talking about something completely different, and it cuts off. The thing is, is that the right-wing watch and everything else cuts off right when he says that. So I don't even know what he really meant about that. We made fun of him for other stuff he had said earlier on, but we really didn't talk about that particular portion.

But that was what was put all over the internet. It. The day after the Supreme Court ruling, people were sending him matches as a joke, like, ha ha, well, go ahead and light yourself on fire. Why don't you put it on pay-per-view? Ha ha ha. And the thing is, is he never said it. But what the media did, especially the leftist blogs and the leftists papers, all said the same thing. Basically, he's willing to light himself on fire to oppose gay marriage when he never Said that.

0:11:10 Tom: Right right

0:11:30 Thomas: Hmm self-immolate I I, that's that's great that you say that, because that is something I hate, and everybody does it, and I really really want to try to not do that in my my personal life, because I think that it's like for some people, it's not enough that someone's wrong. They have to like strawman them and make them even more wrong. It can't just be, hey, I think this guy is wrong on what he's saying, because he is. He's opposing gay marriage. He'S obviously wrong for a number of reasons.

0:13:22 Cecil: Yep.

0:13:23 Tom: Oh

0:13:29 Cecil: He's wrong. Yeah.

0:13:31 Thomas: Yeah, it'S not hard, but you don't need to make it out to be something it isn't. And I totally agree on that. Now, since you guys seem to both be coming down on the side of Tim Hunt to a certain degree. First, I want to say, based on our last conversation, I guess you would still say that the college he's affiliated with had the right to fire him, despite the fact that it's taken out of context.

0:13:31 Cecil: Yeah, yes. Yes. The thing is, one thing that protects professors that doesn't protect other people is academic freedom. So there is a case to be made here about academic freedom now. I don't know what level of academic freedom you can call into place on this, but I know that that is something that does protect professors over just a normal Joe, possibly.

0:14:16 Thomas: Hmm. Well, I think because it was sort of an honorary position that maybe he didn't have that level of protection.

0:14:23 Cecil: I also don't think he works in the US, so I don't know what their levels of academic freedom even even entail, so I don't know what rights he has as a as an employee but what Tom and I were talking about specifically last time was if you're an employee, if you're an employee, and somebody finds either uh legally or non-legally find something really damning about you, something that you did like you wrote like Mind Comp 2 or something and it's on your computer or something you

0:14:27 Thomas: Yeah, no, it's... Yeah. OK, well, hold on. Hold on. I want to stop you because I maybe I didn't. It's possible I didn'T make this.

0:14:54 Cecil: Didn't remember something Hold on, wait, you misremembered something right

0:14:57 Thomas: No,

0:14:57 Tom: You're probably guilty then of crime I

0:14:57 Thomas: I might not have made it clear at the time, but I was talking about also the possibility that this thing that was obtained illegally or legally or otherwise, it might be out of context, like you were just saying. I mean, it might be something that sounds really racist and then you left off the part where it says, but seriously, or, you know, you left out the part where it says, oh, I was just quoting this guy. I heard it work, you know, so I just want to emphasize it might not necessarily be Mein Kampf 2.

0:15:13 Cecil: But sure sure Sure. Right. If that's the case, then I would definitely consider, if it was taken out of context, I think that there should be some way in which all the materials should be brought to light so that people can make a better judgment about it. But even if somebody did something that was definably horrible, like if you looked at what they did and you said, that is a bad thing, Everybody in the court of public opinion thinks what you said was awful and it was obtained illegally. The business, I think, the reason why Tom and I were both on the side of the business is because we come from a state where hire and fire is just, you don't need a reason. And if you're running a business, you're looking to maximize your profits. And if it makes you look awful that some guy is saying something terrible, you should be be able to fire them so that you're not stuck with losing, everybody's losing, all your employees lose out, you lose out just because you want to protect one person's privacy.

0:15:43 Thomas: Okay. All right.

0:16:09 Thomas: Privately.

0:16:21 Thomas: Yeah. And I, and I acknowledge that I think you're right legally. And I will say I did get some messages about, you you know, like, Hey, that's not how, you know employment law is where I am or blah, blah, blah. So I, it's okay.

0:16:21 Tom: Think like

0:16:32 Cecil: Yeah, well, it is in Illinois. So yeah,

0:16:33 Thomas: So it's good to hear you say that, that for your state, it kind of more applies to your state.

0:16:38 Cecil: They can just fire you for no reason here. And you don't get any, there's nothing back. I mean, Tom would know better than I would because he's actually in a position where he does that sort of thing. But right, am I right, Tom? It's a no, there's,

0:16:45 Thomas: He's been fired all the time. Yeah. Oh, I thought you could say he's been fired, fired countless times just from every position.

0:16:52 Tom: Yeah. Yeah. It's an at-will state so we don't I don't even have to Yeah, I can't fire somebody for race, color, religion, national origin, sex, marital status, age, or handicap Beyond that, I could fire you for anything I could hire you for smelling bad I don't even have to give you a reason But no, I've let people go and said, you know, we've just decided that you're no longer a fit for our team And that's it It's not even a reason, right? Right.

0:16:53 Cecil: Yeah. I

0:16:55 Thomas: Well, but there are federally protected classes that But yeah, that's a handicap.

0:17:19 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah. Which is good. And I'm glad that you have a right, because now I'm in a supervisory role as well, somewhat recently. And I can definitely see that if someone just really doesn't work in your team, it's like, you know, you need to be able to make the decision that's good for your business and all that. And I totally understand.

0:17:37 Tom: Yeah.

0:17:37 Thomas: And I, oh, go ahead.

0:17:37 Tom: So I want to I can give you a real world example that happened to me last week. So I had a guy in my office, a new guy's young guy. This is first job out of college. And it came to my attention through somebody else, through one of my other employees, that he made a comment on the floor about preserving the Aryan race.

0:18:01 Thomas: And you don't know whether he was joking or you do know that he wasn't joking or?

0:18:04 Tom: And, well, I didn't know at the time. Right. So. But. All right. Right, he, he makes this comment about preserving the Aryan race, and so it was, it was enough ambiguity in the comment that it came to my attention right that another employee came to me and said, hey, you know, so-and-so made this comment, and so I had to call the person into my office and I had, a you know, find out what it was, and he, I mean, the poor kid, I thought he was gonna poop himself, you know, he's like, oh, it was just a joke, I was just meant as a joke, and I had to, you know, I we had a conversation that, you know, there are some jokes in the workplace that, you know, know your audience, right?

Like, this is not the audience for that joke. But let's say that he had been joking and it made somebody else in my office feel that I had not done a good job of fostering a safe workplace and that this was a hostile workspace. And then he sued me and I lost. And because I lost, my center was no longer profitable.

Maybe maybe he, you know, takes us for a big enough chunk of change that I lose my profit for the year and I get shut down and 13 or 14 people in that group lose their job, right? So as an employer, it doesn't matter to me how I come across the information.

0:18:35 Thomas: Oh, really?

0:19:21 Tom: Once I have the information, I have an ethical responsibility to act on that information because I have to protect not only the person who said a thing, right, and find out what the context of that thing was and then act appropriately based on that context, but I have an ethical responsibility to preserve the the jobs of everybody else because it's not just about like the company's got to make a bunch of money, it's like if the company doesn't make money none of us get to work here anymore and how many families are affected. Yeah.

0:19:43 Thomas: Okay. Yeah. And I think there are two different kind of axes of this because you could imagine a world, and I agree, I think what you're saying is totally valid. I agree. But we could work on separately society's attitudes toward things like this, and we will never make any progress. But in an ideal world, we could work on, because I think, like you were saying earlier, I'll get back to the specifics of Tim Hunt in a while. But in general, I think we really could do well to be a lot more charitable to people in what they, simply things they say. We could do better to be more charitable in these judgments. And if we lived in a world, if we could all agree, like we were saying, for schools. Do you guys think that there, do you like that religious, or sorry, religious, academic freedom kind of, what would you call it, exception for universities where they may be allowed to, some protection from simply being fired for concerns like that? Do you agree with

0:20:14 Tom: I think

0:20:50 Thomas: That? Do you like that? Or were you just merely reporting that it exists?

0:20:51 Cecil: Do I I like it because it without it then you have to, uh, always always sort of research and and and espouse opinions that everyone has to agree with you know what I mean, like there's, yeah I

0:21:05 Thomas: Right. Yeah. And I agree with that. What's

0:21:06 Tom: That I think that doesn't work in business, though, I think that that's, I thinkThat that's extremely contextual, I I think it is great specifically for university, but for a business, I would, yes, exactly. I would strongly disagree that that would be a wise social consideration to have in place for business.

0:21:08 Thomas: That? Okay. Yeah. Because they're not a business. Yeah. Okay. OK, all I wanted to say, though, was if we did take the opinion, like if if we all did, we could very easily the world, not very easily, but hypothetically, the the US, we could take the opinion that anything that should be private and is illegally obtained, we could all hold the opinion. That should be whatever, like we we're not going to sue Tom for keeping a guy in that situation. Now, you may still hate the guy, but the part where the business is liable and people are going to lose jobs, that seems like a separate thing that could be a different variable. Like it's not, it doesn't have to be, if we're talking about just idealism here, I'm not talking about the real world. It doesn't necessarily have to me that everyone has that reaction to you keeping that guy.

0:21:29 Tom: Yeah.

0:22:17 Thomas: Now, let's say, Tom, your employee was somebody who made a joke or actually did say something awful. But he said it in a completely private forum that he intended to be 100% private and not have any impact on his work. Now, that's what he intended. Well, it got stolen. He got hacked, whatever. Illegally, it comes to light. Now I understand the idea of wanting to fire that guy. I understandthe idea of not liking that guy, but idealistically, 100% idealistically. I wish we lived in a world where Tom could say, look, it's unfortunate that this guy has these opinions. I I disagree with these opinions, but they were intended to be private. So I'm not going to fire this guy because it was illegal. The facts were illegally obtained and he would never have meant for this to be public.

0:23:05 Thomas: So I want to live in a world where people don't go nuts over you not firing him. That's all. And I know it's idealistic, but I agree with the negative reaction to the guy. What's that?

0:23:14 Cecil: Don't think that that's a I don't know I I get it, I get, I understand what you're talking about. There's a lot of things idealistically that I think would be awesome, but I also recognize the the practicality of the world that we live in. So I understand where you're coming from. And I agree. I wish that there was a case where you could say, look, that shit's off limits. None of that stuff's going to happen. There was a movie. What was that movie called? It was a woman vice president, I think, was the main part of the movie. And some things came out about her.

0:23:22 Thomas: Yeah.

0:23:42 Thomas: Veep. No, it's called Veep. No, I don't know.

0:23:45 Cecil: What's that? Oh, no, no. There were some things that came out about her, um, in the movie, and specifically what happens in the movie, the whole thrust of the movie is that she never comments on them, she constantly always pushes off and never comments on them. I'm not going to comment, I'm, I'm not going to comment on them. And the movie itself works its way through a drama, but the main pull away from the movie was is that she would never engage it because she never thought it was, she never, she didn't agree that it was true but didn't want to engage it because she was taking the sort of idealistic moral high road and and saying, I'm not going to engage this stuff because it's not true. And eventually the thing sort of, as I recall, I think I only saw the movie once, so gosh, I could be totally fucking bonking it up here. But as I call, everything falls apart because of her unwillingness to address the issue.

0:23:57 Thomas: Oh yeah. Yeah. Yeah,

0:24:31 Cecil: But it's an idealistic movie, because when you think about it, nobody would ever do that. There's no way, if some crazy allegation came out about President Obama, he wouldn't address the issues because you have to control the spin on yourself, herself and so yeah

0:24:31 Thomas: Yeah.

0:24:43 Thomas: I've read that in a book and that is a, I, I'm not surprised that that's what the movie went with. I don't know what this is. This is the show of just references that are terrible and don't matter, just so everybody knows. So which episode, which episode of Catch a Contractor was that, that you're talking about? No, but that is actually, I think that's the prevalent wisdom in politics is that you cannot simply be quiet about something until it goes away. You can't take that high ground. So I agree. I think despite the fact that I'm sure you're remembering the movie completely incorrectly, even though I've never seen it, I'm surer you're wrong about it. But it's not surprising that that would be the thrust of it because that doesn't work. And I agree, we don't live in that world. I just wish we would give people a little more consideration and leeway before we go with the witch hunt, you know?

But I want to say, because you guys seem to be, or we all kind of seem to me on the same page here, I do want to present some of the arguments against Tim Hunt and maybe see what your reactions are. It should be probably no surprise, I don't know how much you guys follow PZ Myers, but surprise, surprise, he's very anti-Tim Hunt. And the,

0:24:53 Cecil: Gosh what movie is it yeah sure

0:25:56 Thomas: The, I would say the thrust of the argument is, look, what if this had been a joke about race? It's not necessarily that it was a joke. Sure. Maybe it was joke, but it's like someone telling a horribly racist joke. They deserve to be punished for this, this racist joke, imagine if he had said black people in the lab, you know, and then they made some sort of joke about, oh, but then, you know that some stereotypical joke and then said, oh but seriously, you You know, like, would we take it differently? And I think that's the argument some feminists are making. Like, look, this is just as bad as making a terrible racial joke. And it's not, excuse me, it's okay that he just says, oh, you know, I wasn't being serious, blah, blah. What do you think about that? Does that change your view at all?

0:26:11 Cecil: Was it is it horror yeah

0:26:40 Tom: I'm not sure. I'm not sure it changes my view. I think, um, I think first of all, necessarily equating everything to what if it had been race? Um, I'm not sure that that's always fair to necessarily equate every, um, every group in a minority power status as what if it were race? I'm not sure that it always translates in a one-to-one direct comparison. So I'm not, I'm not necessarily convinced that saying like if I make a joke about you know oh, women, it's the same thing as making a joke about black people. It's the same thing is making a jock about Jewish people. Is it the same thing as I'm not sure that they're all co-equivalent. And I think that there's also a level of I think there's a level of venom, which is necessary to consider when you're when you you're looking at the context of these things, though, I think that there was real venom in his comments.

0:27:36 Tom: I don't. I don't, because I looked at the contacts where he says, "No, know, seriously," and then he chides himself later for being an awful person, um, you know, I I, he is, well I do that all the time on our show, like, I'll make a really, really, really aggressively off-color joke, and then I've made jokes that make me cringe, I've make jokes that make me hold my head in embarrassment, but I tell them anyway and I don't mean them. I don't mean them, I'm just telling a joke, like, there's a right, like, are we so, are we so socially fucking inept that we don't understand that jokes rely on hyperbole and exaggeration for comedic effect?

We're just like not willing to concede that at all, that you can actually say the exact opposite of what you believe, and that's part of what makes a joke funny. Right, part of what makes it joke funny is saying things we don t really believe. There's an amazing, amazing, like, there's a great David Cross bit where he gets, where he gets heckled.

So David Cross is, is, he has a great stand-up comedic act back in the 90s, and he's, he says something like, you know, I believe that women are smarter than men, and people clap and cheer, and I'm like, oh, whatever,

0:27:46 Thomas: So he's like, you think he's, like. Playing a character of, you now. Yeah.

0:28:46 Tom: And it's like, but, you know, I also believe that dogs are smarter than women, and then, you know, like in the crowd, like there's like a woman who's like, "No." And he's like, "Oh, is that, is that too far?" It's like, "You don't believe that. I actually did a series of tests to determine." He's like, "You're right, you're right, it's just a joke. I don't really believe that, I'll be telling a lot of them these tonight." And it's like, like we're, we're really at a point socially where we're just willing to just be outraged despite the, you know, the obvious context of what's going on or the intention. I mean, you can't know the operation of someone's mind, but you can just ask and you can look. Does this, how does this person have a history of being, you know, misogynist? Does this person have a history of actually like treating reading women differently in the lab. And if those things should inform how we respond to these things.

0:28:52 Thomas: Yeah, I remember that.

0:29:36 Thomas: Yeah. And to give some more context to bolster your point, there are people who are pointing out, look, this guy has been a very fierce advocate of women in science. He's given a lot of women positions. He has given them help and guidance and advocated for them. And the speech after he made those jokes, he apparently said, you know, but in all seriousness, you know, women in science play a big role in the development of, I think, was it South Korea where he was? I think something like that.

0:30:07 Cecil: I think so, yeah.

0:30:09 Thomas: So that's to bolster your point. Were you going to say something, Cecil?

0:30:13 Cecil: Well, I was just gonna say, you know, we were talking earlier about how this guy didn't know his audience. He didn't, he he must have clearly not, and clearly not everybody in his audience because somebody took offense to it and posted on Twitter, etc. So he didn't, I mean, and you had said that they had started to laugh, so I don't know to the extent at which he didn't know his audience, but I will, will say this, PZ Myers does know his audience and he knows exactly what he needs to say and what exactly he needs zu do every single time an issue like this comes up because that's going to get him the most sort of circle jerkiness of his little group. And I'm not saying that to be mean because I think our podcast is a circle jerk. You know what I mean? I'll own that shit all day, so I get it. I understand. I know exactly what he's doing. What he's saying is this is a story that's going to outrage the people who follow my blog, and it's going to be good for hits.

0:30:39 Tom: Yep. Right.

0:31:03 Cecil: That's what it's gonna be good for, and I recognize that that's what PZ is doing, and he's going to comment on it in a way that all the rest of his people are going to give him sort of an e-high five and say, "Way to go, PZ," and they're all going to comment all their little stuff on his little comment, and he is going to feel good about it, and they are going to feel good that they read it, and everybody is going to be happy in his own little circle that he has. I

0:31:23 Tom: You know, the thing to remember too, about that is that's his business, right? Like it's his job to get, to get hit. I mean, if you're running a blog and you're doing it seriously and you're trying to get readers and you're trying to maintain the readers that you have, just like our show, like it's a business, you're managing your perceptions. You're giving giving the audience what they want to hear. It's that, that's that's, I mean, it's absolutely editorialized comment, like that is necessarily different than, you know, a contextual third party objective journalism. And he's not doing he's doing editorializing. That's that's the job of somebody like that. It's to get hits. What is going to get me hits?

0:31:54 Thomas: So, like PZ, so are you, interesting, I mean, because I think that PZ would say, and others might say, no, I, this is how I really feel. And I feel like people who are making these comments are idiots and they deserve to be embarrassed. I don't know at what level of, I guess, cynicism would you apply to his motives? Do you think he is in it for clicks?

0:32:02 Tom: Yeah.

0:32:22 Cecil: Wonder, I don't think that he necessarily disagrees with what he's saying, I don't think he's, I don't think he's conflicted in what he's writing BUT I think that that as he goes on he he's sort of sharpening his his it's sor of it's sort of this this

0:32:31 Tom: Well, I don't either.

0:32:32 Thomas: Okay. Yeah. He knows how to get the reaction he wants, I guess. But well,

0:32:42 Cecil: Exactly and he's also he's also just like Tom finding the witch he wants to burn, this is the witch that he wants to burn, so he's gonna find this guy and he's gonna know, he's gonna know exactly, this is everybody that goes to his blog is gonna cheer when this witch burns, everybody's gonna stand in the audience and be like this is amazing and we're happy that you found this guy so we could hate him too sure

0:32:58 Tom: Right. Yeah. It's it's a five minute tape. Right. But that's what people and there's nothing I'm I'm not even I'm not saying that to denigrate it right like we you don't go to you don't go to PZ Myers blog to get a review of the new Mustang right that's not his shtick he's not a car review thing right you you go because he's selling a certain editorial product right

0:33:03 Thomas: I was going to ask, are you?

0:33:21 Cecil: Or he's posting cute octopuses, that's why you're going octopi I guess I don't know if it's well

0:33:24 Tom: That's but I mean legitimately like I would be can you imagine how fucking flabbergasted you would be if you went to an editorial site that did car reviews right and told you like how awesome the new fucking big fast car was and instead you like flipped open you know you navigated over to the car review site that you love and it's an editorial review where they're going to tell you how badass that car is and instead it was like hey I just you know bought a new fleshlight here's my review of that you'd be like fucking that's not what I come here for

0:33:57 Cecil: Hey maybe you came for it who knows that's

0:33:59 Thomas: Hey, man.

0:33:58 Tom: Hey Right. We we we the internet is different than other forms of media because we get to pick and and choose the echoes we want to hear. Right. And, and Google informs how we, you know, how our searches come back. Our, our laser beams are tightly focused in terms of these are the things I search for. These are the results. Well, we like it or lump it. That's the, that is the internet, right?

0:34:19 Thomas: Yeah. And I don't like that.

0:34:24 Tom: It's look at something like Reddit. I choose which Reddits I like, right. Which subreddits are like, and that's the news I get fed. When I go and do a Google search, I get fed the results that are similar to other results. So, yeah,

0:34:23 Cecil: The internet bro

0:34:25 Thomas: Yeah, see, that's the part I don't like. See, I like, I don''t mind that people have the, the, yeah, well, I dont mind that peopl, and this was what drives me nuts about Facebook, too, is people do have their chosen sources of news. I get that. It's hard to, you know, I would, I woul, in general, I wish the world obviously considered more points of view, you. I like to, I have all kinds of different places I go. I like to try to get the biggest, broadest picture I can. But here's what I don't like. I don't like the sneaky stuff that you don't even know about, like you mentioned, where I'm trying to do a search on Google, what I think maybe, I think it's going to be a neutral kind of search, like a idealist or ideologically neutral sort of search. And then they, but they're giving me results based on some bullshit calculations I don't even know about

0:34:38 Tom: I don't either, but it's the game.

0:35:19 Thomas: And hiding certain stuff from Me. I think Facebook is the the worst with that. And, uh, I don't really like that. So I don't know, that's a separate point, but yeah, I, I don't mind the stuff you know about where you're consciously picking, you know, picking and choosing your sources, but I kinda, I kinda don't like that some things behind the scenes tailor, you know, to the sources they think you want. I Don't like that

0:35:20 Cecil: So go to duck duck go he's

0:35:40 Tom: Yeah, it's a bespoke internet, man. Like, we have, like, any denial of that is dishonest, you know? Like, everything about our current internet culture is a bespoke culture. I choose exactly the experience, whether consciously or unconsciously, through algorithms chosen by me by, you know, when I go to Amazon, it suggests things I might want to look at. And you know what? Sometimes I look at them and buy them.

0:36:05 Tom: My experience shopping is different than your experience, Amazon shopping, right? Well, I'm not saying no.

0:36:05 Thomas: The aforementioned In fleshlight Yeah.

0:36:13 Cecil: Got a huge collection it smells really weird in that room but you're

0:36:15 Thomas: Yeah.

0:36:17 Tom: So, you know, like it's just, that's the reality of it. You know, it's not an idealistic environment. It would be great, I guess. I don't know if it would be great, but it would certainly be different than what we have today. But I'm not convinced that we ever had anything approaching neutrality or objectivity, um, but

0:36:28 Thomas: Well, maybe, in the 90s when before anyone knew how to do all that stuff but there also wasn't very much stuff on the internet

0:36:37 Tom: But I don't I don't even I mean then there wasn't anything on the internet you know what I mean that

0:36:39 Thomas: Yeah which like horribly colored website which like awfully solid green website were you gonna click to

0:36:49 Tom: Shit was all time cube dude. It was it was fucking garbage, but I mean like when you when we got our media from TV was that I mean I was no more objective and the newspapers were no more effective

0:36:53 Thomas: Oh no not at all Yeah, well, I don't know, I actually do think things were more objective back in the day. I actually did because um for TV

0:37:05 Tom: Which day though like you got to be specific because I'm real aggressive about this point, which day yeah

0:37:08 Thomas: Sure sure For TV, I think that the, uh, because Fox News is not very old, you know, when was that, when did they come up, in the 90s or the late 80s or, or no, I think it might've been the Fox News that the channel did not exist.

0:37:19 Cecil: Thinking like cronkite era no I'm saying I'm seeing like I'm staying like you're the the the objective sort of news, you're thinking like Cronkite era, like during the Vietnam War stuff.

0:37:24 Tom: But Right.

0:37:31 Cecil: I

0:37:30 Thomas: And possibly, I don't mean to say that it was objective. I don't think it was 100% objective. I do think it was less divided because just by the nature of, now there's a million more channels. So we have the ability, people have the ability to latch on to things like Fox News or things like very specialized ideological channels that they didn't have that ability before. And when we only had a few channels, both sides kind of had to fight it out for whose point of view would get considered. So I do think it was more objective. I don't know that that means better. I'm not sure about that, but I do think that things have tended. And I think I saw a graphic the other day about it. Like people are getting more polarized and this may be a factor in that, but it sounds like Tom has strong opinions on that. Oh, what? What's up?

0:38:18 Cecil: Think the news, I do want to mention though, I think the news no matter how you report it is always going to be subjective in some way. Because you're just deciding on what you report. You know what I mean? There's no way you can report all the things and you have to editorialize some way. And whether that's giving a story about a murder a minute or three minutes, that's making an editorial decision.

0:38:26 Thomas: Of course. Yeah. Yeah. That's why I said it's, I think it's more, I, yeah.

0:38:41 Cecil: You know and whether or not that goes at the beginning of the hour or the end of the hour that's an editorial decision and there's all these editorial decisions that went into news throughout the entirety of sort of TV news and you

0:38:42 Thomas: Yeah, it's going to have to be that way.

0:38:52 Tom: You. Know, I'm thinking of like Neil Postman's book that was pre-Fox News, which is an excellent book called How to Watch TV News, and I remember reading that book, and that book really shed a lot of light on, and again this was a pre-vox News era sort of, uh, analysis of of the incredible subjectivity and slant and editorial directionality of television news news programming.

Um, like Cecil says, there's, you know, when, if you cover a story, there's no way to cover any story with anything even remotely approaching objectivity, because you have, you have questions about, you know, what do we show, do we cover, do we first, like, let's talk about, like, a murder, like it's a great example actually, like should we cover murders at all, are they actually, so there's questions that have to be asked, like, is this actually news, what makes it news, and why, if we're going to show images, what images do we show, how much weight, which of the interviewees do we put on camera and for how long and from what angle, is this a flattering or unflattering scene, there's so many considerations that just, if even if all the words in a transcript were merely factual, just by virtue of the medium of a visual medium like that, I think that there, that any any kind of pretense toward objectivity is is moot, like the the

0:39:37 Thomas: Yeah I, I absolutely, I'm

0:40:11 Cecil: I

0:40:11 Tom: Only thing objective might be watching, like, like closed circuit TV camera footage, I mean, I, I mean, I'm, I'm kind of, and so, like, that idea of objectivity or that idea of a golden age of journalism, it kind of doesn't fly with me, I'm not convinced that that's

0:40:16 Thomas: Yeah.

0:40:27 Thomas: Well I, that's why very, very specifically said I think it was more objective. I totally agree that it was not, yeah, yeah

0:40:29 Tom: Yeah yeah No, I gotcha, I just want to I Just

0:40:36 Cecil: Do I want to exaggerate it as much as possible so I

0:40:39 Thomas: Yeah. No, but I think you're right. I think there are people who do have like, you know, whatever you call it, looking through shaded glasses. What is that phrase? Looking through rose colored. Yeah.

0:40:49 Tom: Rose tinted glasses. Yeah.

0:40:50 Thomas: Rose colored glasses. Yeah. At the past. And I do agree that that's overblown, but I think it's pretty undeniable that things have gotten more polarized. And sure.

0:40:50 Tom: Yeah, but I would, I would say that I am, uh, hugely in favor of the incredible democratization of information that the internet has provided. Um, I can go find out way more when I relied, if I had to rely previously on newspapers or television, I had access to vastly less information. I mean, unbelievably Less information and less diverse sources than I have now. So even if I'm picking and choosing, um, who provides me with that information, I have access to so much more information, um, I, I would argue that we're probably a little bit better informed, right?

0:41:09 Thomas: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

0:41:40 Thomas: Yeah well, let me take another crack out just to pull us now back into the Tim Hunt thing. Let me take one more crack at what some people have said that'll maybe get us to get your response on it. Because there's another aspect of this where a lot of, now some women in science have backed him up and have been supportive, but there is another response, the hashtag that went crazy about women in science that is essentially saying this, look, I'm a woman in science. I've had to face countless countless times of, oh, little jokes that were harmless that they think are harmless. But it's the attitude constantly that the way that I'm treated differently, it's the way that women in science are discriminated against.

0:42:26 Thomas: If you have two resumes and they're exactly the same, but one has a female name, they get hired or considered way less, like all these things. There are a lot of people coming forward, a lot of women coming forward and saying, look, this is my experience. This guy's joke, joke or not, this guy is emblematic of an attitude of misogyny in science. And therefore, that's why this kind of stuff, these kind of remarks need to be punished and need to basically people need to be called out for them. So, what do you think about that kind of reaction?

0:43:00 Cecil: Mean I think that then in some ways that is justified, right, I mean, you, I can't look at the world from a woman's perspective, I don't have any of, can't do that, so I don't know what it's like to, and first off I don't know what it's like to be a fucking scientist, okay, so I'm clearly not there, but I also don't know what it's like to be a woman, so I don't know what that that that experience is like, I don't know what it feels like to be a women in today's working place, I don't know what it feels like to be, you know, to have some like constant those constant nagging jokes which you know you might start taking offense at, um, so I mean in some ways I understand what they're getting at, but then, but then you got to look at it from the other perspective and say, okay, well, is this the flag you want to plant your soil on? Is this what looks like to many people a harmless, innocuous comment?

0:43:46 Cecil: The thing that you want use is your rallying cry to make sure that everyone understands sexism is rampant in the science world. Are there not better examples that we can use that show that sexism is rampant other than what other people could easily misinterpret as a joke then? What I want, what I want then, if it's super rampant and it sucks, is I want one that I can easily look at and be like, that's not a joke. That dude's A dick. Like, fucking where's that at? I want that guy. Because that's a guy who deserves it then, if that's the case. Because in this case, it feels like, well, maybe this guy is just sort of part of the system, which is constantly oppressing women, but he's a tiny little cog. Where's the giant cog? Because I want to get on your side. I want be there and and fuck I'll light a torch and scream at the witch too if it's a bad enough witch but you got to get me a witch give

0:44:11 Tom: Yeah.

0:44:36 Tom: Find better witches, right? Like find stronger witches, don't find the fucking, oh yeah, I got, you know, I'm making some fucking potions in my basement, not hurting anybody, oh fucking let's burn her, that's, it's pointless, I totally agree with you you, man, find better witches.

We do this all the time, like I'll find stories for the show, we always talk about and, you know what, we're going to do and, uh, Cecil and I will, you know, we'll sit down before every show and we'll talk and we're like, no, I, I don't, you know, that story's not strong enough, we don't want that one, that's not, or, you know, well, look at it and say, I was, maybe it's a good tweet, but it's not necessarily something we feel strongly about, it's not a strong enough witch, right?

It's not worth attacking, or it's just not gonna be funny, but, um, and I, I would say too that, like, specifically within the Tim Hunt context, when At the end of his conversation, he says, you know, but I'm a terrible person, or I'm a monster, or whatever he says, and he's, he's making reference to the fact that he's joking, he's making reference because he doesn't really believe he's a monster, right?

It's hyperbole, it's exaggeration for effect, and one of the strengths of humor is to draw attention to social problems through exaggeration and hyperbole, that is one of the best things humor can do, that's one of the strongest, I mean, look at like comedians like George Carlin or Bill Burr or Chris Rock or Amy Schumer, like that's what they do, they use exaggeration and hyperbole for effect, but they also have strong social messages, and if we can't, like, if we can't see through that shit and say, like, oh, this is a person who's an ally in my community and they're doing good and they're speaking out and maybe they made an off color joke that didn't work, but I know the real position.

0:46:14 Tom: I know the intention. Cecil and I get called on the floor sometimes for using terminology that we were unaware is, um, like we, we said like trans or whatever. I think we've, we've said a few things that, um. We found out later that we're, you know, unintentionally derogatory and we didn't know, but at the end of the day, it's like, you know, can you not tell them on your side we're covering this story from from from the standpoint of being an ally to your cause so if if it's more important to you to be outraged then go fucking sit in your outrage corner that's cool like hang out with all the outrage kids that's your lunch table but if you can't find bigger witches you know my feeling kind of is fuck off

0:46:24 Thomas: Offensive to some some people.

0:46:39 Thomas: Right.

0:46:59 Thomas: Hmm. Yeah. And, and just to make sure I cover all the, cover all the bases.

0:47:07 Thomas: Cecil, you did send me this, just want to acknowledge that you, you sent me this Gawker one that kind of pointed out his apology that people didn't like. You know, I think I'm going to, this is very short, so I think I'm going read this, this pretty appalling Gawker thing. Just to give an idea of some of this reaction. So, oh, okay.

0:47:24 Cecil: Credit to the author too, I think it's important to give credit to the author because you

0:47:28 Thomas: I I don't know the author.

0:47:28 Cecil: Know if you write a masterpiece, you want to make sure that the author gets the Yeah, there you go.

0:47:30 Thomas: Is it Dana Evans? Is that

0:47:33 Cecil: I don't know, I just, I just think this is an awful article written by an asshole, so

0:47:30 Tom: So

0:47:33 Thomas: Someone you know something about? Oh, okay. Okay. This week's sexist idiot is Nobel Prize winner, Tim Hunt, a biochemist and honorary professor at University College, London. Hunt, whose nose hair is longer than the list of fucks I give about him, said the following. Uh, let me tell you about my trial. That's the quote we already read. You criticize. Oh, and I don't think we read this. Did we? Three things happen when there in the lab, maybe.

We did you fall in love with them, they fall in love with you, and when you criticize them, they cry. Silly crying ass girl scientists. After his remarks blew up on Twitter, Hunt went on BBC4 to apologize, sort of. It was a very stupid thing to do in the presence of all those journalists. I'm really, really sorry I caused any offense. That's awful. I certainly didn't mean that. I just meant to be honest. Actually, I did mean the part about having trouble with girls.

It is true that people I have fallen in love with people in the lab and people in the lab have fallen fallen in love with me, and it's very disruptive to the science because it's terribly important that in the lab people are on a level playing field. So that's a, that's not a great quote to be honest with you, um, as I'll continue speaking of the leveling, the playing field, your nose hairs could use some leveling, as in cut your nose hair. So basically, then she ends

0:47:38 Cecil: Oh.

0:48:42 Cecil: No, keep going. No, no, this is, this is the best part of the article, that's

0:48:43 Thomas: With Okay. Okay. As in cut your disgusting nose hairs so that they aren't hanging out of your nose, you're supposedly a genius, quote-unquote, scientist, but you are a flaming idiot if you think any woman would be sexually attracted to a man with braidable hair streaming from his nostrils. Okay, UCL released a statement on Wednesday that said Hunt, who was knighted in 2006 and who won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2001, why don't they know which? No, I'm just kidding, for groundbreaking breaking work on cell division in 2001, resigned from his honorary professorship this week, and then they do a very nice large close-up on his nose hair that is indeed quite prodigious coming out of his nose, yeah.

0:49:03 Cecil: It Yeah, yeah, that's the resigning.

0:49:31 Thomas: So, there's a lot to react there, too. First off, I will say that that quote is pretty bad. I mean, honestly, if that was his apology, that is pretty bad, but the thing is, like, like, I don't know, there's another apology that's a lot better and I don't know if they' re ignoring that.

0:49:28 Tom: Why,

0:49:30 Cecil: Admittedly, dude's got some nose hairs.

0:49:45 Cecil: Here's the thing, though. I kind of do take, I look at this and I see what he says. He says it was a stupid thing to do in the presence of all those journalists. I understand that that's one of those things where he's kind of trying to excuse himself, right?

0:49:55 Thomas: A non-apology, though. Yeah.

0:49:57 Cecil: It's a non-apology. But then he says, I'm really sorry I caused any offense. That's awful. I mean, that's what he says. I'm really sorry I caused any offense, that's awful. I certainly didn't mean that. And then he says, I meant to be honest, actually, but then he transitions to the part where he says, I have fallen in love with people and people have fallen in love with me. That's the part he's being honest about. And, and biology, you know, the guy's a biologist, he's talking about biology, man, he's talking about, like, I'm in the lab with somebody for long hours and suddenly, you know, we're the only people here, and that's sort of what happens, and if he's being honest about it, then why is it a big deal? I don't see the big deal in this. This feels like, I mean, this seriously feels like people want to fucking burn some dude for no reason. I can't see the reason in this. Even that apology doesn't seem appalling.

0:50:41 Thomas: Well, I think people are saying, really? Because

0:50:44 Cecil: It doesn't at all.

0:50:44 Thomas: People are sayi ng that this apology looks like he does still think that there should be gender segregation in labs. Because he's saying it's terribly important that...

0:50:54 Tom: Don't we just ask them, you know, what I mean, like, let's like why don't we just fucking ask them? Do you really think there should should be gender segregation? We don't want to ask him because we want to, we want to look at his comments obliquely dude.

0:50:56 Cecil: Also, that feels too.

0:50:56 Thomas: Well, and people are saysi ng he does think that. I can't find that if anyone actually flat out asked him that, but I've gotten the impression that there are at least a number of people who think he does actually believe that part. So I don't know. It's hard to say.

0:51:16 Cecil: But gender segregation in labs, does that mean that women are less than in that case? That's the thing that I'm worried about. Okay, so let's say that we split the labs up into boys and girls. Does that mean the boys' lab is different than the girls' lab in any way other than genders? Are they Equal? Equal, are they not equal? Like, what's the deal? Like what, and why are we that upset by a particular guy who, you know, he's saying this but no one else is saying it, so what do we care what this guy, I mean, like I just feel so weird. It feels like, it feels like they're just striving to find somebody in this community that they can throw on this fucking fire. It doesn't feel like they found anybody that's worth burning, see.

0:51:30 Thomas: Separate but equal, huh?

0:51:55 Thomas: Well, and there was a longer interview I think he did with The Guardian. And honestly, from that, for my personal reaction, he does seem like he's backed away from it. And he said he had to give a speech. I think it was even impromptu. I think he was very short notice, had to give a speak, decided to go with a certain kind of humor that he obviously regrets now. So for me, I see it. I don't really think it's that big of a deal. But let's talk about this ridiculous... Here's what I think bothers me about this thing, about the author you wanted me to name, Dana, Dana, with a Y, so it's kind of hard to read. D-A-Y-N-A, which I guess is Dayna Evans.

0:52:41 Thomas: It's weird that when people think they're justified, when people think that when they're indignant, when they are righteously indignant they have the right to just spill disgusting personal attacks on people. That's the part that I find hard to get behind. Let's say I agreed with this Gawker author on their interpretation, on her interpretation of this guy. Isn't it weird that, and I know Gawkor is not the epitome of media or anything, but the license people feel to just do these disgusting, like attacking this guy's nose hair and saying like, there's no way anyone's ever been sexually attracted to him. Like, I don't know if I'm going to, yeah,

0:53:22 Tom: That's just like saying like how is that different than like male writers saying like nobody would fuck you because you're fat, like when that happens, that's such an obvious attack, right? That's like a, it's A horrifying, disgusting thing for people to say, and people say that to women writers and women bloggers all the fucking time, right? And that's like one of the things that you read, one of the problems, legitimate problems, legitimate, legitimate problems that women have to face when they're entering the media space, right, is that they get called on the carpet for their physical appearance as if it's somehow relevant to the, you know, to their intellectual argument or to the product that they're producing. And this is the, this is a fucking turnaround is fair play, 100% straight example of the other thing, the other part. Like we're going to call this guy, we're mad at him for being sexist. So we're going to do something incredibly sexist, like it's just, it's bullshit, man, like right.

0:53:30 Thomas: That's horrible, yeah, Yeah.

0:54:17 Cecil: I, I don't have a problem with them doing the nose hair thing at all, like I'm like, whatever, like I, we make fun of people's faces on our show constantly, like their face will be all big and roasty on the giant flapjack jaws and I'll make fun of them and I don't care. I'm like, yeah, your fucking head looks weird and my head looks Wierd, so I don't care, I'm just like, whatever, this doesn't bother me as much as I think the, uh, as much I think that it just feels like selectively they're trying to find ways to make you feel I

0:54:34 Thomas: Yeah.

0:54:45 Thomas: Because I think it's more the the the hypocrisy of it, what, like Tom says, I mean

0:54:51 Cecil: Understand what I understand, understand what Tom says, and I, I mean, once in a while I'll have a good point. Um, I'm

0:54:51 Thomas: Yeah yeah It's

0:54:56 Tom: This isn't one of them, but on occasion

0:54:58 Cecil: Not gonna, I'm not gonna back this, no, actually I do, I agree, I agree with Tom, I think he's right, you know, especially when you're coming from that particular camp, because Tom's right, I mean, how many times can, I mean, you, you see the hate mail that some of these women bloggers get, where they're like, I wouldn't fuck you if, I, I wouldn't rape, fuck you, and they fucking ran, like, all the idiot commenters, because they're mostly YouTube commenters who say just horrible, awful.

0:55:13 Thomas: Really bad, yeah,

0:55:23 Cecil: Shit.

0:55:22 Thomas: They're awful, that's A Huge problem.

0:55:24 Cecil: At them. And I Get it, I fucking, I'm right there with me, like, that's fucking stupid, but, in, in, right, and in many ways Tom's right, is, yeah, they're saying the exact same thing, I don't think that that's off limits, and I think that, you know, clearly if somebody doesn't, you know, you want to make fun of somebody, you're totally fucking, make fun, but also understand like Tom said, there's a, you know, a level of, of a hypocrisy in what you're doing.

0:55:24 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah.

0:55:25 Tom: Yeah.

0:55:40 Thomas: I think That, that's okay, I think, maybe the difference is I, I want to know how long you get to get away with, with the, well, this happens to us, so therefore I can do it to somebody and it's okay, you know, because this isn't some ironic thing, this, this girl isn't, this author, who I assume is a woman based on the name, is not, she's not making this point as, like, a, see how it feels when it happens to you, she's making this with a tone of, like, oh no, she can, she can be this horrible to this guy, it doesn't matter, it's totally fine, it will, it is 100% fine, it's a little different than the, like, like you said, turnabout is fair play thing. I don't read that as her intention. And that's what worries me. And again, people can write whatever they want. I'm not, whatever.

0:56:27 Cecil: Yeah, no, no.

0:56:28 Thomas: I mean, but it's, I don'T, how much should we give people leeway in what they say and do because they've been wronged in some other way? You know, like, doesn't that kind of just initiate a perpetual circle of wronging each other, you know? Doesn't it have to stop somewhere?

0:56:28 Cecil: Yeah.

0:56:46 Cecil: Should a guy who's been gay-bashed be allowed to beat the hell out of a bunch of people? You know what I mean? At what point is turnabout fair play? I don't know. I mean, I don't know what the answer to that is. And I recognize, like I said, I recognize what Tom's saying is absolutely true. This person is doing the exact same thing that other people do to them and that's what they want to

0:56:53 Thomas: Yeah, exactly.

0:57:05 Thomas: And a lot of people hate that about PZ. I mean, they don't, a lot of People hate the fact that he is so vicious in what he says. He thinks it's totally cool because he's identified the correct witch, you know, but yeah.

0:57:07 Cecil: Yeah.

0:57:17 Cecil: No, yeah.

0:57:18 Thomas: So interesting.

0:57:16 Tom: Right, I mean, we do that, like, you know, I mean, I will tell you right now, like, we do the same thing. Like, we go, we find witches and we attack the witch. That's, I think that's human nature. I think that that's. If it wasn't part of human nature, people wouldn't be doing it in mass, right? That's

0:57:30 Thomas: Yeah. It's, it's been tainting human witch relations for for years.

0:57:38 Tom: It, right.

0:57:38 Thomas: That's for sure. It's made it very difficult.

0:57:38 Cecil: I I feel like too, you know, there's... there's a level of, I mean, I don't, I mean, IDK, like, when we, when I, I'm not gonna try to justify what we do because I think that what we doing is the same it's the same level but Um, hey, you're right, but what, uh, what, what we did was we go after these guys that have tons and tons of tons of people who think that they're doing the right thing, right?

0:57:50 Thomas: No one could justify what you did.

0:58:02 Cecil: So when, when Rick Perry says something, it's not that we think he's an asshole and that he's just some schmuck who's just saying something or even just getting publicized. He's a guy who has millions of people who agree with him. It's not just Pat Robertson who says something awful. It is that Pat Roberts is saying something awful, and there are millions of people watching him every day who also are going to agree with whatever he says. The same thing with, to a lesser extent, Rick Wiles, who runs that True News, to a lesser extent, Brian Fisher. But these are people who still have a following. These are people whose still have a bunch of people who listen to them and take their arguments and move through into the world with them. So we want to attack those arguments. And on occasion, we attack the people. I mean, we

0:58:02 Tom: I

0:58:03 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah.

0:58:43 Cecil: Make fun of Pat Robertson for being old. We make funof his jaws because they're weird and he looks like a muppet. We make fun of him all the time. But I think the heart of what we're making fun of is just the way we we feel appalled that people just take whatever he says at face value and so hold

0:58:48 Tom: Think

0:58:51 Thomas: And

0:58:59 Tom: I think too that, like, there's a difference between a public persona and a non-public persona, and a public persona, you, if you choose to be in the public, if you choose to be a, uh, a person who, you know, goes on TV or goes on a podcast or go, you're, it's, it's fucking fair game. And I'm not sure it's necessarily the same way when you get asked to do a speech at the fucking last minute and drop a bad joke.

0:59:23 Thomas: Especially, I mean, when he's been supportive of women in the past, and that's the reason he was there, I think. So, yeah, it's a little tough. I think my overall verdict, if we were to try to give, and you guys feel free to sum up what you think, we can come to a close here. I think that it's definitely possible that this guy has some outdated ideas about some stuff, but I think it just really is too much of an outrage machine that we have, and I don't know how we fight that. It's just some level of outrage, sure, but some level of... I don't even want to say outrage. The appropriate reaction in a perfect world I think would be, hey, listen, man, the joke you made, it was just don't do that again.

1:00:10 Thomas: It's not a good joke. People, it's kind of harmful toward women in science because they have to face these jokes all the time. Sure, maybe your joke wasn't bad, but when they have hear these things every day, maybe it gets a little old. Like if that's the reaction you want to have, fine. But then it blows up to this outrage machine. And I really think that it's gotten out of control. And And I think this is going to happen more and more where people are just absolutely their careers are ruined. And oh, sorry, one more thing I wanted to say. PZ did. I just wanted to to say real quick he did go on Of course, he didn't really lose his job, I'm quoting. He lost an honorary position, as I've been saying repeatedly. I have learned that he lost the accompanying photocopy privileges at UCL, which is the biggest cost to him I've heard yet.

1:00:55 Thomas: I think that's pretty flippant because there's a giant cost to being embarrassed in this way. And you're losing a position for, if you're using a position, you're going to lose a position for no reason, then it doesn't really matter what the position is. I mean, if he deserved it, he deserved it, let's say hypothetically. But I think that that's pretty flippant of PZ to say that, because when your reputation's ruined in this way, when it's massively, massively ruined on Twitter publicly, you're not, what do you do from there? I mean, basically his science career is pretty much over. He doesn't get to be an advisor and be a public kind of advocate of science anymore, despite being a Nobel Prize winner. And I think that's, I think, that's disproportionate. I think that's wildly disproportionate. And that's the judgment I have on it. Even if it may be true that he that he does have some outdated ideas, but I just think it's such a disproportionate response.

1:01:01 Cecil: Absolutely.

1:01:52 Thomas: And I wish we had a better way of going about that. But I don't know how that's going to change. So if you guys want to give kind of a summary of where you've arrived on this, that'd be great.

1:02:03 Cecil: I'm with you on that. I think that's a symptom of, I don't know, maybe it's a symptom of modern life. I don't know. A couple years ago, this was many years ago actually, this was probably like 10 years ago. The Cubs were in a playoff hunt. I guess they were in the playoffs and some guy reached out and grabbed a ball. His name was Bartman. That's all I remember. His first name.

He reached out and grabbed the ball, a foul ball that was going to be caught and they would have gone on, I think, gone on to the World Series or something like that, but it was going to be caught, but he reached out and grabbed it or something like that, and like immediately the crowd turned on him. They were throwing their beer on him. He had to leave.

But that guy became like national news as the guy who ruined the Cubs' chance to go to the playoffs or go farther in the playoffs or whatever it was, this big deal. The guy's whole life is changed. He had to move on to Chicago. He had to leave because all these people, like, just everybody knew him. They made him famous, they made them like, and this was like, I think, near the internet times, when internet started getting really popular, and it was like he was internet famous and national TV famous because of, he was the guy who ruined the Cubs' chances and

1:02:49 Thomas: Oh my god.

1:03:04 Tom: Right.

1:03:05 Cecil: Everybody hated him, everybody hated them, he had to leave Chicago. I think he lives in like Florida now because he just, he just fucked up. About the little kid, there was a little kid who would was playing around with a mic stand and he was pretending to do Jedi moves and, like, he became internet famous and everybody sent his shit around the internet and he became like what

1:03:19 Tom: Yeah.

1:03:24 Thomas: Wait, is that what the Arrested Development joke is based off of? Oh, when, when, uh, George Michael, like the footage of him playing, like he's using a lightsaber like

1:03:33 Cecil: Yeah I think maybe I didn't, I didn't watch the rest of the Development, but there's, there was a kid who was playing around with a mic stand, he recorded himself, and he was spinning the mic stand around pretending he was blocking, like, lightsaber blasts and whatever, and it went viral, and everybody sent it all around, like, let's make fun of this kid, let's make fun of this kid, and it's like, he's just a kid, you know, he's just a kid playing around he's not a, you know, he didn't put himself out there, he didn't even think that this was going to go viral. He didn't want it to go viral. So like, I don't know, like I agree with you, man. There's a, there is this feeling that we have this, we have awesome power and we have no idea how to use it. We're just

1:03:34 Thomas: Oh I never knew that yeah yeah yeah

1:03:56 Tom: Right.

1:04:05 Cecil: Like, we Have this awesome power of being able to, you know, communicate with each other and communicate all across the span of, you Know, all the entire world almost instantaneously. And we fuck it up constantly. We fucking ruin it constantly. And it's, it's a bad position to be in. I just, I don't know how to fix it. I don't know what to do. Um, and actually, to be honest, I think Tom and I feed into that a lot, you know?

1:04:09 Thomas: It's yeah yeah

1:04:27 Tom: We do. Do, man.

1:04:28 Cecil: And I, and I, you know, but the thing is, is like, like, we do it because we think it's funny. And that's the reason why. And, you know, it's, it's hard, man. It's hard to look at those other things and be like, man, are we doing that? And it makes you think about those things. It makes you wonder if you're doing the right thing sometimes.

1:04:45 Thomas: Interesting, yeah, that's, that's well said. What do you think, Tom?

1:04:49 Tom: I, I just feel like, I feel like the internet lacks nuance often. Everything's one star or five star, everything's all or nothing, everything's heroes and villains, um, and I, and that's problematic, that's really problematic, because we're very comfortable, um, painting perfect strangers into those villain corners, um, and I think we do the same thing with some of our heroes, our internet heroes too, you know. And and I I, I think whenever you take human beings and you decide somebody is all good or somebody is all bad, or, you know, even, I, I just, I just feel like that, that's the problem, is it lacks nuance, it lacks subtlety, and it's, and that, and because of that it's dishonest, right?

It does, it's, it's part of that, like, we're going to use, we're gonna treat people like Yelp reviews, you know, I mean, nobody gives a three star, everybody's one or five, right? It's, it's, it, it and that's, I, I find that incredibly problematic. I, I don't know what the solution is, um, and I, and I don't know how much of that is just part of our infancy and learning to use this, um, social media and the democratization of knowledge and all of these things that, you know, are part and parcel of kind of this new culture, and this, but this thing with Tim Hunt and many others, it's, it, like Cecil mentioned, like the poor guy who caught a fucking ball at a baseball game, I mean, that's for catching a ball. Isn't that, like, I don't know, sporting, but, like, isn't a fun thing to do when

1:05:14 Thomas: Yeah yeah true yeah yeah Life ruined over that crazy this

1:06:26 Tom: You're at a baseball game

1:06:26 Cecil: You reached his hand out. He reached his hand out into the, into the field, which I guess is okay if you can reach it, but, you know, again, it doesn't really, like, if you look at the still photo, it's hard to tell whether or not, because it's like kind of right over the right over the edge, so you don't know if he's reaching his hand out into the field of play or not

1:06:41 Thomas: Is very very timely reporting on this controversy, yeah.

1:06:41 Cecil: Yeah I know, it's it's a 2003 controversy, so it's not like it's, you know, but in any whatever

1:06:47 Thomas: Yeah well

1:06:45 Tom: Yeah but I, yeah.

1:06:49 Cecil: No

1:06:49 Thomas: I really like the quote of treating people like Yelp reviews. I think that's a great, um, way to put it. Were you going to say something more? Sorry, I interrupted.

1:06:49 Tom: No

1:06:57 Thomas: Yeah I think, I think that's a great way to put it. It reminds me of, I think I've referenced it before on the show, but there's something that Bogosian tweeted that I thought was thought provoking. It was like, when are we going to learn that people are not good people or bad people based on views that they reference online, the things that you do make you a good person or a bad person. And I don't think that is 100% true. I think you can be a bad person by espousing bad beliefs online and causing people to do harm and all that, but it's at least worth thinking about. And I think that the problem with everything we've laid out on the internet here is that it's an aggregator. It takes, everyone has like kind of a reaction of, oh, well, I don't really like that. And it's a binary thing. It's like, is this guy a frigging hero or is he a friggin villain?

1:06:57 Cecil: Nothing important, yeah.

1:06:57 Tom: I wasn't

1:07:18 Cecil: Yep yep

1:07:51 Thomas: And then everybody, if one person does that, it's not a huge deal. You You know, it's like in public, if you see somebody do something and you go, oh, I don't like, you know, that guy cut me off, you know, fuck you, that kind of thing. But it's an entire internet of billions of people at once saying, hey, fuck you. And that is very, very scary and powerful for minor things, you know, and people have lost their lives over this. It's definitely a big deal. And I think, like you say, it may be something that we have to figure out as we go on. But that's okay. Thanks for coming on. Thanks for all the nonsense that we talked about.

1:08:29 Cecil: All this, all this stuff, you can't use, well,

1:08:32 Thomas: Hey, I'm using it. I love it. I think That's the cognitive dissonance, you know, Atheistically Speaking experience that we have. You know, we get on, we talk, and personally, I like it. So I'm proud of it. I will put it out there. So thanks for coming in, giving me your thoughts. And uh thanks as always for everything you guys have done um I I know that we talked about it on on your show but you guys were probably the first you were the first podcast to uh discover my you know Bible show and I'm I'm always grateful for that and it's been a really cool thing to interact with you guys for the last however many years this has been so thanks.

1:08:33 Tom: Free Adnan, yeah

1:09:14 Cecil: Thanks for having us on we We really appreciate it.

1:09:16 Tom: This was A great time thanks as always.