SIO50: Michael Shermer on Evergreen and Gender Studies

Transcript

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

0:00:28 Thomas: Hello and welcome to Serious Inquiries Only. This is episode number 50, a little milestone I suppose, and I'm your host Thomas Smith. Alright, today's episode, which is normally commentary slash voicemail, well, jeez, despite the fact that I have so many good voicemails to go over, this got preempted by an impromptu conversation with Michael Shermer. He once again, to his credit, reached out to me when someone tagged us on Twitter responding to something he tweeted. So that seems to be an effective way to get people's attention sometimes. So thanks to people who do that. But anyway, he emailed me and the availability worked out so that we could have this conversation now. I wanted to get it out so it would be timely. I didn't want to shelf it. And I have a great interview already for Monday. So that's why it's happening today.

0:01:14 Thomas: Michael Shermer came on the show a few episodes back. We had what I thought was a productive conversation. And then, as people noted, he seemed to be changing his mind on that show. But then later Twitter behavior kind of suggested maybe, maybe not. So we'll see how it goes this time. And with that said, we're going to talk about the Evergreen situation and we're gonna talk about the conceptual penis hoax on gender studies. Of course, because that was originally published, the article was originally released in Skeptic Magazine, which he wrote an introduction to, a forward to. So that's a good topic to talk to him about. Out, but also the evergreen stuff. He's been in contact with Bret Weinstein and he's expressed opinions on it on Twitter. So we talked about that too. With that said, let's get right over to it. Here is Michael Shermer.

0:02:12 Thomas: Joining me for the second time is Dr. Michael Shermer. Thank you so much for coming on, Michael.

0:02:17 Michael: You're welcome. Back for the bonus round.

0:02:20 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah. And again, I got to thank you for coming on. I really appreciate it. And once again, really, to your credit, you reached out to me. I'm really blown away by the fact that you're willing to come on again and talk. I love it. Thanks so much doing so.

0:02:34 Michael: Well, we had a thoughtful conversation last time, but then after that is when the evergreen thing exploded and I thought, oh boy, I wonder how he, what he thinks about that, because that would be hard to defend in some way from their perspective or from the progressive left's perspective, given that Bret Weinstein, the professor who is under assail there, is himself a self-described radical progressive.

0:02:39 Thomas: Yeah, okay.

0:02:58 Michael: So I was just I'm curious what your thoughts were on all that, if that changed any of your opinions.

0:03:04 Thomas: So yeah. And then I also want to note, I really want to talk about the gender studies hoax too, because that also happened, I think, after we talked. So lots happened after our first interview. So glad you're here today to talk this out. I think last conversation, as you said, was really productive and interesting. So, all right. Well, if you want to start with framing the question to me, I was going to try to frame it to you, which is your tweet said Evergreen was kind of a game changer and you already touched on it, but if you want to lay out just what you think about why it's a game changer, feel free. Or if you wanted to just turn it to me, I'm happy to answer your question.

0:03:42 Michael: Well, no, I guess it's because the lines of what we discussed last time, it's something of a spectrum. I mean, a lot of the arguments that so-called social justice warriors or far-left progressives make, you know, have some basis in truth and reality. You know, there is discrimination. There is racism. There is bigotry. There is misogyny. You know, these things still exist. And to the extent that we can identify them and correct them, that that's a good thing, that's how moral progress is made. But then, when you start sliding along the scale where it becomes too extreme, where, you know, everyone's a racist, everyone's uh a um, you know, subconsciously they're all biased, we're all biased and so on, and and then, you know, every incident that happens, you know, turns into a, uh, you know, something of a witch hunt, or, or, you know, the the constant search for enemies and, you know, and then it becomes dangerous the further along that path you go.

0:04:36 Michael: And I think that's kind of what we were talking about last time. And so in my mind, you know, the evergreen thing was just the eruption of the most extreme version I've seen of that. We, you know, there's, there hasn't been physical violence there yet, but I could certainly see how it could happen. Something along the lines of what happened to Charles Murray's host at Middlebury, you know, the liberal professor. Who was, you know, attacked. So, you know, and I've now been corresponding with Bret and his wife, Heather, mostly Heather, because he has been inundated with media attention now, mostly from the right, which is kind of bizarre, although maybe it isn't, if you think about it.

0:05:15 Thomas: All right. I was going to say, yeah, it doesn't seem that bizarre to me. But go on.

0:05:18 Michael: Yeah, yeah, maybe not, because, you know, he's spinning a narrative they like to hear, and it's from somebody that's not in their camp, so that kind of reinforces their point, I guess.

0:05:24 Thomas: Yeah, that's exactly what I was going to say. Took the words out of my mouth.

0:05:31 Michael: The liberal media hasn't taken more of an attention, or maybe they have and I haven't noticed. But, I mean, the New York Times had an op-ed piece, but it was by Bari Weiss, who's a woman who used to write for The Wall Street Journal. She just moved over to The New York Times. So, you know, I'm not sure you'd call her a die-in-the-wool New York times liberal or anything like that. But in any case, you know, Bret's he's you know he's worried about his future. He doesn't know if he has a job. You know, he's looking at Patriot. He set up a Patriot page. You know, he is thinking he may not have a job anymore or may not be safe to go back.

0:06:04 Thomas: Well, yeah. I wanted to catch you on one thing you said early on just to follow up on it. Do you think that people aren't full of implicit biases? Because you seem to say, and I don't want to misrepresent you, but you said, oh, sure, there's real racism, there're real examples, but treating everyone as though they're biased in some way doesn't seem healthy. And I just want to get some clarification on that because it seems to me that the science that I'm familiar with is that, for the most part, yes, yes, we all are really biased, and we don't realize it oftentimes, and there's going to be varying degrees, but I think there's plenty of studies that show we have a lot of implicit bias. Do you agree with that, or do you think I'm wrong?

0:06:46 Michael: I'm skeptical of some of that. Just recently I have a forthcoming column in Scientific American, it's, in the August issue. It'll be a mid-July title, "Are We All Racists? Private Thoughts and Public Acts." And it comes under sort of on the heels of a lot of research that's now skeptical of the Implicit Association Test, which is what's been driving for the last 20 years, driving this idea that, you know, we're all biased.

Even African-Americans are biased against African-Americans and women are biased against women and obese people are biased against obese people and so on. Um, I remember when that first came out, um, I thought, wow, boy, you know, it's been replicated, looks pretty solid. I went and took the test myself, and of course I'm, you know, I'm a racist and a bigot, everything else, like, holy shit, god dang. Uh, but um, Carol Tavris called my attention to the fact that there's been a number of meta-analyses of these studies just published in the last year or two that are calling into attention what's really being measured when you're measuring something subconsciously. Because, you know, if it's subconscious, how do you know? So you kind of have to trick the brain into releasing what's in there, and this is not impossible.

I mean, there's a whole area of studies that cognitive psychology have to do with priming the brain to respond in a certain way, and that kind of tricks it into releasing what's there that you yourself are not. So it's not, that's not completely bogus, but uh, something like, well, I'll just give you some of the points here. First, unconscious states of mind are notoriously difficult to discern and require subtle experimental protocols.

0:07:31 Thomas: All right.

0:08:20 Michael: Second, associations between words and categories may simply be measuring familiar cultural or linguistic affiliations. And the example I give is associating blue and sky happens faster than blue and donuts. This doesn't mean I unconsciously harbor a pastry prejudice.

0:08:39 Michael: Third, negative words have more emotional salience than positive words, so the IAT may be tapping into the negativity bias instead of prejudice. Fourth, IAT researchers have been unable to produce any interventions that can reduce the alleged prejudicial associations. A preprint of a 2016 meta-analysis by psychologist Patrick Forscher and his colleagues made available on the Open Science Framework examined 426 studies on 72,063 subjects and, quote, found little evidence that changes in implicit bias mediate changes in explicit bias or behavior. Therefore, five, the IAT doesn't predict prejudicial behavior at all. And finally, one last study from Frederick Oswald and associates published in the prestigious Journal of Personality and Social Psychology concluded that the IAT provides little insight into who will discriminate against whom.

0:09:37 Michael: So even if we concede that surely we all have some prejudicial attitudes, which is probably true, so what? I mean, if you don't act on them, and if you're consciously trying to do the right thing, which I think most people are, I think, you know, since the civil rights movement and then the women's rights movement, now the gay rights movement, I think we're all pretty sensitized, know, to the point where, you know, even a pro like Bill Maher slips up and uses the n-word, you know, and he's just called on the carpet, even though there's no way Bill Maer is a racist, it would just be so unfair to call him that. You know, that kind of overt public display of how sensitive we all are to these things shows that even if we are subconsciously like this, most of us most of the time are trying to do the right thing. So, so that's my attitude. That's my feeling about that, I guess.

0:10:27 Thomas: It. It looks like I'll have to look more into that and await your column. Sounds interesting. So that's something to look into. I just was curious what you meant by that. And yeah, and I would certainly agree that there may be difficulties in implicit bias. And I am more in favor of policies that I think make sense no matter what. Like, for example, just to take a small example, dealing with resumes without looking at names would be a good idea. You know, stuff like that, where there's been a demonstration, there's multiple demonstrations of how people with various names, like obviously female names or names of certain ethnicity, that the same resume is treated differently. Things like that that are, you know, doing a kind of a blind review would be beneficial for everybody. And there's the great example of the, what is it, the orchestra where they started doing, yeah, yeah.

0:11:05 Michael: Yeah. Yeah. Put him behind a screen and then.

0:11:19 Thomas: Like stuff like that. I mean, that seems pretty non-controversial to me. I mean, I would be interested in that because it seems like that's a good way to ensure that talent or skill is the primary motivator. But what I think is dangerous is there are a lot of people who think that things are completely... There are a lot of, and I have to say, people who have the most privilege tend to be white male people who believe that the status quo is fine and that they're already being neutral with respect to this. And I think that's dangerous because the person who's reviewing resumes and thinking they're totally neutral about it is going to be the one who's going to be most blind to their mistakes. And there are a lot of people who are resisting simple measures to try to improve equity on the grounds that everything's already equal.

0:12:07 Michael: Yeah, I asked Lawrence Krauss about this, and he said at the University of Arizona, where he teaches in Phoenix, or Arizona State, I guess it is ASU. Yeah. You know, the dean has said, you know, given equal in it for a job and, you know, one's white and one's a minority, hire the minority, or one's male, the other's female, hire the female. So it's not prejudice against somebody so much as, you know, it could go either way. So why not have it go in one direction? Again, I guess part of our historical correction for the wrongs of the past is the idea there. But I do find troubling is, like, when I hear stories from women in science who say that there's still prejudice in hiring women in labs to work in science labs, for example, but even when it's women doing the hiring, and maybe the stuff on the IAT is really real.

0:12:59 Michael: And even women don't want to hire other women, even liberal women. But I just can't help but think, come on, really? I mean, you know, behind closed doors, maybe maybe it's not even conscious. They're not they're not thinking I want to hire the dude, that would be discouraging if that was true.

0:13:15 Thomas: We'll put, I guess, a pin on that and I'll do more research on it and I'll wait your column.

0:13:21 Michael: Source for this, I think, is Carol Tavris, my friend. She's super fair about these things. She's very sensitive to discriminations and stuff. She's also super sensitive about bad science. And there's a lot of bad science and social science, as we've realized in the last couple of years.

0:13:23 Thomas: Okay. Hmm. Yeah. Well, let's talk about Evergreen then. I think maybe I'll look to her work and that's, thanks for that answer. That works. About Evergreen. There's So a lot to say there. First of all, I think the biggest thing is if your original question toward me was, you know, like, what do I think of this when it's the liberals eating their own. Bret Weinstein, by his own words, is a progressive guy. I think I think he said he was might have been a Bernie voter.

0:13:55 Michael: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

0:14:02 Thomas: So I think my response to that is, first off, I so I did I did an episode on this. It's a complicated issue. I certainly I called out the protesters for any wrongdoing, any illegal acts. But some people say I didn't go far enough in that. And And I'm kind of sensitive to that because a lot of the protests were pretty, were pretty obnoxious. We're very angry and all that, but I'm sort of forced to, to look at the situation this way when two sides are wrong, you know, what do you do? Because when I look, did you, I take it, you've looked at the original email exchange that, that Bret did.

0:14:39 Thomas: And, and I also, the other big problem with this is how misrepresented it's, it is in in the media, and how one-sided it is. Because these protests didn't... The popular conception prior to my episode, I found, was Bret wrote an email saying, hey, we shouldn't force people off campus. And then a bunch of people of color exploded and rioted. When really, there had been demonstrations for almost two years on the campus. There was a growing feeling of frustration that It all began with, in Olympia, I I think it was two black people were killed by the police, or one was and one was injured. And so there's this incident where there were demonstrations against the police and there was racial tension. And then there was a series of incidents by the school police that students viewed as racist.

0:14:39 Michael: Yeah. Oh, yeah.

0:15:29 Thomas: And not going to sit here and say I can adjudicate all those. I mean, there's a lot going on in a campus that I don't know. But there was a lot of background that was ignored. And the fact is, look at the timing of the protests. I mean, Bret's letter,

0:15:45 Michael: It was like a month before, right?

0:15:46 Thomas: Yeah, yeah. His original letter was on the March 15th. And then the protests of his classroom were far later. They're almost, I think, let's see, they were two months later, May 23rd. And the thing is, like, what I don't know is, as skeptics, you and I, as skeptical, I think it's difficult to sit here, get one person's side of the story, which, by the way, involves a lot of, like faculty politics and stuff. Like he has a lot in his interviews, He talks a lot about, oh, I have a history with such and such member. I can't remember her name, but she's a person of color who was behind a lot of these.

0:16:27 Michael: Yeah. Yeah.

0:16:28 Thomas: And, you know, he talks about a history there. You and I don't know what that is. He says the president has been showing preference for her. You andI don'tknowthat. Like, we're getting one guy's word for this. And by the way, a lotof the students said that he said racist stuff on social media. I don't—maybe they're wrong. Maybe they're right. You and I don't know. A lot of people have gone crazy over something that we can't really answer unless we get more representation from the other side, I think.

0:16:57 Michael: Yeah. Well, okay. Well, how come we haven't heard from the other side? I mean, where

0:17:01 Thomas: Well, and that's another aspect of the thing that I attacked. And sorry, because I covered this a lot. I have a lot to say on it. Look at the kind of inequality in the means there. Because one side is a lot of angry 19, 1920 year olds. And I get a lot of them yelled that it doesn't look pleasant on video. And then the other side is someone who has access to a massive wealth of media, of mostly conservative media, as you said, who want to push his agenda. I think it was, what do you think about him going on Tucker Carlson? And now I know you're more libertarians, so you probably may be a little more sympathetic to, I don't know, Fox News than I would be, but right.

0:17:40 Michael: Oh, I mean as he's pointed out several times, they came to him. He didn't seek out conservative media. You know, they were calling him when they first heard about it. And he, you know, he sort of was hand-wringing about it because he doesn't like Fox News any more than you or whoever. But but they were the only source. And then since then, you appeared on Dave Rubin and then, you know. Two and a half hours on Joe Rogan where he really lays it out. And and it's not like Bret's becoming a conservative or even a centrist, not even close. I mean, he's still part.

0:18:04 Thomas: Yeah. That's not Really, really what I'm worried about, to be honest. Here's the analogy I would like to make, because I know there are people listening who don't get why I have such a problem with him going on Tucker Carlson. I just like to paint a little analogy. Can you imagine if a biologist who was wronged went on a Christian radio show with a clear agenda to disprove evolution and started giving little snippets of things about, "Well, yeah, in biology, there's this problem here. Era. We don't know exactly how this works." And played to the obvious bias of the show, of the net, whatever it is, to disprove something. Because Tucker Carlson has an ongoing segment called Campus Craziness. He has an agenda to misrepresent things in order to give conservatives an enemy in liberals on campuses.

0:19:03 Thomas: And it's just so irresponsible to me. And many of the faculty faculty at Evergreen wrote a letter and have posted and have talked about the fact that, look, once he went on Fox News, we've got all kinds of white supremacists threatening us. We've got, I mean, if you talk about taking people's word for it, we got Bret's word, sure, but we've also got a lot of faculty on the other side who's, and I can give you these sources, who are saying, like, we started getting death threats after this. Like, people are, that's a different thing.

So, So that happened, too. But but also they said, the staff of color have received multiple threats like death threats ever since that Tucker Carlson thing. And he allowed Tucker Carlson to start it off with white people must leave the campus or else. And I had a lot of people, by the way, who said, oh, he might not have heard that intro. Well, he just went back on Tucker Carlson two days ago. So you would think that would have been a time where I'm sure he saw his original interview. Where he could have corrected some misconceptions about that.

0:19:30 Michael: Well, they get that one job called up.

0:19:56 Michael: Yeah. Well, of course, you only get five minutes. So I think you got even less than that the other night, night. But, uh, but again, where's the other, it's not like Bret was famous or something. I, I never heard of him until this happened. No one had heard of him, um, and, you know, now he's all over the place. Okay, so, you know, any of those other professors, they could do the same thing.

0:20:22 Michael: Uh, they it doesn't, well, but why but

0:20:22 Thomas: But it doesn't sell. That's the point. I mean, conservatives, like you said yourself, I mean conservatives have an agenda to show, hey, here's a progressive who's willing to trash his own side because of what happened. So that sells. But trying to get the other side, that doesn't cell. Nobody's interested in that.

0:20:38 Michael: Why Isn't Rachel Maddow calling either Bret or one of his colleagues at the other side, or or Anderson Cooper, or, you know, somebody who's neutral like that, to get the real story? I mean, yeah, you're the only one I've heard that's asked for, you know, what's the other side. Maybe Dave Rubin and Joe Rogan have tried to get other people there, I don't know. Uh, but yeah, I'm sure there's another side. It'd be interesting to know what those professors actually say about him.

But I mean, Bret just, he just drips with integrity. I mean, you listen to the guy, he could not be, be clearer in his positions and descriptions of what happened.

And, you know, all on the, uh, Dave Rubin show, he talked about the incident back when he was an undergraduate at Penn, you know, with these African-American women that were, you know, hired to do lap dances or whatever at one of these frat parties, and he, you know, disgustedly got up and left and wish he'd stayed because he was so offended by this and objected to it. And that, that launched his sort of personal career again, fighting racism and bigotry and so on.

0:21:39 Michael: I mean, all that's just incredible. It's like if you're saying he's a racist, you've gone off the rails. You've lost your mind.

0:21:46 Thomas: Maybe. Look, I haven't called him a racist on my show. And no, no, I know. Let me answer that, though. So I think that it's possible a lot of these protesters are overreacting. I think that's certainly possible. I don't know. I do. I Think my opinion is that the president reacted pretty well. He handled this well. I know a lot Of people disagree with me, but I just saw today or yesterday, he gave an interview where he said, yeah, there were some of the protesters I was really disappointed by, and we're going to be looking into disciplining them. So that may may happen. But I want to give an alternative reading of this first email, maybe put a little context on it. So you ask, like, how could you call this guy a racist? I get it. But also doing something good along the lines of race, you know, 20 years ago or whatever, and being an ally, that's great. And I do think he should get credit for that.

0:21:51 Michael: Don't you. I mean these students.

0:22:37 Thomas: But it doesn't mean that he can just do something like this email he sent and be fine, fine. This was a really insulting email, and I'll try to give you my point of view on this, and you can react. So they decided to reverse the Day of Presence and the Day of Absence, everybody knows the story by now, but to put context on this, this is in the wake of, and actually I pulled up an article that was written about this structure change before all of this madness happened, so it's kind of, I mean, you can, I'll give, give anyone the source, it's it's from the student newspaper. You can take it however you want, but it was before the whole thing exploded. So at the very least, you can see that they're not trying to retroactively justify it or anything.

But what the reasoning was, was, hey, here's the deal. This election was horrible. And I would hope that you could at least agree on that. This was horrible when leaders of the KKK endorsed Donald Trump and when white supremacists in the alt-right have been empowered throughout all this, this. And with the campus police allegedly, you know, mishandling some people of color situations there, and with the shooting that happened, they decided on this campus, let's reverse this Day of Absence.

0:22:54 Michael: Yeah. Yeah,

0:23:51 Thomas: As a show of solidarity, let's have white people be the ones who do the Day of Absence. There'll maybe be, there'll be some events off campus, et cetera. It's something that the committee decided to do that was in charge of this, for then Bret Weinstein to see this email, which, by the way, said voluntary, it's all voluntary. There's no conformer else to this. You can look at the original email, which mysteriously Rubin didn't really reference the wording of the original email. He just referenced the reply. And then you, from that perspective, you see Bret talk about, you know, there's a huge, I'll read the paragraph. There's a huge difference between a group or coalition deciding to themselves from a shared space in order to highlight the vital and underappreciated roles, the themes of the play, whatever, and and And a group or coalition encouraging another group to go away.

0:24:44 Thomas: The first is a forceful call to consciousness. The second is a show of force and an act of oppression in and of itself. So from another angle, to give another view on this, it really looks to me like, and you even heard in the Rubin interview, he said that his potential problem with the Day of Absence, how it was before, is that it kind of goes unnoticed, like it doesn't even, what did he say? He said, oh, when it's a whole town, then the town notices because the people of color are crucial to the town. But because it's such a small campus, people of colour aren't really crucial to it. It was a weird thing for him to say. And because of that, it almost looks as though he's fine with this protest, with this day of absence, when people of honour just leave and he doesn't have to care about it. But if he has to do anything, if he's inconvenienced in any way, then all of a sudden it's a big deal.

0:25:31 Thomas: And he hasto send a letter to the entire staff and faculty, which he knew would include a a lot of students who were in faculty positions, just deciding that he's right about this and everybody else is wrong. What do you think about that?

0:25:44 Michael: I guess it depends on what's meant by a group or coalition encouraging another group to go away, away. So encouraging is not forcing, clearly, uh, but I guess it would be, what, what, what are the consequences if you don't follow the encouraged suggestion to stay away, which he clearly said he wasn't, um, I mean, if there was a, you know, a day without a Black or day without a Mexican or whatever that they'd done in the past, and some of them in that group come to campus us anyway, you know, I can't imagine there'd be any consequences socially or culturally or whatever. So, I I guess I guess we maybe

0:26:21 Thomas: Well, I don't, you can't, I could, I could imagine that. You don't think that they would be looked at as kind of a, kind of a traitor in a way?

0:26:28 Michael: Maybe, you know, maybe that's what Bret meant, you know, that, uh, the feeling would be if you show up, you know, you're, you're really not an ally in civil rights, and yeah

0:26:37 Thomas: Yeah. Well, let me ask you this. Is that unfair? Is it unfair to say, and given the wake of this election, Trump's election, given the, the, by the the way, another element to this story is there were white power posters that were posted around the campus. I have that in the timeline. Tied to this racist group that I don't think they were part of the school or anything, but they had gained access to the campus and posted these. Is it really that unreasonable to say, hey, let's reach out here as white people. Let's do this. Let's do a day of absence. They've done a day of absence, they've left the campus for 30 or 40 years, this tradition goes back. How about we do it once? Is it that big of a deal?

0:27:16 Michael: No probably not, no, not a big deal unless, I guess, you make it a big, big deal. And I think that's what Bret did. I think he drew a line in the sand and said, you know what, that's enough of this. And, and I don't think it was because he's white. I mean, he's so sensitive about these things, I can't imagine that's where he was thinking. Uh, but that instead it's along the lines of what concerns me, that is this, this sort of, um, segregation of society instead of integrating society. In other words, it's sort of a throwback to the, uh, 1950s black and white drinking fountains. I mean, we see this, you know, black only graduation at Harvard College, and these black only or what well, not white only just black only dorms, or, you know, there's a lot of these segregated, uh, movements now on college campuses. And to me, it seems like, you know, pulling back to take the longer picture, that the, the idea of moving toward a, you know, a a raceless society, or a race blind society, that's a step in the wrong direction.

0:28:18 Michael: I mean, we're not there yet anyway, but, but this is to me, it sort of forces people to think of other individuals as members of groups, which is what my objection is to identity politics in general, is that why do we keep pigeonholing people into these groups? I thought the whole point of the civil rights movement was to be treated as a, as an individual that is judged by the content of your character, not the color of your skin. And my guess is Bret just decided to draw the line in the sand, you know, this has gone too far. Now, he hasn't, he hasn't said it like I just said it, but, you know, that that would be the reason I would object to it anyway. Yeah.

0:28:55 Thomas: Well, but let's look at this event, because this is a day-of-absence. There's also another component which is a Day of Presence. So what they do is they do the day-off of absence, and then the second day of it is everybody comes together, and they have seminars for everybody that are kind of more focused to everybody. So the point of the Day of absences as I'm seeing here in the planning for the programming, is there are different concerns for people of color and for people who can pretty much identify as white. I mean, is that something you, I mean, there are difference ways that you might want to be an ally. Like, there's going to be different ways that I might want behave versus a person of color, and therefore there can be different targeted programming for each of us. But I like that there's also the Day of Presence, where all everybody joins together and they have seminars for everybody. Does that seem unreasonable?

0:29:44 Michael: No, of course, when you say it that that way, it doesn't. But, but again, it's like, why are we doing this in the first place? And, and in all places, Evergreen, one of the most liberal, tolerant communities, these supposedly, we're told, campuses in the country. I mean, if you're going to fight something, you know, why not Richard Spencer and the alt-right, or the 1488ers? Do you know about the 1488ers?

0:30:10 Thomas: No. What's that?

0:30:11 Michael: The guy named David Lane, who's a far right, alt-right kind of guy. And the 1488 moniker comes from Lane's 14 word credo, which reads, quote, "We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children." Children, 14 words, the 88 stands for the eighth letter of the alphabet, H H, Heil Hitler, um, and uh, so I was just writing about this this morning because I just wrote an op-ed about Megyn Kelly featuring, um, the odious Alex Jones on national Television this Sunday, it's like, well, who's next? You know, you're gonna interview Richard Spencer and and and this David Lane and his 1488 credo. And, you know, under the guise of, you know, shining a light on them, you know, you've given them national exposure. In other words, of the thing, the kinds of things that that students at Evergreen could be concerned about, surely Bret Weinstein as a possible racist has to be way down the list compared to obvious racists like Richard Spencer and this David Lane character. Care.

0:30:30 Thomas: Oh, right. Yeah. Yeah, well, yeah, but what are they going to do about that on their campus? I mean, they're responding to their environment.

0:31:17 Michael: Yeah, That's right. What are they going to do? All right. So I think some of this is driven by the fact that it's local and easy. It's like you get up in your dorm room in the morning. What am I going to doing? I'm morally outraged about racism. You know, I can't go to Washington or Texas or wherever. But that that bastard, that racist professor Weinstein said that, let's go get him. And to me it just seems so misguided, uh, again, if you know, Bret Weinstein, if you think he's a racist, that this is the guy that would stand next to you marching in his civil rights, well,

0:31:43 Thomas: Well, look, if anyone is saying, which I haven't heard anybody say this, but if any of these students are saying that he's the biggest racist in the country, sure, I mean I'm going to agree with you, but I think there might might be a bit of a blind spot here. And I think that Bret has a blind spot, and I think a lot of people are looking at this in a blind way. Because especially, let me just go back to the email, because this really is the point of disagreement here. This is the response email. It's just one paragraph from Rashida, Rashida Love, who was, I guess, in charge of this. No matter who you are, participation is and always has been a choice.

Every year there are people of color and white people who choose not to participate for various reasons. We are are asking people to register because space is limited. No one is being forced to attend either event. There are, however, many people in our campus community who believe it worthy and to dedicate eight hours of their lives to engaging conversation around racism, equity, and inclusion. There's no need for a formal protest.

0:31:51 Michael: No, they're not saying that, they're Not

0:32:46 Thomas: You and others are free to choose otherwise. So what they're reacting to is not, okay, this guy, Bret, is the biggest racist and he's a bigger problem than Richard Spencer or whatever. It's the fact that if you look at it from the point of view that this committee put a lot of time into this. They wanted to do something special in this year because of the election, the things I laid out, the racial tensions that had been rising, the protests they've been having.

They want to do some special. They put a lot of thought into it. They decided on this. And this is why people refer to this as like a white-splaining kind of thing. Somebody like Bret Weinstein in a position of power used his power to just say in a in a flippant email, no, ever, all of your thought about this is wrong, like you're wrong about all this, everything you've decided. And he has, he has that position of power to be able to just do that. And the the Rashida Love person said, hey, if you want to talk about this, let's have a meeting, you know, like we can talk about it. And and it's it's from that angle that it it looks really insensitive. And and this, it isn't just this email, by the way.

There's another email from earlier where he rejects the equity program that students of color and faculty of color put a ton of work into to try to create, this equity program for hiring so that they would have more people of color on campus. And he's just decided that he has the authority to send out these emails to all faculty and all staff lists rejecting it. And it looks like, hey, man, you're just using your power.

0:34:20 Thomas: And by the way, going on Fox News is part of this. You're using your immense power and the immense power that white people have in the media and elsewhere to just declare that we're all wrong in how we've been thinking about this.

0:34:33 Michael: Yeah, maybe, I don't know. At this point I guess you'd have to ask Bret himself directly. Maybe you can get him on a show. He's a little tight for bandwidth now in time. I'm sure, but but you you know, time is, got plenty of time. So maybe this summer he'll come on your show. I would certainly suggest you do so, uh, to give an answer to that question. Or maybe you could have one of the other professors or somebody that supported that, you know?

0:34:42 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah, I've reached out. I think the timing is bad. I haven't reached out to Bret because because I know he's swamped. Also, my thinking was like, Bret's gotten to tell his side of the story. I would love to have somebody to tell the other side, but go on. I finished.

0:35:08 Michael: Yeah. Yeah. Well, but just asking that question, I mean, it was voluntary. It, you know, when you read it, it doesn't sound that troublesome and it, you knows, it's two months, whatever it was that before all this erupted in In any case, why? I don't know what his answer would be to that.

0:35:13 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah. Mm-hmm. Yeah, I would like to know. I suspect there could be information we're not privy to, you know?

0:35:29 Michael: But again, this larger thing that sort of politics, classifying people by race and ethnicity and all that stuff, to me it seems the wrong direction that we should be taking as a society. Do you not agree?

0:35:44 Thomas: Well, I think that case by case, I might have to look at it. I mean, when it comes to, if we look at this Day of Presence, Day of Absence, seems totally reasonable to me. If we look at, I don't know, I'd have to look more into, you know, if you're segregating graduations for some reason, I admit that sounds like a bad idea to me, I don't what the purpose behind it was.

0:35:45 Michael: Yeah, these black-only dorms. I mean, if you had a white-only dorm, you know, there'd be a shitstorm. You know, you just can't do that. But a black-only –

0:36:09 Thomas: Hmm. Well, but, okay, but in general there is a lot of that reaction. Well what if this were white people? There's a lot of that reaction and I just don't think you can ignore historical context in that way.

0:36:24 Michael: Yes, that's right. I mean as Ice Cube told Bill Maher this weekend, that's our word and You can't have it back. Okay. Well, I understand that. I get that. I mean it would be nice if that word weren't so radioactive and it just quit and it just lost its power but it still has the power such that, you you know, a white guy can't use it. Some comedian had a riff about this, like when a black can use the N word, when a Hispanic can use the N-word, and when a white can use N-Word. And it was like, if the white guy is abducted by aliens and taken to Mars, he still can't us it.

0:36:29 Thomas: Yeah.

0:36:38 Thomas: Well,

0:36:58 Michael: So I thought that was pretty telling, you know. It'd be great, and this may not happen in our lifetime, if that word lost all of its power because, you now, we don't care about race anymore. Obviously, we're not there. My wife's from Germany, by the way. She just moved here three years ago to be with me, if you can believe that. And she's just been stunned by how much the subject of race comes up in American culture, you know, every night on the news, every day in the newspaper. I mean, just conversations, dinner table conversations, just everywhere. It's incredible. Incredible, right,

0:37:31 Thomas: It's a big thing in our society. I think I think that's what's interesting about the U.S. and I'm not an expert on this, but it's like when you watch the Olympics, you know, isn't it weird how for almost every other country you could see the team and you can identify the country based on the you know how the person looks. And then you see the U.S. and it's like, who knows? We're a melting pot. You know, we've got everybody.

0:37:53 Thomas: And that's really cool. But I think it presents problems that a lot of other places in the world, I mean, tiny countries who are mostly one ethnicity, I don't think they've had to grasp, and I don't mean to say Germany's a tiny, I just mean in general, a lot of countries haven't had to grasp this, or if they, or they've had such a strong majority stranglehold that, you know, the minority groups haven't even gotten to be a strong vocal presence. I don't know.

0:37:49 Michael: Right, Well,

0:38:19 Thomas: But, yeah.

0:38:19 Michael: They're, they're getting some of that now with um Angela Merkel, Angela Merkel allowing in uh so many people from Turkey, the immigrants that are Islamic, um, and you know now there's issues so they're having their own issues now with other things, um, but uh, and you know, again, I'm sort of a long-term optimist, you know, I, I you know, maybe it, maybe it's going to be the Star Trekking in 23rd century before we're past all this. I don't know. It'd be nice.

0:38:44 Thomas: Yeah. Well, to answer your question again, Yeah, I'm sympathetic to the fact that oftentimes we look at the Middle East in this way, too. There will be people who will just say, well, naturally, all these different ethnic groups can't exist in one state. You need the Kurds to have their own state, and you need the Sunnis to have their own state. And you need the Shia to have it. And it's like, really? There's no way that segregation is really the only way this is going to work?

And I think that that is sad, and that's harmful, and that's bad. I agree with you. And I don't think that segregation is a good long-term plan, but I also, I need to take this on a case-by-case basis because what I've learned about all this stuff is you've got so many people with an agenda either way, you know, the agenda goes both ways, but you've got so many people wanting to paint their storyline and use the facts to further their agenda that you just got to take this case-by-case. And, I guess, I want to try to pin you on this. Do you at least see why there's a concern with promoting Bret's one-sided view of all this? And to answer your question before of why haven't other publications, newspapers, whatever networks gone after this, is it possible they've looked at this as like, well, this is one guy giving his side of some inter-office drama. We don't know. There's not enough journalism there to go do it. Yeah,

0:39:39 Michael: Yeah, maybe. But now it's such a national story. I mean, he's pretty famous. I would think by now someone like a CNN would say, well, maybe Bret's not the story, but the story behind Bret's the story or how he became who he is now is a story. I would thank somebody would glom onto that. Let's find out what's really going on there rather than the obvious one-sided one that Tucker made it look like. Like, I mean, Joe Rogan's, you know, it's two and a half hours, but, you know, he's not he's doing something different than, say, and I think

0:40:36 Thomas: He's just not a great interviewer to me. I mean, whatever. But yeah, yeah.

0:40:40 Michael: He's a great conversationalist, but he's he's not an Anderson Cooper trying to press and get it.

0:40:43 Thomas: Right, right, right. I would agree with that. And I like Joe Rogan. I just don't, yeah, I don't look to him for like a good balanced view of stuff. But I think just another thing I wanted to bring up with with regards to Evergreen in terms of your original tweet where you said this is a game changer. This has got to be one of the most progressive campuses in the country. And so to to look at what's happening there with a progressive president, by the way, who you can love him or hate him, he is enabling a lot of this. And I think, I have a pretty positive view of the president there, but I still would say that he is labeling a lot. I mean, he could have clamped down on these protesters.

0:40:45 Michael: Yeah, totally. Absolutely.

0:41:23 Thomas: And so, to take this evergreen occurrences, furthermore, to take a Fox News version of it, which is just fiction, I mean, it's based on a little bit of fact, but it's completely fiction. There wasn't, it wasn't like a hostage situation. It wasn't any of that. I mean so much of the story was overblown. To take that and to to paint all college campuses with that, I think is pretty useless. I mean it's one data point.

0:41:23 Michael: So Absolutely, of course. But but but again, it's not it's not Fox News painting. I mean it's Bret himself. It's his own words. So if there's another set of words that's it that contradicts him or shows he's wrong or misinterpreting things. Well, let's hear it.

0:41:59 Thomas: Well, sure, I'm doing my best, but like I said, I means it doesn't sell. People aren't,

0:42:02 Michael: But I think you're right. I think, you know, my guess from the students I know at Chapman University where I teach, you know, we never see any of this kind of stuff on our campus. And my guess is even at Evergreen, what do they got, 4,000 students or something? You know, if we see 200 of them marching, well, where's the other 3,800? You know, well they're probably just in their dorm studying and couldn't care less about any of this. That's entirely possible. And that, you know, we're being polled like everyone else is by the media's grabbing headline grabber. You know you wait till you click this. Wait till you see what they did next at Evergreen. I'm clicking. I have to admit it's compelling. You know it's hard.

0:42:10 Thomas: Yeah, yeah. Four or five, yeah? Exactly.

0:42:37 Thomas: Yeah, well, it's a victim story that I think, and look, again, there was certainly plenty of wrongdoing happening. I think a lot of the students were wrong. I totally do. But I think that the danger is allowing that to be painted as a campus takeover, as Tucker did. And furthermore, I will say, with regard to getting coverage from the other side, I think, I think I, I don't know if you'll agree with this or not, but you know, it might be a good idea for someone like, uh, uh who, you know the NBC, MSNBC, I already forget her name, because Rachel Maddow, I, don't actually watch that stuff, um, but I think it would make sense for people to latch on to this, because let me tell you, I think that liberals are ignoring a lot of Fox News at at their peril.

And I certainly am that because I find 95% of it to be nonsense, so I ignore it. But I think it's important to look at what's going on over there. The way that Fox News is apologizing and distracting from Trump's horrendous character and agenda and everything is to cast suspicion students and progressives as insane people And that they're taking over colleges across the country and all this. The segment is, side note, really interesting segment happened right after

0:43:15 Michael: Rachel.

0:44:01 Thomas: Bret Weinstein's second Tucker Carlson appearance, where Tucker Carlton had a lawyer on who was fighting against some of this new legislation that Republicans are bringing in to like protect, yeah, protect. It was hilarious, but also really sad because Tucker Carlson was in his own world and the other guy was in another world. And Tucker Carlson was like, look, why aren't you addressing this takeover of every college campus that's happening? And the guy's like, well, it's not really happening like that. So I think it would be a good idea for Rachel Maddow or anyone else who considers themselves like a lefty, I guess, to take on this narrative and to say, look, yes, there is wrongdoing on campuses. Sure, there's students going too far, but look at how much we don't see, which is just campuses being campuses. Like all day long, thousands of colleges are just being colleges and doing normal stuff. There's no takeover, you know? So I Think you might be right about that.

0:44:12 Michael: Yeah.

0:44:56 Michael: Yeah, that's right. I mean it's like the media does not go to a country where there is no civil war or civil strife, on the street corner with a camera crew going, "Another day without a," without a revolution, you know, they only go to where the action is, of course. And well, Rachel would be great on this because she, I do watch her show fairly often, and it's heavily researched. I mean, she's just data after data, statistics, charts, graphs. She's obviously got a huge team of people looking stuff up, so they would be, you know, perfect to do this. I mean, Bret, I don't know what Bret's schedule is. I mean, he, he should, he should get a publicist and get him out there on more stuff. And that would be perfect to do it.

0:45:02 Thomas: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah.

0:45:33 Thomas: Well, I'm open to talking to him. We'll see how that goes, but, but I can't help. I mean, his brother also had a weird tweet. I'm like, I can't help but think like there there's, there's a bit of a motive behind this, but I think we'll have to leave this aside.

0:45:36 Michael: Yeah, yeah. So, Well, his brother, his mother works for Peter Thiel, the whatever Peter Thiel's investment capital investment company is. I forget the name of it, but that's what Bret's brother does. He works for, you know, one of the biggest billionaires in the world. It's kind of fun. You know, maybe Bret's going to, you know, he set up a Patreon page. Maybe he's going to do that. You know, I don't know if it was you or somebody else mentioned how much money some of these people can make on Patreon. And I thought I think I at the time thought you must have misspoke since looked it up. And it's like this this Jordan Peterson guy makes like forty five thousand dollars a month.

0:45:48 Thomas: Yeah, yeah.

0:46:14 Thomas: No. Yeah, he got up to 45. Oh my God.

0:46:23 Michael: Forty five thousand dollars a month, you know, that's I mean, he's not going to come close to that ever as a college.

0:46:27 Thomas: Exactly. Well. Okay. And And since you brought it up, I just want to correct one thing because the easiest accusation that people make toward me on this is, oh, just jealous of their success. Like, okay, I am concerned with the fact that if you get up like Jordan Peterson and make a gigantic stir about a nothing issue that you and I talked about last time, which is trans pronouns, they never come up, it's not a big deal. And as a result of that, he makes, according to you now, up to $45,000 a month because of that hatred that he wasn't making before, that's problematic to me. You know whose Patreon I've never complained about is Sam Harris. I disagree with him all the time. Guy makes a ton on Patreon. I don't care. I'm not jealous of people making money. I'm worried about what that says about the state of our society when someone like Jordan B.

0:47:15 Thomas: Peterson can make so much money when the substance of what he's doing is complaining about trans people in a way that I find really, really offensive. But anyway, yeah, but he's always been making videos. He's been making videos and his Patreon was nothing until this and now it's exploded.

0:47:25 Michael: Yeah, I'm not sure that's what people are paying for. Apparently makes videos. I haven't seen any of them. I see Yeah, I don't know. Well, it's not the Coke brothers.

0:47:39 Thomas: Yeah, yeah. And then the other thing I just wanted to touch on before we try to, I want to move on to the other topic because it's, yeah they're both huge, but have to call out what he said and what you echoed about Bret that he's worried about his job and all that. The president just said that there's has been no disciplinary action taken against Bret Weinstein and there won't be. He has his job. He's exploiting that to, again, paint a victim narrative. And because Tucker Carlson would love him to, he has his job. There's no concern. According to the campus, by the way, he was on campus the other day. He denies it, but he was there. He was safe. They've said he's safe now. They said there's no action taken again. So it's a he said, he said or they said. And I think that we can't just unskeptically accept one side of this.

0:47:44 Michael: Oh, Yeah, Yeah, yeah.

0:48:25 Michael: That's Pretty weird. If he said, they say he was just here on campus the other day, and he says, I was not on campus, then okay, somebody's lying. There's Something's I

0:48:33 Thomas: And it might be the, it might be the campus. I don't know. But, but it's like, I think that as a skeptic community, aren't we allowing ourselves and some people to, yeah, to just go to just trust the one person. And speaking of, let's go over to our other topic, which is the gender studies paper. Now I'll just try to, you know, I talk a lot. I'll try to let you talk more on this this because I want to know your perspective on this because you wrote the, the editor's note on the first one. You also wrote another note on the, on Sokal's response, which that response was fascinating. Do you want to take us through what you thought about the first article of the hoax, and then maybe what

0:48:35 Michael: Don't t know. Yeah, Maybe, yeah, yeah, maybe, yeah. Yeah, Yeah, Sure,

0:49:10 Thomas: You think in light of Sokal response?

0:49:11 Michael: Yeah, Yeah, so, uh you know, I've known Pete Boghossian for many years, and and he's a he's good friend, so when he told me he was doing this, I thought, okay, well, let's see. Uh And then when he was published and he wanted to write something, and and he asked if Skeptic would like to publish the expose of those, I thought, yeah, sure, why not, because I liked the original Alan Sokal hoax back in the 90s, 96, I think it was, or 94, whatever it was. And I thought it was effective in what it did in exposing the obscurantism of postmodern lit crit studies when applied to physics, which was his field. And at the time, it was pretty controversial. And he got hammered by a lot of people. But interestingly, he's come down as sort sort of the wise old sage of hoaxers, such that when he offered to do a kind of a reflective piece for us, I accepted it before I even knew what he was going to say.

0:50:08 Michael: And it turned out he was a little critical of Pete. And and I thought, well, that's that's OK. That's fine. I mean, just, you know, that's his opinion. That's his opinion. And so we published exactly what he said, I didn't change the wording at all. And, and I think, I think I agree with this point that none of these hoaxes really prove that much about anything, but they at least draw our attention to potential problems. Now, I don't care about the journal situation. I, as I mentioned in my longer piece about it, that I actually kind of, as a, as journal, as magazine publisher and an editor, you know, I'm sympathetic that, you know, it's hard to do these things, it takes a lot of work, it would be easy for things like this to slip through the cracks without my noticing and then be embarrassed later. So I'm not inclined to try to embarrass editors or journals or publications, that that to me is not really the issue. I would, it wouldn't matter to me if it was

0:50:21 Thomas: No,

0:51:06 Michael: Published in the Onion or the Journal of Irreproducible Results that gives out the Ignoble Prizes every year. To me, it's just really what it highlights is how difficult it is to tell the difference between a so-called real article and a fake article, which was So-call's original purpose behind his, you know, Transgressing the Boundaries article. You can't tell, because it's so hard to know what any of this really means. And I think it's different, this is the point he made back in the 90s, was that it's different than, say, you and I reading a quantum physics paper, which is going to be loaded with stuff we don't understand. It's different than that because, you know, in a lit quick journal, presumably we should be able to understand if we know what the words mean. But it goes beyond just the words or jargon, technical jargon of a field.

0:51:56 Michael: And to that extent, I think these kind of hoaxes at least call our attention to, well, what's going on in these, you know, feminist studies, gender studies, race studies, cultural studies type journals when, like the one I cited was the feminist glaciology paper, which I'm still, even though I checked with the university and they said it's real, I still have a feeling somebody's going to come out and go, oh, it was just a hoax. No, it's not.

0:52:22 Thomas: It's not. It's a, it's, did you watch the talk on it?

0:52:26 Michael: No, I didn't know there was

0:52:27 Thomas: No. There's a talk on It. I would encourage you to watch it because it's heartbreaking. Uh, so she, yes.

0:52:31 Michael: Oh, really? Oh, No.

0:52:33 Thomas: So she, please watch it. It's, it's, it's maybe 20 minutes. So, couple responses to that. So, uh thanks for laying that out. I think I see where you're coming from now. First off, the feminist glaciology thing, that was posted in not gender studies, not race studies, none of the things you mentioned. I believe the journal had to do with, well, so it's It's not, but it's not a hard science journal. It's a journal where they publish geography studies. It's about It says, peer-reviewed journal of choice for those wanting to know about the state of the art in all areas of human geography, research, philosophical,

0:52:33 Michael: I mean, heartbreaking. I Geography. It was a geography journal.

0:53:08 Thomas: Theoretical, thematic, methodological, or empirical. So, and the point of the feminist glaciology study, paper paper, was not to say, you here's some hard science. It was, and she brings up a good point in the talk. She says, you know, what's interesting about glaciers is that there was an argument about what caused, I think it was, was it either glaciers or something that they did? I don't know. There's some scientific question in the 1800s or whatever. And it was solved by whoever was the most manly. So there were like two of these geologists at the time who, like, they both had theories about, you know, something, some scientific question about glaciers. And the way they solved it in the eyes of the public was like, whoever was the bigger man, like the bigger adventurer, you know, they would kind of, you know, their point of view prevailed.

0:53:56 Michael: Yes.

0:53:57 Thomas: And she points out that for the longest time, women were not allowed to study glaciers, like they were forbidden from going out on these expeditions. And, and the point of it is just to highlight that a lot of our science has has been done with one, you know, demographic group represented. And, and it doesn't, it's a straw man to say, therefore all science is invalid, but it's, it is a concern. Like it's something that we should be concerned with if there may be a different way of looking at something or the, or, or by the way, just the fact that women were hardly allowed to do this science at all. That is something that's worth talking about.

0:54:16 Michael: Yes. Yeah.

0:54:35 Michael: Yeah, for sure. I mean, the story of Henrietta Levitt in astronomy, and and the so-called Harvard calculators, no, computers, the Harvard computers, which were were these women doing math, or more recently in the Hidden Figures film, which I just saw, about the NASA calculated women computers, mathematicians acting as computers. Yeah, okay, so that's all true. Yeah, right.

0:54:57 Thomas: And here's the heartbreaking part of it. And I, I would please, encourage you to watch this. In the end of this video, she talks about the how fact that she this paper, everybody misinterpreted it, and she got received death threats, rape threats, harassment. And she says, yes, watch this and get back at me later on. Because she says I was afraid. And she says, I was also afraid to even look afraid because I don't want people to think that they've gotten to me. And I don't want people too, to, to think that, they've you beaten me in this way or like, how should I react? But she says I was scared about this and, and like to see that video and to see what this glaciology paper was about, and then to have people still ridiculing it and encouraging the, you know, the reaction and spreading it in a negative way. Way. Like it really does make me sad. Like, it worries me. So, please watch that and maybe reconsider your thoughts on that if you don't

0:55:11 Michael: That's That's Really Oh God, I Think

0:55:57 Thomas: Mind.

0:55:57 Michael: This is the correct, "Glaciers, Gender, and Science: We Need More Stories of Ice" by M Jackson, yeah. It's A TEDx talk, and guess where the TEDx talk happened. At Middlebury. At Middlebury. Yeah. That's too Funny.

0:56:01 Thomas: Yeah. Yes. Oh, really? Oh, yeah, yeah. And here's the thing. I think there's probably some nonsense in that paper. I don't know. Like I'm not an expert. I'm just like, I'm going to read it. I'll read it later. I mean, I think there's some stuff where it's like, well, I don't really know what point she's making here, But there are some good points in it. And maybe it's 80% good points, 20% nonsense. Maybe it's 50-50. I don't know. But certainly the response it got was not nuanced.

0:56:11 Michael: Yeah. Okay.

0:56:30 Thomas: And her very harassment outlined the problem. I mean, there women face these challenges that men do not face when they write these things, and really makes me sad. I mean it, again, watch it, see what you think, let me know, but in terms of gender studies, I'm worried about was how unscientific this was. So I did a whole episode on this, and I actually talked to James, because I'm not friends with Pete Boghossian. We'll go into that later. But I am friends with James Lindsay. I've had him on the show a lot. I had him onto Talk About It. And we had a conversation about it. What is the most frustrating thing about this has been the goalpost moving, because the original article certainly made some strong claims about gender studies as a result of their paper. And then later on, and in the interview, they've moved the goal post now to starting a conversation. So they went from, you know, gender studies is bullshit. And this paper on the evidence, this paper confirms our belief that gender studies ist bullshit to, well, we started a conversation.

And that is troublesome to me. But also look how unscientific it is, because both Peter and James, and I think you just did now, have adjusted to where you're saying, okay, the paper doesn't, the hoax paper paper doesn't prove anything. But here's some other stuff that maybe proves this.

0:56:44 Michael: Okay. Okay.

0:57:49 Thomas: Well, let's have that then. The original article should have been, here's why we think gender studies is bunk. Let's post some papers. Let's look into them. Let's address it. You know, like that's how to scientifically answer this question, right? Well,

0:58:04 Michael: Yep. I, I'm not sure what you mean by, you know, the scientific way of addressing this. I mean, it wasn't a, I mean, the submission of a paper that gets accepted, is that scientific test? Well, I mean, Alan Sokal sort of outlined how they might have done it. Like, if they They would have had a hyper feminist ideology submitted to a journal in which, you know, they argue that hyper feminism leads to whatever climate change or something. You know, would it have been accepted? Probably not. I mean, that was I mean but they didn't do that. So you're right. It's not a test, not an experiment for sure.

0:58:19 Thomas: Hmm. Yeah.

0:58:40 Thomas: And look at how people latched onto this. Look at how your editor's note described it. You know, your original editor's notes. Look how Sam Harris described it he did not Sam Harris did not even in his podcast to roughly a million plus listeners or more by his own accounts a wide audience. He didn't even talk about the journal problem. Problem. It was 100% boasted as this shows why gender studies is nonsense. And that's so unskeptical and so unscientific. You know, and I think that Sokal made a great point when he said, here's how you might have actually adjudicated this. And I said that to James on the show. I said, why didn't you just try a higher up journal? Because by the way, they got rejected by Norma. They got rejected and Norma has a zero impact factor.

0:59:27 Thomas: So they started with a journal with a zero impact factor, got rejected, got an automated reply to convert their paper over to a pay-to-play which had not zero impact vector, no impact vector. And we're able to publish on that with what looks like some complete idiots either not really reading or not really reviewing their paper. And so it just doesn't prove anything. And it was so overblown.

0:59:03 Michael: Yeah. Right. Right, right.

0:59:52 Michael: Well, we just published in this morning's eSkeptic, so you can find it at skeptic.com, and James' response to the 10 major journals.

0:59:59 Thomas: Yeah, I've read it. Yeah. Yeah.

1:00:00 Michael: Yeah, so in the first one, you know, that Cogent Social Sciences openly advertises a 61% rejection rate of papers submitted in 2016. So it's obviously not pay to play. It's not a first-rate journal. Maybe it's not even a second-rate general. Maybe it is a third-rate. I don't know how you –

1:00:16 Thomas: It's not by the way, it's not a gender studies journal. So it's a it's a general sociology journal with no gender studies experts on the in the reviewers. And by the way, I just want to say as far as the 61 percent thing goes, that doesn't prove anything either way. Like you could be a terrible journal. Who knows? Maybe the the articles they rejected were actually good. Like that doesn't prove anything. Either way.

1:00:16 Michael: Right? Right. Right, right, right.

1:00:41 Michael: That's, yeah, yep, I probably reject 61% of the papers that are submitted to Skeptic's just because they're so poorly written or you know, we get, I get articles almost every day about atheism, you know, "I, I have the proof of why God doesn't exist." Oh, oh, another one. OK.

1:00:44 Thomas: Yeah, yeah.

1:00:58 Thomas: Well, and have you seen, I actually just saw this. I think norma it did a Reply and here's what they said. They said, uh they rejected the piece as nonsense. They said, we completely rejected it. And then we didn't realize that Taylor and Francis had set up this automatic referral program to the Cogent journal. And they said that was a mistake. Nobody at Norma wanted that to happen. It says here, Norma didn't realise the automatic referral system was in place. And now they have asked Taylor and Frances to remove it. So, by the way, if all they did was prove that there was a problem with the papers and the journals, like that's fine. Like if that's what they set out to do, hey, we want to show that there's a problem in publishing. That's fine, that's not what they said in their article.

1:01:03 Michael: Well, they did.

1:01:43 Michael: Yeah, and I don't think that's what they did is not, it's not the same as the guy that put, "Please take my name off your fucking mailing list." Yeah, it's not the same is that incident, which was hilarious.

1:01:49 Thomas: Yeah. Wait, why is it not the same as that?

1:01:55 Michael: Oh, because I think, again, to me, it didn't matter where it was published, could be published in The Onion. It's, it's again, what, what, what are these, this jargon, what does it mean, these, you know, these sort of uh approaches to claims about the natural world, including humans, um, if, if I can't tell what it means, then what's going on, what kind of communications are we talking about here of the

1:02:18 Thomas: What do you have in mind when you're saying that? Let me guess, is it from the real peer review Twitter account?

1:02:20 Michael: Uh, Yeah, that would be a good example, I mean, almost daily they post stuff that's just, just like, "What?" And, you know, this is so.

1:02:32 Thomas: Can I encourage more skepticism when it comes to that? Because here's what happened with the James interview. Afterward, I said, or during the interview, I say, please send me your sources. I say that every time. If anyone has sources that But, you know, I want to publish my sources. I want my guests to publish their sources. He sent me an email and intended to prove his points. He and sent me a series of papers, something like, I don't know, maybe 12. And it looks as though he just ripped it from real peer review.

1:02:56 Michael: Yeah, probably.

1:02:58 Thomas: And I looked into every single one and all of them, but maybe one were completely misrepresented. On it. So this is something we need to look at skeptically. When you see something tweeted by Real Peer Review, for example, here's one of the sources. His description, James's description, which by the way, may have come from him, may've come from Real Peel Review. I'm not sure. Either way, this is the evidence he's using to justify the claim that gender studies is bunk. Fat men's penises might not exist. Social construction. That was his description. I click on the paper. I look into it. Turns out it's a survey of how fat male sexuality is represented in the media. It's a completely valid thing to write about. They say, hey, we looked at, we took a survey of all this media across the years. If you look at certain characters in popular media, fat males are either portrayed as, you know, like ugly and gross or their sexuality is ignored like it doesn't exist.

1:03:51 Thomas: And from that, there was the straw man to fat men's penises might not exist. And that's how it was portrayed by Real Peer Review. And I have, that is just the tip of the feminist glaciology iceberg. Because this entire thing, I went through all of these sources and I looked at every single one and all of them were like that. Now, maybe there's a bunch of bullshit in gender studies. I bet there is. I bet There's a ton of bullshit. This doesn't prove that. If you're going to prove it, take an actual survey, engage the actual scholarship and make your point.

1:03:56 Michael: OK. Yep.

1:04:21 Michael: That would be a good thing to do next.

1:04:23 Thomas: By the way, one other tag on these, most of these were, had zero citations, meaning they were not significant in the field at all, uh, there was one that has, has as much as four, but exactly yeah, yeah, that's what I mean to say, yeah, they weren't cited by anybody.

1:04:31 Michael: Oh, you mean no one referenced that those papers? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Well, good.

1:04:45 Michael: I guess we I guess we need to be skeptical in all directions then. Then. Yeah. So I'm, I'm always in favor of that, of course. So yeah, it's a good point. Well, I will, next time I click on real peer review, maybe I'll actually click on the actual paper. Usually we don't have time to do that when you're scrolling through hundreds of tweets for the website.

1:04:48 Thomas: We really do, please do please do, because it is so ideologically motivated and look, again, I, I don't

1:05:09 Michael: Who are they? Who are the people that, oh, okay.

1:05:11 Thomas: Know, no, I, I'm not sure. Sure. And it's to the point where, I mean, people have complained about this. Like, look, stop just pulling random sentences from abstracts and claiming you know what the entire paper is. You know, I

1:05:13 Michael: All right. Yes. Yeah, Right. Now there's examples of that for sure, you know, like the entire papers in Latin and people post it, uh, right? Okay, well, it's good point.

1:05:33 Thomas: Can give you all these sources if you want to look at them. I mean they really was embarrassing. And I even had someone who emailed me who said, "Hey, I have access to all these journals because of, you know, whatever." A lot of people that listen do. And they said, "I even read the full papers," and he gave me a more in-depth look at some of these. And it's just, it's embarrassing. I'm embarrassed for James. I've told him as much. I emailed him. I, I held him in high esteem. This was such a misrepresentation, such a hatchet job, misrepresidentation of what's going on. And they're gaining popularity for this, you know, they're gaining notoriety for this. Sam Harris boosted him. And it worries me because what they actually proved was that there's a whole bunch of people ideologically motivated against gender studies who are willing to very uncritically embrace this hoax as proof of everything they believe.

1:05:34 Michael: Yeah, Well, For what it's worth, I, I would disagree with your data. I would say most of the responses have been critical by far. From what, I didn't do a count, and I don't think they did either, maybe it's the negativity bias where you notice negative things more than positive. But I think they got far more criticism than positive response. And certainly the man himself, Alan Sokal, you know, was pretty equivocal in his response and probably slightly more critical than positive about it. Yeah.

1:06:37 Thomas: Well, that's great.

1:06:49 Thomas: Well, there was a big effort by, I know, me for what literally that's worth, but also Phil Torres. There was a lot of people who were making an effort to call attention to this. And at the time, I don't know if you could attest to this, but at the same time, at the times, James told me that Sokal was supportive of their hoax. And then, I don't know if he reconsidered or what, but

1:06:57 Michael: They were critical, yeah, I don't know uh I don't know, because I never, was apparently he wrote, on he wrote his response and then I didn't see it for a couple of weeks as he was refining it, so I never saw the original

1:07:18 Thomas: When it comes to, I'm glad that most of the responses were negative, but you can't also ignore the fact that Bogosian's Twitter account in the last couple of weeks went from like 20K to 30K. He got the shout out on Sam Harris, which is a gigantic audience, a lot of influence. So I don't know. I mean, it's hard to say, it'd be nice to take a poll of everybody in the community and see how they feel about this. But certainly you can't deny that there's a ton of support for this, right?

1:07:18 Michael: Uh Well, there's some, I wouldn't call it a ton, and I'm not sure what Twitter membership means anyway. I mean, these musicians have 45 million, uh, Twitter followers. I, I don't know what it's really worth, but I will watch the Glacier's Gender and Science video. I have it queued up right here. I'll watch it before my next interview here.

1:08:02 Thomas: Please do. And if you do and you want to shoot me an email, if you want a shoot any sort of response, I can read it after this. Yeah. So, all right. Well, you are just about out of time. You've given me a tonne of your time. Thank you so much, Michael Shermer, as always, for coming on.

1:08:10 Michael: Yeah, sure. Yeah, it's always good to talk. You've got to talk to the other side, or I don't know if you're the other sid. Fellow skeptics. We're all skeptics just trying to figure out what the truth is.

1:08:25 Thomas: I, yeah, I I agree. I am trying to find out the truth. I know I have my biases, but I really, skepticism in the end is the most important thing. You know, looking into both sides of these things. And that's the name of your damn magazine. So, I would hope you could agree with me on that.

1:08:40 Michael: That's right. Thanks.

1:08:43 Thomas: All right. Again, Again, seriously, thanks so much for coming on. Really good stuff.

1:08:46 Michael: You're welcome. Yeah, good conversation.

1:09:13 Thomas: Alright, well, there you have it. Hopefully, what was another productive conversation with Michael Shermer, and we'll keep an eye out for any, any changes of hearts on his part, I suppose, and I certainly, I see where he's coming from on some of these issues, especially early on. I'm looking forward to his article about whether or not we are all implicitly biased. I'm open to the science on that either way. So, also, I do, I did intend to make one correction.

I don't know if I should do another evergreen episode. There really are a lot of things to address, but I'm hoping that this episode did it. But I do need to make a correction. I said that a white student called the cops on two black students at Evergreen. I was wrong. It was, I believe, a Puerto Rican student, but any, at any rate, someone who identifies as a person of color. So I was wrong in that point of fact. I apologize. I hope that that didn't mess up the message too much. The overall point of that was to say that protesters were concerned with police not responding to their calls if they were people of color. I think there were other reasons they thought that, and I misunderstood this one particular fact. So apologies for that.

I want to get everything as accurately as I can, maybe just to try to tie up loose ends so I don't have to do another episode on Evergreen. There's more I could say, but honestly I said a lot of it during this recording. I think there were people who criticized the fact that I didn't go hard enough on the protesters, and I think that might be valid. I think I could have gone a little harder on the protesters because I do think there were certainly, certainly times where they crossed the line.

1:10:45 Thomas: And I think it would have been in the president's within his rights to discipline them and to maybe even expel certain people. But I think that he took an approach that I think worked, which was trying to diffuse the situation by listening as much as he could to their demands. And I think the reason he did that was because of the long history. So we came in and everybody got swooped into this thinking that, oh, Bret wrote an email And then there was this demonstration, which, yeah, I would look at it differently. But this was a one or two year thing that was brewing. And so for that reason, it might have made sense for him. And that's why he might have decided to take this approach, because it seemed like it wasn't something that was going away. I mean, I could imagine you expel a couple students and then you have even more of a riot on your hands.

1:11:33 Thomas: So certainly, who knows what the exact right thing to do would have been. I think that I mentioned to Michael Shermer, I just saw an article that just came up today saying that he was disappointed in a lot of the protesters and might be seeking action against some of them. And I mean, I support that. If anyone broke the rules in a way that they can be tied to on video or whatever it is, I definitely support discipline because I think people will cross the line for sure. But the biggest point I want to make is I hope people didn't come away from that original episode thinking Bret Weinstein was completely wrong and the protesters were completely right. Because that's not at all what I meant. What I meant was, there was a lot of wrongdoing on either side. And how do you adjudicate that?

1:12:19 Thomas: I mean, you can't just point to what one person did on one side that was wrong and say, therefore, the other side is right. That doesn't follow. I think there was wrongdoing doing on each side. I hold professors and people who have the outlets such as Fox News and Rubin and Rogan and people have plenty of outlets to get their voice heard. I held them to a higher standard than 19 year olds. So there's a bit of a burden that way. But in listening to his interview on Rubin, it strikes me how much of it was based on some inter-office politics, some staff drama that you and I just don't know. I mean, I'll be honest, you can just unskeptically accept his explanation for everything and maybe he's right on some or all of it, I don't know. But imagine if you went on Dave Rubin and talked about your office and how Brenda did some crap the other week that you did.

1:13:09 Thomas: I mean, you can just go on and give your accounting of inner office drama, and how am I supposed to know who's telling the truth with just one source? I don't think we can. I don't think skeptics can make a decision based on that. All right, plenty more to say. I don't know, I just think we should move on to other stuff. But I wanted to have this discussion with Michael Shermer because of the fact that it's two very, very prominent occurrences with the Evergreen thing and the gender studies hoax, which he had a clear hand in. So I thought it was definitely worthwhile to talk to him about that. I hope you found the conversation interesting, worthwhile, and I hope that we can keep an eye on maybe if he, if Shermer has changed his mind on anything going forward. That being said, I need to thank my, my amazing patrons. I've got some new patrons this week.

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It's been depressing at times, you know, and my only thought and hope is that we can just sort of build a corner of the movement that's more skeptical on things. It doesn't mean that every single time the social justice side is like right or anything. And I hope that that's not the impression I give. I think it has to be case by case because people are so agenda driven that you can't just unskeptically accept one side's reporting.

1:15:39 Thomas: I think you need to try to look for both sides and find where you think the reasonable truth is. But it's really hard to do these days. I think people are so motivated by ideology on either side. So with that said, I'm going to do my best to keep telling it how I see it and keep researching as well as I can. So thanks so much for listening and supporting that endeavor. And I will see you guys on Monday.