Speaker 1: Today we're going to be speaking with Dave Ferrigno, who is a science communicator
and also author best known for his YouTube channel.
Professor Dave explains.
I know we have some at least overlap with our with our audiences.
Dave, really appreciate your time.
Good to have you on.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Thanks for having me.
Speaker 1: So, you know, I want to talk to you maybe more specifically in a few about
homeopathy and GMOs and maybe maybe vaccines.
But it seems to me that one of your goals in the content that you create is to blend.
Certainly, as we all do, being entertaining and being educational, but specifically creating
sort of a framework to think through an issue where there are conflicting claims and at
least in principle, some kind of factual or scientific underpinning that would get us
closer to what we might call the truth.
How do you approach it?
What's your thought process?
How do you think about it?
Speaker 5: Well, I mean, for the longest time, I was just making purely academic content
on my channel, so explaining science.
But then lately I've been doing this debunking content where I sort of go after prevalent
purveyors of disinformation.
And what I mean, I want to debunk their claims at face value, but I also do try to elucidate,
you know, what is obviously their motive, what are the narratives they're using to ensnare
people.
So if I can kind of like unpack that for people, I think some can maybe approach it with a
new perspective and go, okay, I see.
That's sort of the bias that led me to to fall for this kind of thing.
Speaker 1: There's a whole bunch of typical things that happen in these conversations.
One of those can be that the person you're talking to maybe doesn't understand the difference
between an opinion and a fact.
And they might think you're kind of disagreeing about one when it's actually a factual question.
Another thing that can happen is that it's Sam Harris called it the setting of many small
fires, which is you you have your you're prepared for a conversation and you're knowledgeable.
But at any time, someone can say, well, but what about that study from Singapore, which
you haven't seen necessarily?
And it can sort of feel like an uncontested claim where, I don't know, maybe they're right
about that study from Singapore.
Can you talk about a couple of those or others and maybe how to best handle those types of
moments?
Speaker 5: Sure.
Yeah.
I mean, it's obviously we're seeing that it's rampant in science, politics everywhere.
I mean, I as a science communicator and an educator, I like to just find where there's
a disconnect in the understanding and try to explain that.
So I do like to try to explain the science.
And you'd be surprised how how often it is that it's just a misunderstanding of basic
science or scientific terminology or high school level concepts, that if you just get
in there and explain that, okay, now that makes a bit more sense.
But as you're saying, yes, there are those people who are very they like to adhere to
a particular narrative because they derive an identity from it.
And they do go, oh, look at that study over here.
Look at that study over there.
Well, you know, in my debunks, I get into all that.
So let's look at that study.
Let's look at this figure.
Let's look at this character.
Who are they?
What are they saying?
Is that is that accurate?
How does that compare to actual science?
You know, I like to try to get into the weeds with it.
Speaker 1: What about that?
When some some is something that is brought up, maybe accurately or maybe not, that you
simply just haven't heard of.
It's unlikely that it changes the overarching narrative or the bigger truth, but you just
aren't familiar with a particular data point that someone asserts.
What's a good way to deal with that?
Speaker 5: Yeah, it almost never does change anything.
Unfortunately, on the spot it's hard to counter because you do have to go and look at that
source.
But that's why I make debunking content because I'm able to be very well-researched with it.
I'm able to I like to just hear what is going on in the ether.
What are people saying, what are people pointing towards?
And then I can go investigate those sources.
And 99.9% of the time it's very easy to go, Alright, this person is not qualified, they
have no clue what they're talking about.
They're just spewing an anti-establishment narrative to cash in.
That's all there is to it.
But then I like to try to illustrate that as clearly as possible.
When you're in person.
Yeah, it's very hard.
I don't know who you're talking about, but I mean, one tactic is to say what is more
likely that the entire scientific community is either dumb and wrong or lying and corrupt,
or this one guy is a liar.
I mean, it's it's it's it's very unlikely that this person is is accurate in what they're
saying.
Speaker 1: Do you find that analogy and or examples can be useful sometimes in these
cases?
I'm thinking back to, you know, earlier in the pandemic, there was all this confusion
about raw numbers versus per capita and understanding the rate of something versus the raw numbers.
And like one thing that in my personal life seemed effective to talk to people about,
it was so the United States and Lesotho have different populations.
If I told you 100 people got COVID in the U.S. and 100 people got COVID in Lesotho,
does that seem like a like an important comparison or is something missing?
And people go, oh, no.
Yeah, because the U.S. has way more people.
And it kind of like.
Opens the door a little bit.
Are those types of things useful mechanisms?
Speaker 5: Absolutely.
I mean, anything you can do to get somebody to understand.
But first, just understand science and numbers and data, but also show how others use numbers
to obfuscate what's really going on or to, you know, push a narrative.
There's a million ways to do it.
And anything you can find that that establishes a line or connection that can help you get
a point across.
Absolutely.
It's a great thing to do.
Speaker 1: Let's just to pick something.
Let's talk a little bit about homeopathy.
So whenever I talk about homeopathy and I say, well, there's no active ingredients and
in many countries the packaging has to actually say cannot does not treat or cure any condition
or disease, period.
And you look at studies where you compare homeopathy to placebo and there's it doesn't
work.
And people just get angry with me and they often will write to me and they'll say, my
uncle is a homeopath or I was successfully treated with homeopathy or whatever the case
may be.
I don't know if you agree with my position on homeopathy.
I'll let you address that first.
But I do.
How how how do you tackle those types of rebuttals from from folks about well, with chiropractic
stuff, I get a lot of the same types of emails.
These can be tough because there's a lot of emotional connection.
Speaker 5: Right.
Yeah.
And that's not my forte.
I'll say that right off the bat.
I'm not you know, if somebody has a really strong emotional bias, they're towards something
it's hard to penetrate.
And that's not really my specialty.
I like to make these larger, you know, this debunking content where I can go in and explain
to you beyond a shadow of a doubt why homeopathy is pseudoscience.
Now, some people are going to engage with that and some people are going to reject that,
and that's just how the cookie crumbles.
But I think that, you know, my strategy is to go in and say, okay, why would you think
that homeopathy would work?
What is the mechanism by which this could work?
And now let's compare that to what we actually know about the biological sciences, about
medical sciences.
What is it for something to work?
What is happening on the molecular level mechanistically that would cause something to work and recognize
that this has no chance of doing that.
There's nothing in it.
It's water or a sugar capsule or whatever it is.
It cannot do anything.
And homeopathy, to me, is the most incredible example of something that's so blatantly pseudoscientific
on face value, it's so indefensible, and yet is penetrating even certain areas of academia,
you know, sort of these like low level trade universities that are offering programs in
this stuff simply due to financial demand.
Right.
If people are going to pay for the program, some institutions are going to offer it, you
know, not Harvard Medical School, obviously, but some place is going to do it.
And then that that really fuel it's a vicious cycle now because people then can point at
these things and see there's validity to it and know they're 100% is not.
Speaker 1: So homeopathy seems a little easier to deal with than chiropractic in my mind.
And I think that one of the tough things about chiropractic is there is this kind of blend
where some of these I've never had it done, but some of the adjustments probably feel
good, at least in the short term.
Maybe there's an endorphin release, there's maybe a stretching component.
There might be something that's more akin to like massage that that that is good.
But then you have all of the supposed uses and treatments and the mechanism of subluxation
of the spine through which it supposedly works and this type of thing.
Chiropractic is a very tough one because there's so much, so much there.
Speaker 5: Yeah, it is tough because I don't think that chiropractic is a sham field at
face value.
I think that there is there can be something to spinal adjustment.
And it's it's fine that there are chiropractors and there's something to it.
But the problem is it blends so easily into pseudoscience, largely because you have these
I mean, narcissists, essentially, who they're not trained doctors.
Right.
To become a chiropractor.
You're not going through the same educational path as someone who is becoming like a medical
doctor or a surgeon or something like that.
So they they definitely know no less about things that are outside of their expertize.
And then but then you have people that go on the Internet and say, I'm a doctor, and
here's some stuff that's totally unrelated to chiropractic about nutrition or something
like that.
And you should listen to me because I'm an authority and people really fall for it, especially
if it has that anti-establishment vibe to it.
This is what pharma doesn't want you to know.
Or it said, you know, these kinds of ways of thinking.
Speaker 1: Last big issue I want to talk about and we can spend some more time on this one.
You got into a back and forth with Matt Walsh from The Daily Wire on the topic of trans
people.
And over the last year, you know, if you've watched Trump rallies, CPAC and other places,
the home of overtly homophobic and anti-trans rhetoric is some of what's getting people
the most excited when there's a crowd.
They are of the folks that go to these types of events.
Something about it is really getting people excited.
The right loves to say plain and simple.
We're just scientifically correct on this trans issue.
There's men and there's women and that's it.
And just sort of anything else is kind of like cultural stuff, social stuff, work stuff,
which you can do, but it's outside of the realm of science.
Where where do you think the most fundamental scientific mistake is being made by the right
on this issue?
Speaker 5: I mean, the scientific mistake is that they ignore science, right?
Boys, penis girl's vagina is not science.
That's what you learn when you're five.
Right.
But that's not all right.
That's not science.
Human sexuality, human physiology is is exceedingly complex.
And all this is on the right is just a dog whistle, right?
Nothing unites people like a common hatred.
And people fear what they don't understand.
So I, like everyone else ten years ago or war or whatever it was, had to have that moment
where I went, Oh, transpeople, okay, that's a thing.
But I don't understand why the right didn't learn anything from the homophobia, the huge
wave of homophobia, you know, 40 years ago or whatever it was a little bit before my
time.
But when when society had to adjust to the fact that homosexuality is a thing and it's
not boy and girl make baby.
And that's how humans are, right?
Homosexuality exists.
And also sexuality is on a spectrum, all these things.
Gender is the same way, and they hide behind all these false narratives.
So every time I try to talk about this, you know, somebody says, you think there's 76
genders or something like that, never said anything like that.
It's just about the differences between sex and gender, right?
Sex being largely chromosomal and related to the primary sexual characteristics, the
external genitalia and gender identity being something that's a neuro anatomical construct.
Or there's a thing such a thing as having the experience of being male or female.
And that's intimately linked to two brain structure, right?
Masculine is Asian and feminization occurs in the brain just as it does in the rest of
the body to produce secondary sexual characteristics, etc..
And when sex and gender don't align, that's a trans person and that's all it is.
So I tried to make some content explaining what trans people are scientifically, and
I did so for the layperson at first and actually expected to get a little bit of flak from
the left, because I sort of defended like Dave Chappelle and said, oh, yes, he said
some problematic things, but ultimately he's not a bigot and he's just confused.
He doesn't know the difference between sex and gender.
So let me help try to explain this.
And just the onslaught from the right was astounding.
I've never experienced anything like it.
And so in my response, I cited papers, you know, here are papers studying gender identity,
sexuality, all of these aspects of human physiology and behavior as they are linked to certain
areas of the brain.
Now, I'm not an expert in it, but when the title of the paper says gender identity as
as correlating with the unseen at Nucleus or whatever part of the brain it is, people
are studying this.
I don't know the status of the field.
I could dig into it more and do content on that if people are interested.
But this is this is science.
When you don't cite any primary literature and you deny the primary literature that the
other side is citing, you're not pro-science, you're denying science.
And there's science behind gender identity, sexuality, all these things that the right
regularly ignores.
That's all there is to it.
Speaker 1: It also does seem as though there's a concerted effort from the right to focus
in on on a sliver of the entire issue, which, if we think about it like concentric circles,
you've got all gender and possible gender topics and then you've got trans people within
that.
And then within that you have trans people in sports.
But that's not even really the issue because they don't really seem that concerned about
trans men.
Right.
And they also don't seem that concerned about all sports.
Like, for example, chess has women's and men's divisions, but it's not become controversial
if a trans person wants to be in a different right.
So they're basically talking about like weightlifting and swimming.
And only when it comes to trans women, this is like the tiniest sliver of the totality
of the issue.
Speaker 5: And it's a shame because we should be able to have good faith conversations about
those things.
It is a problem.
Yes, but we do trans people in sports.
Yeah.
And that's another thing I did in the first video where I was trying to admit that, yeah,
there is something to talk about here, but they that's they're not interested in talking
about the dignity of trans people or even acknowledging that that trans is a thing that
you can be.
Right?
Right.
They just want to go towards, oh, they're having surgeries on children.
And this is a.
No, they're not.
They're not doing that.
That's not a thing that's happening.
Nobody is undergoing medical procedures as a prepubescent child.
That has happened zero times.
So it's it's just a way for them to garner political support by capitalizing on the fear
and anger of confused people that don't want to accept what humans are.
That's basically it.
Speaker 1: It's also weird how.
Obviously absurd things slip into the lexicon where like, for example, for a little while
it was puberty, blockers on five year olds was like five year olds aren't about to go
through puberty.
Why would you why would you need to do that?
Or prepubescent girls are having double mastectomies.
They don't have breasts.
What are what are you removing?
Speaker 5: How does that work?
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's just.
Speaker 5: So blatantly false at face value.
How can anybody listen to this and keep a straight face?
Yeah, it's just a narrative.
It's just a narrative that they're pushing.
That's that's all there is to it.
Speaker 1: Folks.
We've been speaking with Dave Farina, who is a science communicator and author best
known for the YouTube channel.
Professor Dave explains, which I encourage you to check out.
Dave, really appreciate your time today.
Speaker 5: Thank you.
Thank you for having me.