The Asymmetry of Bullshit

Please note that this transcript is automatically generated and contains many inaccuracies

Disclaimer

Announcer:   The Zooier Than Thou Podcast contains adult concepts and language and is intended for a mature audience. So if chat GPT’s dog ate your social studies homework, you might wanna come back when you’re older.

Theme Song

Kynophile: Hey, what can I say?

You’ve got me howlin’ at the moon!

Whoa, don’t you know that love is wild when you’re a zoo?

We’re Zooier Than Thou!

Oh yeah!

Intro/Emails

Aqua: Greetings fellow zoos and welcome to another symmetrical, fair and balanced episode of Zooier Than Thou. I’m Aqua Space Ghosts Roundest, and most dedicated fan ball.

Tarro: And I am taro, and I think mota is okay.

Sigma: And I’m Cigna and I am just this dragon.

Aqua: And we’ll be your host for whatever this is. What is this?

Tarro: It’s.

Aqua: Yay. Excellent. It sure is. To all our fabulous listeners, we hope your month is full of joy and fun wherever you are, and to anybody listening who isn’t quite ready to be seen yet, it’s okay. We still see you and appreciate you and we will show up for you.

Sigma: The Transphobes and homophobes are lining up for another drumming. Come join the fun.

Tarro: but aqua, you’re still turquoise. Where are your pride stripes?

Aqua: It was, uh, it was a really long winter, but should be any day now.

Sigma: I heard you paint them on.

Aqua: Citation needed anyway, I’ve got this stack of listener email. Shall we read some.

Sigma: Yeah, let’s.

Aqua: Alright, our first email is from Muffin, asking for some puppy advice. Muffin writes, hi everyone. I hope you’re all doing well. My family and I are currently in the process of moving out of an apartment into a home, which will be the first place we aren’t renting in a long time.

I live with my parents because me and my mother are disabled and I’m not capable of living on my own yet. However, I managed to get them to agree to letting me get a dog. They want to get a puppy so they can be raised to be used to other non-humans.

Since we already have two animals living in our home, neither are dogs. I’m okay with this of course, but the thing is, I have absolutely no idea how to train or raise a puppy. I don’t know where to start. We won’t get a puppy for another month or how long it is until we are fully settled into our house since we just started packing. But I’m incredibly excited, but also very nervous because I have no clue what I’m doing. I’ve been doing research and trying to learn as much as I can about taking care of adult dogs and puppies, but there is a lingering fear of doing something wrong and accidentally making the puppy not like me. I know many of you are dog people, so I was wondering if you have any tips or advice on raising and bonding with a puppy. Anything is greatly appreciated and thank you in advance. Muffin.

Tarro: First of all, congratulations on, uh, getting to move into, your own place with your family. I think that’s really awesome. having a puppy around is very fun, but can also be very chaotic. my advice would just be really patient and understanding. the puppy is gonna do a lot of things that are gonna frustrate you.

It’s just how it goes. but understand that they’re learning so much about the world every single day, and as long as you’re just there to, you know, give them respect and care and help them along those lines, you know, that’s a great start. another thing is that, one good part about the digital age that we live in is that there are so many amazing resources out there.

For learning about this kind of thing. So if you’re already doing research, if you’re watching YouTube videos and you know, maybe even reading a book or two, if we’re getting really crazy, you’re, you’re on the right track,

Aqua: Yeah, I have some book suggestions. we’ve talked about each of these on the show before, but there’s one called Don’t Shoot the Dog, which is funny and also really important.

Tarro: don’t shoot your dog.

Aqua: Yeah, definitely don’t do that. but this one I think will help you understand how dogs learn and, maybe make the patients part of the, process a little easier. Uh, another one is from last month’s episode, constructing canine consent. by the way, if you can’t buy these books or, if you can’t find a place to buy them, You can borrow them. Uh, there’s a great app called Libby, which, lets you enter a library card and, then you can check out digital copies of anything that a local library has available to you. and the last book that I think would help you right now is called The Other End of the Leash. if you read those three, you’ll be off to a flying start.

Sigma: I will say that in my experience, play is very important. my parents had such dysfunctional relationships with their dogs, like, if you are the average zoo in this community and you saw how my parents used to behave for their dogs, you’d probably kick their butts.

I’m not even exaggerating, but I actually, started a regimen of. Giving, their dog like an hour of play every single day without fail, all the time. And she grew up to be like this, Duchess. she would even,lie with her four legs crossed in front of her like she was, some kind of princess.

I think she was imitating my mother. it, it was the weirdest thing. and also, she had the most human-like expressions of. Any dog that we ever had before or since. so play, like on a regular basis is huge.

Aqua: Yeah, definitely. making sure, that your puppy has, enough exercise and, somewhere fun and constructive, that you both enjoy, where they can dump all that puffy energy. That’s a really big part of this. and it should be a factor when you’re deciding what kind of dog to get to. if you know, that you have some limitations about how much time you can spend with them, or, you know, if you’re not up for running or, riding a bike alongside them, and doing that every day for at least an hour, then maybe, narrow your consideration to breeds that require less energetic play.

I.

Sigma: yeah, there are some dogs that will be perfectly happy if you,toss a, squishy ball at them for several hours. Like literally the same Duchess dog. sheep actually liked this whenever the weather was bad. and you can just keep throwing that to your dog and they’ll bring it back to you anytime they get bored.

and they’ll keep nagging you for this, like all of the time, once they learn they can do this if they’re bored.

Tarro: One other thing as well is, just make sure that you’re not forgetting about your other animals’ needs. you know, you didn’t mention in the email, what kinds of animals they are, but assuming that they’re not like a hamster and they’re free roaming as well within the house, just make sure that they have their own space and that they’re not going to.

Constantly be forced into situations with this puppy that’s going to drive them just as crazy as, they drive you. you know, just pay attention. Make sure that they’re socializing well, and make sure that the animals you already have are, uh, happy, healthy, and have time to adapt.

Aqua: Yeah, very important. A final idea would be obedience training. so if you have the means to attend puppy school, that’s great. that can be really important in the first year. you know, you’ll have to do a little bit of research to make sure that the, training program that you found aligns with your values.

one key word to look for might be R plus, that is, uh, a reward based, training system that does not incorporate positive punishment at all. this is also really important for socializing your dog. So it’s one thing if, the three animals in your own home are able to live together. It’s quite another for your dog to. be accustomed to strangers and to other dogs. Uh, and this is a really good time for them to learn those skills. there may be a, program in your area called Canine Good Citizen. this this is worth pursuing. It’s more extensive than basic obedience training, but, sometimes there can be insurance benefits or, a bit of leeway from the municipality if there’s ever a problem.

it might even change, the nature of, discussion with a landlord, although you’re just moving into your own home, which is great. homeowners associations might have something to say about it. So you may need to do some of these things to meet those requirements Anyway. and a final note is, since I mentioned positive punishment, I am of the opinion that positive punishment should be a very last resort for bad behavior.

You should try everything else first, and that could be simple redirection. If there’s something going on that you don’t like or that you want to teach them to stop. Just offer something else to do. Change the scenery. there’s a, a number of useful graphics on, the internet about this. there’s one, I think it’s called, the roadway, to animal training.

I’ll link it in the show notes for you. but it gives me an idea of like all the different stops that you have available before you have to intervene,in a way that’s gonna be unpleasant and a negative experience for the dog.

Sigma: yeah. What I have found is that, Any excessive focus on positive punishment, just leads to alienation and a less satisfying experience with the animal. What it does is that it diminishes the trust between you and your dog and, because

of that. You disrupt the communication between you and your dog.

When you disrupt the communication between you and your dog, it is harder to get your dog to understand what the fuck you’re talking about. that’s just how it’s, for them to be able to understand what you’re trying to get them to do or not do. They have to have feelings of trust towards you. For a dog, this is huge.

It’s the one reason why we can coexist with them at all in the same house. Because they generally have more trusting natures than any other animal that we know of.

Tarro: Yeah, and I, uh, I know this is gonna sound kind of corny, but have fun. having a puppy around is really amazing. they have so much energy and that energy can be really, really infectious. Don’t stress too, too much about having to do everything absolutely perfectly. Just, have a good time. Your heart seems to already be in the right place, so, uh, trust your gut there too.

Aqua: thanks for riding in Muffin. Good luck and congratulations and watch out for those sharp little puppy teeth.

Tarro: All right, next up is this one From a feral artist from far away writing about the, uh, not secretive zoos on furry spaces, feral rights, Hello there. I am a feral NSFW artist. It is not all I draw, but I do draw it fairly often. Mostly fantasy creatures like Pokemon Designs, dragons, because those can fly under the outrage radar more easily.

And I do like them. I don’t consider myself a zoo, even though I have had some interest in animals from an early age. Mostly because I feel it’s purely fetishistic on my end and I have no interest in playing out those desires. IRL, this is only my view on my personal situation and not some sort of zoo or not zoo standard.

I think people should follow. I have gotten some zoos coming to me in private to see if I was okay with them following me, and I said yes, though I try not to be neither pro nor anti zoo in public. This seems to not be a popular stance for fair artists, as many of them are very anti zoo outwardly. I always thought it was hypocritical to draw animal porn and then look down on people that have an interest in animal sexuality.

It’s not like normal people are gonna see you as less of a freak just because you draw raw dog and doggies and would never do at IRL. Great pun, by the way. It just seems like people are always looking for a bigger freak to burn. I legit saw one person saying Phal alert was more zoophilic than her realistic dog dildo because question mark.

I think all interest in furry porn is inherently zoophilic to some degree, and it’s really clear when you see how many people in furry spaces will tell you about their real attraction to animals when they feel they’re in a safe space to do it. I would go as far as to say society as a whole links animals with sexuality all the time.

Cougar bull stallion, doggy style, Fox Bear, all sexual terms. you can even see it in that. Quite misogynistically stereotype about white women and dogs. I could go all day about this, but I think I’m going off topic Basically I wanted to ask what you think about this unspoken thing furries have with zoophilia.

Do you agree that furries and zoos are inherently linked? Have you ever had a feral or furry artist that was very anti zoo? Show a different opinion privately? Hope you have a good day and thanks for reading.

Aqua: Alright, Pharaoh, lots of great questions in there. yeah. I’m gonna start by saying that when somebody feels safe and comfortable yeah, the truth can come out. This is super duper common in my personal experience and it’s a really big part of why studying this topic is so difficult, which I’ll explain now. furries and zoophiles are distinct, but overlapping groups. and being one does not make you the other. I think the most that we can say about furry sexual interests is that if the furry aspects get incorporated into sex, it’s there to enhance or compliment the activity, just like in other parts of their lives. and this is because stepping away from one’s humanity to tell a story or to do something with a fresh perspective is really powerful. Why animals though, and animal behaviors and animal body parts? I think it’s fair to call that zoophilia adjacent and for some number of furries, it is driven by some degree of zoophilia and maybe furry art is their way of handling it. But again, that’s only one of many possible reasons and we have to give space for furries who are not zoos. to exist and to draw whatever they like Most furries are not zoos and most zoos are not furries. I do think that your approach to not taking a position publicly is the right one. You can still have your personal boundaries without adding any noise to a conversation that you don’t want to have in the first place. and anybody who gets mad at you for not taking their side publicly. Probably isn’t your customer. You don’t have to share everything that you make, you can draw just for yourself. it’s up to you who, who sees it, if anyone,

Tarro: Yeah, and I mean, I would probably adhere to as well. Don’t feel like if you’re stressed out about having to draw specifically to cater towards the furry audience that you have to only draw for that community. the zoo community is growing bigger and bigger every day, and we love to have artists over here as well.

if you’re ever feeling so inclined, why not, make a fresh zoo account and draw some cool zoo art and, Have a new space where you can have that outlet without needing to worry as much about, you know, what people are gonna think or say or anything like that.

Sigma: Yeah. What some artists worry about as far as doing that is, oh, someone will recognize my style. what if you want to experiment with a radically different style and develop a completely different part of yourself that is just for this part of your identity? just change the hat that you have on when you’re drawing, and, make that just completely different expression of your identity.

Tarro: Yeah. And as someone that’s been around the furry, circuit for a while now, uh, I can absolutely confirm Plenty of very, very antio feral artists are, uh, very different when you’ve gotten a couple drinks in them at a room party.

Sigma: as far as whether or not you were the least bit zooey, I do want to say, my personal opinion is that almost everybody is to at least some small degree Zooey. I. but it interacts with other variables. For example, people tend to have, either a high sets drive or a low sets drive.

Some people actually never want to do anything with any species of partner until they’ve sort of randomly had an experience of falling in love, in which case they act just as much like a romantic doofus as anybody would for the same reason. And, to a lot of people that just never comes along with a member of another species or even a member of their own species.

people are just different in so many different ways. but very few people, in my opinion, are completely non zoo. but just express it differently.

Tarro: at the end of the day, sexuality is a spectrum. You may consider yourself not zooey, and that’s okay. at the same time, if you want to label yourself as such, that’s fine too. There’s no one who’s standing at the door to the Zoo Club checking IDs or anything like that to make sure you’re a zoo enough for any kind of label.

Use whatever terms you decide, feel best for you.

Sigma: And always be protective of your freedom of conscience. that is one thing that you have a right to, and if that is attacked, that’s a big problem. And, that’s a sign, that sign to sort of pull the plug on the kinds of people that. Make you feel like you’re not allowed to think what you actually think, especially if you’re being pressured to say something that you don’t really want to say.

That is a huge problem and it’s a red flag. That’s how cults behave. when you’re not allowed to say certain things in a certain context. Sometimes it can pass off as a part of the adequate, and sometimes it is a part of the adequate to just not say certain things, but, to be forced to say things that.

You don’t really ever believe or think are okay. that is a red flag of a cult and get out of there.

Tarro: We appreciate the email Farrell. Thanks for running in

Sigma: This one is from BLEs Zoo. Curious and Questioning Ethics, high Peeps and Animals on Zoo tt. I had an on and off curiosity about zoo stuff for over a decade now. often coming in short bursts, followed by long periods of nothing.

These last few years for me have been different as I’ve also entered the furry social scene and come in contact with many people of different tastes, most condemned zoo files, at least openly. But a good few of them even condemned fictional material. I always considered totally acceptable and normal, such as.

Feral artworks. Long story short, this made me reevaluate my feelings on the zoo community, and half a year later, I pretty much entirely agree with most zoo talking points. Now what keeps me from going full zoophile is that I’ve noticed the bestiality porn, part of the internet seems to be a lot larger than the actual community around zoophile identity and the ethics of a zoo lifestyle.

It’s a lot like furry in that way, but unlike furry on places like Zoo X 18, I’ve noticed a ton of profiles are. Self-admitted animal rapists that also enjoy other highly illegal and unethical material so, needless to say, that does make me question my position is the zoo community just a.

Front to normalize this evil material are these zoo Twitter intellectuals secretly still pawing off to torture porn at the end of the day. And even if these two groups were totally unrelated, memberwise, would normalizing one accidentally benefit the other. Its zoo Zoophile truly care about the wellbeing of animals.

I imagine there would already be an ongoing attack. to get this website shut down, not only would it be good for the animals, it would also give actual weight to self-proclaimed ethics, of zoos. I would love to hear what you all think of this.

Aqua: All right. heavy question. I’m not sure. I don’t have in front of me when you sent this question in, but you’ve got great timing ‘cause I feel like this is a conversation I’ve seen popping up a lot recently. indeed.

Tarro: So one of the tragedies resulting from, uh, a lack of information is that the voids get filled by whoever saying and doing whatever in science.

This lack of information is how we get snake oil products. In politics, we get demagogues and on taboos like sexuality, we get dangerous misconceptions for zoophile. commercial bestiality on sites like you mentioned, are one of the most prominent unwanted features and they account for many people’s first exposure to the concept.

The content on those sites is not made by zoos or made for zoos, and this is plainly visible when watching it. Nobody wants to be therian. Nobody’s enjoying themselves. It is usually abusive to everyone involved, and the world would be better off without it. But anytime the topic of cleaning house or cleaning up the fandom or whatever comes up, I bristle a little bit because too many innocent people get caught up in it and end up losing something important to them.

I’m also not interested in doing our adversaries work for them by dividing the house until it all collapses. The best we can do is condemn that stuff while offering a visible, viable alternative to anybody who finds it, which aligns with our values.

Aqua: yeah, exactly right.

Sigma: As far as stopping animals from being hurt, I actually, have a friend that has a group of. All zoo files, on a team that is trying to help bust, cock fighting and dog fighting rings. fortunately there are very strong laws, where those types of, abusive sorts of.

Sports, can actually get busted in huge police raids, and that helps a lot of different animals at once. And it also takes away from the idea that this kind of behavior is in any subculture or in any context, normal or okay, or it’s set narrow culture. we’re outta spoons. there is so much.

Different kinds of animal abuse out there that these people are dealing with, that they’re overwhelmed. them working with, several other people besides their own group.

and it is a long, long to really fixing any of these problems I would, caution against ever seeing that kind of abuse content as in the least representative of how people that love animals and fall in love with animals ever actually behave. a researcher named Alexandra Zeidenberg did a research paper measurement and correlates of zoophilic interest in an online community sample.

Zeus have a diversity of opinion about that paper. Some don’t really like how it was done in some ways, but interestingly, she, and here’s a good thing, she discovered that people that enjoy harming animals, including. Those that sexually harm animals are usually not especially attracted to animals, at least not in the same way as zoophile.

They’re attracted to being able to hurt, someone or something that is, uh, weaker than themselves and is powerless. But they’re not specifically attracted to animals. They just like being able to inflict hurt and injury.

Aqua: So Ashley Hamer, who, was it last fall?

Tarro: God. Don’t say that. It feels so much that’s too much time.

Aqua: however long ago it was, or however fake time is, uh. Ashley Hamer, just finished a, uh, podcast series all about Ophelia’s, and included an episode about Zoophilia, and featured Toggle in me. and she actually, covered, Dr. Berg’s paper in her episode with us, and noted, Zu Sadism, which was one of the four scales that Dr. Zeidenberg identified, quote, barely registers, which I took to mean that there wasn’t much endorsement or that it was one of the weaker correlates.

So we, unfortunately, we don’t have a lot of data about this yet, but we, what we do have seems to point toward low rates of sadism.

Which is really encouraging. and, there’s another one. this one’s called Demystifying Zoophilia. that one’s by, uh, Dr. Emmett, Dr. Clammer and Dr. Stina. and, in it they discovered that People that actually have some kind of direct relations with animals tend to have higher empathy than people who only fantasize about having sex with them.

Now granted, the group in that study who had the highest score for empathy seemed to be the tactile group. you know, ‘cause some people really get their jollies just on stroking their fingers through an animal’s fur. I see you, I get it. and apparently they got really high empathy scores, at least according to the psychometrics used in that particular study. The point is that we actually have real relationships with animals, and it’s not like the kinds of people that circulate these, really gruesome, fantasy and real life material on the internet. I think the last thing I wanna mention is. There’s another paper out there titled Coming Like Animals. And that’s spelled COM mind you.

Tarro: Good thing you clarified.

Aqua: yep. And that one examines commercial bastil reality in Depth. and it’s a, really tough read, but it’s an important one.

And, uh, the fact is this material wouldn’t exist without demand, but we’re not the target market. I think the challenge right now is that the law doesn’t distinguish between safe and, functional and mutually pleasurable, zoophile relationships with animals and animal sex abuse. and the majority of the material out there is only interested in covering sex abuse crimes. We don’t have, anywhere near as much, uh, research on our side of things, which is, what we’re trying to correct or at least encourage, with some success. But, the consequence is that anytime we, are reminded by somebody else or we identify abusive behavior, in Azua file community, our options for dealing with that are pretty limited. And if it’s a commercial website, there’s almost nothing we can do about that. unfortunately it is one of the primary on-ramps for, people, first encountering bestiality, however they end up feeling about it. And, until there is some, dignity and some, understanding built into legislation or at least. an understanding established between us and animal rights groups, it’s going to be difficult to make any progress. Getting rid of it, you know that, that is the challenge before us.

Tarro: if someone realizes that they’re zoosexual, a lot of that at the start is gonna be the sexual part. you, you realize one day that you find dogs or horses or whatever hot, you probably don’t know that there is a community out there. Most people’s first thought isn’t gonna be, man, I’m gonna go check Twitter and see if there’s other people like me who are like really into activism.

It’s gonna be, well, let’s, you know, find some porn and jack off or paw off as you put it. Very furry. there aren’t. Really a lot of, positive invisible zoo spaces that really cater to people on that first step. And the community that we do have just isn’t big enough for it to be like a jumping off point for people who, realize that they have this sexuality.

I’ve talked about this a little bit before. I don’t know if my co-hosts here would agree, but I really think that a big moment for the community at some point is going to be when a zoo who’s already engrossed in the community is able to create a competing porn site where people really care about vetting content and make sure that everything there is made more ethically.

and then that can also guide people who visit that site for the porn towards other community spaces, um, as well as projects like zoo.pub or, uh, zoo, this podcast. I really think that. A lot of people getting into this, it’s easy to label them as just like fetishists who only care about the porn and don’t care about anything else.

But like I think it’s important to remember contextually that a lot of people don’t know about anything else, and it’s part of our job trying to foster this community to be able to reach out to them and invite them to look at things more ethically.

Aqua: Yeah, it’s an interesting thought. I kind of wonder if maybe the days of a porn site are either Too far off or maybe behind us because we have so many other platforms that we can use. and also because of the current difficulty in, in maintaining a site like that,it costs money.

there’s real risks for whoever, you know, signs their name and so on.

Tarro: The, uh, the tricky part is finding that balance between having it visible enough that people who are new can find it and relatively easily, but also not, in such a position where it just becomes, bad and the person who’s running it becomes, you know, in troubled and liable for a lot of stuff.

something that we’ve gotta tackle. But I just wanted to say, you know, I very much understand how it feels seeing that kind of thing on those kinds of sites, but it is something that we care about and it’s something that we hoped that we can have a stronger impact on in the future.

Aqua: Yeah, it’ll be interesting to try to square that project with the Zeta principles. I don’t know if it’s possible,

Tarro: That’s one episode that, uh, I am okay not being on. That sounds complicated.

Aqua: Yep. That sounds like it ends in an argument.

Sigma: Thank you for reaching out bleeds. you really, posed some challenging questions to us and we did try our best to address some of those. the main thing is that there are people that happen to be zoos that are actively fighting against things that harm animals, but that’s a huge category, and some things are just.

Aqua: Practically easier to address, and we’re barely able to take care of those sorts of things. But, but there are zoos out there that are doing that, kind of stuff, and that’s like the main thing that they do with other zoos. Yeah, it’s important to have this stuff front um, yeah,you raise a very good point. Uh, just don’t make it all about, attacking porn sites because.

Sigma: Some of those might actually be innocent or just have no idea. And that would just cause disruptions there’s other stuff that is a lot easier to address and there are a lot fewer legal issues in trying to address it. and there are people out there that are doing exactly that, trying to address those.

Aqua: Lastly, we have an email from Joey, the sad raccoon, who says, yeah, let’s try to fix that. Joey says, I’m an zuo who just escaped the hate mob. Okay. Joey writes, I. Hi Zuo here. At least. I think for now. I used to be a big anti zoo consuming the same hate memes and call out posts as basically everyone else I knew.

But one post was different and it got me thinking and I was sent down a rabbit hole. Pun not intended. The more I read, the more I realized zoos might not be the terrible monsters you’re made out to be. Anyway, my point is, you’ve got a new ally here, but I’m afraid to speak up because of the backlash.

What can I do, Joey?

Sigma: first things first. find more freethinking people to hang out with. if you bring up Zoophilia around. On thinking mob that passes along hate memes, you’ll just make them all the more obsessed with it and they’ll continue to use this as their pet scapegoat. maybe if, we just start quietly drifting to more freethinking.

Groups, they’ll eventually find somebody else to harass and annoy. more freethinking people generally do not engage in the behavior of blindly passing along callouts. but they’re as likely to disagree with each other as to agree on anything and when. It’s still fun when they disagree. like, if you can have a disagreement with somebody and you’re still having fun, then.

maybe you’re starting to move into more freethinking crowd at that point, but those are the people you gotta find, before you can really bring this sort of thing up without just it citing, a mob to bully us and annoy us more. unfortunately.

Aqua: Yeah.So I think you’re right there. Long term, that maybe is a, you know, a, a goal that Joey should have is just surrounding themself with, people that are able to disagree with each other. that is a dying art apparently. but I do have a little bit of a different take than you do.

so I think Joey, first things first, I’m glad to hear that you made it out. Thank you for asking us what we need. that’s refreshing.

my, uh, cohosts here and other zoos might have some different ideas about this, but for me personally, it’s enough that you’ve disengaged with the noise and the bullshit. Sigma, I remember you said one time that the number of people who need to exist to be treated like human beings is one. And there isn’t one of us. There’s millions of us. so I think that neutrality and skepticism are fine. and I think that zoophilia especially, with a, you know, that has a sexual component, does warrant some extra scrutiny.

but really it’s up to you to judge how invested you are, in our situation. So maybe if you see something wrong or hateful being said or done and it’s safe enough for you in your judgment to push back on it in some way, maybe you can do that. But really for me, it’s enough to just be aware of the, uh, asymmetry of bullshit as it were,and just not platform it or participate.

and that connects to what Sigma said in that people who are comfortable enough or secure enough in their opinions and their ethics are able to, disagree with others and still hear them. that doesn’t mean that people who are able to do this don’t get tired, and sloppy and that fatigue doesn’t set in.

‘cause it takes energy to do this, right? if somebody says something and you’re, you’re constantly like. Taking it apart and analyzing it and trying to figure out where it came from and if it’s something that they believe or just something that they heard. that’s hard. It’s hard to maintain that, especially if it’s something that you’re really passionate about.

So, even I do this if I see something come across my feed or one of my friends shows me something that they know I’m gonna like. I will take a minute to enjoy it or get mad about it, or whatever it is. And unless there is something really flagrantly wrong with it,I’m probably gonna share it with somebody else that I know also would enjoy seeing it, or at least I like to know that it exists and that doesn’t always work out so well. so even if you never get to a point where you can push back for us, uh, in your existing circles, That’s fine. I suspect that most of the world actually thinks the way that you do already. and in fact, I’m sort of counting on it. but good on you for getting out of that situation.

any sort of group that is formed around hating somebody or something else. Otherizing them, othering them. that’s not sustainable. And it like, eventually it’s gonna collapse and then, tragically, when this happens to people, they realize just how totally invested they have been in it, and they have to start over again.

So, it’s great news for you that you, you escaped. That’s

Tarro: Yeah. You, uh, mentioned in your email that, uh, there was a specific post that got you reflecting on your views on the topic. if you end up hearing this, I would love to know what that was. Uh, as someone who does a lot of trying to convince people to reflect on their views, it’s really helpful for me to know what’s effective and what’s not.

So if you end up hearing this, reach out to me or someone else on the team on. Twitter on the email, whatever it is that’s easiest for you and let us know ‘cause that would be really cool.

Aqua: All right. We appreciate you taking the time to write in Joey, and we hope this cheers you up a little bit. Oh, and stay tuned because your email is important to this episode’s topic.

Tarro: today we’re going to be talking about the asymmetry of bullshit.

Aqua: Huh? There it is again. alright, so we’ve all heard it before, right? A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes.

Sigma: Like many truisms, this one is difficult to attribute to a particular person with certainty. Maybe it was Mark Twain, probably Jonathan Swift, but it doesn’t matter for our purposes, I.

Tarro: We will be focusing on identifying, understanding and combating misinformation, with example strategies from scientists, science communicators, and activists, and how we can apply those to ourselves.

Aqua: But first we have a word from our sponsors. Be right back.

Tarro: Be right back.

Sponsors

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Topic - The Asymmetry of Bullshit

Aqua: All right. Welcome back. Fellow zoos. I’m here with Sigma and taro again for today’s topic, which is the asymmetry of bullshit.

Sigma: Hi.

Tarro: Hello.

Aqua: ring to it, doesn’t it?

Tarro: It is, it’s catchy.

Sigma: Yeah.

Aqua: I, and I like the metaphor. It’s, I think it’s pretty obvious. I cannot take credit for coining this term. the first place I ever heard it was on, the, university of New South Wales Center for Ideas podcast.

and it was Deputy Chief Scientist, Darren Saunders, who said it. it got a, a pretty good chuckle out of the audience. I think I’ll link that episode in the show notes also, because it’s really worth a listen. but anyway, the asymmetry of bullshit, it relates back to, uh, this idea that a lie can make it halfway around the world, while the truth is still putting on its shoes.

except this is more about the quantity of, misinformation and disinformation and half truths that are out there, quite literally at the speed of light now. and how it’s becoming increasingly difficult to separate signal from noise and actually determine whether something is factual and reliable. so with that said, I think we will begin with, just some general definitions,what the difference between misinformation and disinformation really is.

Tarro: Yeah, so misinformation as a term refers to unwitting or thoughtless, spread of incorrect information. So that might be passing around sort of information that you hear secondhand, and then that information goes viral and suddenly everyone’s talking about it, but without any real sort of looking into the sources or where the information came from.

Disinformation, on the other hand, is much more deliberate and targeted. It’s when someone actively chooses to put forward information that’s false, specifically to further some kind of talking point or agenda or something like that. How do you spot misinformation and disinformation?

gosh, that’s gotta be a great Google search right there. Ignore whatever Gemini tells you. yeah, there’s a, there’s a few obvious ones to look out for. a lack of sources. For example, if it’s just, I. Sent out into the world and there isn’t a link to follow or a citation or a reference or really anything for you to do with it. Thank God for community notes. Am I right?

Aqua: eh, they tried.

yeah. And uh, also, if the person making a statement can’t even properly identify, the subject that they’re speaking about, if they just say they, instead of naming them, whoever it is or whatever it is, that’s, laziness, but it might mean that there’s nothing there.

what else is there?

Sigma: personally, I, believe that it’s always a bad sign if the people that, you’re surrounded by tend to,think that you’re obligated to agree with anything that spreads panic, or anger. and that, it’s somehow wrong to disagree. If it’s about something negative, for example, call outs.

Aqua: Oh, okay. So you mean like a really strong emotional content? Like it’s whatever the news is, it’s designed to like poke a, sore spot and get you aggravated about it.

Sigma: uh, yeah, call outs are only one example. there are some communities where there is this idea that it’s wrong to question a call out. And if you do, then you’re supporting the behavior that is being called out over, which maybe you don’t, maybe. You think that there’s been a distortion or an in, in its saturation, but if nobody is allowed to question it, that’s a big, deal.

But also, this includes, different, kinds of, misinformation, that are focused on spreading panic, such as, false claims about vaccines.

But it could be about anything. there are just communities where there’s a, there’s a strong bias toward, uh, considering any negative information, whether it’s true or false, to be sacrosanct, and you’re not allowed to question it. and those types of communities are multiplying, unfortunately.

Tarro: Yeah. Another really simple example of trying to use, emotion to spread information or misinformation in this case is, if you guys have ever seen those like AI slop, Facebook posts of like statues of lobster Jesus underwater that are like asking for retweets or reposts or, those pictures of like, oh, I’m a veteran and I’ve lost all of my limbs in the war and it’s my birthday, please like, and share if you care.

All of that kind of stuff is specifically made because it’s supposed to resonate with people in like a really quick and fast emotional way, and they feel compelled to share it.

Aqua: yep. one of my favorite slop genres. are the, uh, thumbnails for YouTube shorts, but specifically the ones you get if you are not signed in to YouTube and it, the algorithm hasn’t learned anything about you. It’s like it’s designed to appeal to your morbid curiosity after you feel disgusted at what you just looked at.

Also, as far as like how quickly information, or in this case misinformation, disseminates is an important one. if you suddenly overnight see a. Identical posts across social media platforms. Like if you see the same thing on X and TikTok and Instagram and YouTube, and it all happens at once, that’s probably coordinated.

Tarro: And that’s where memes come really into play as well. whether if something’s in like kind of a very traditional meme format, that’s a big red flag for whether or not it’s authentic information because memes by nature are designed to be the most shareable and the most easily like readable to a mass audience.

And so anytime there’s that kind of sort of jump at you image it usually means that someone is trying to push a point across in a really, really quick way without getting into the details.

Aqua: Yeah.and that’s also what makes memes fun, right? They’re supposed to be instantly relatable. and just this little slice of life, moment of humor. You know, it’s like When did we start calling that a meme? That’s gotta be a couple of decades ago at this point.

Tarro: yeah, it’s been a while.

Aqua: Yeah, that’d be an interesting thing to check on Google trends to see when that word first appeared. but viral images with a short message are not, new to us anymore. in the old days we had Y-T-M-N-D, so there was like a static image and some text and some sound. and then it just became more and more specific photoshops of inside jokes with a punchy message I get a little bit suspicious when I see meme formats being used for heavy subject matter, or trying to push a product. and that I think leads me to maybe the most important one here. And that is if you encounter information and you are. Surprised or upset, or it resonates with you deeply and you’ve seen it in a few different places at once. it’s a good idea to ask yourself, who benefits from me reading this and believing it? What is happening on their end? Is there a sale at the end of all of this, or a product or a sales pitch of some kind? because a lot of times, this happens unfortunately in the scientific community also where there’s junk science or fraud, you know, even if the intent of a study is, you know, a good idea, if it’s not conducted to, the expected standard or it doesn’t pass peer review or fraud is discovered later on, it really threatens the whole, field.

It can set back a. whatever progress, or whatever we have added to the body of knowledge in a particular area by kind of a lot because of somebody’s bad behavior. and that calls into question a whole bunch of other things. that person might speak about whoever, whoever is, is responsible for it.

Tarro: Yeah, and it’s unfortunate because it’s so. Easy to create something that looks close enough to science, to justify misinformation, whether that’s just blatantly making up things or even actually conducting science and research, but just using very manipulative ways to examine that data, whether that’s specifically cherry picking the results to try and like point towards the direction that you’re hoping to be in.

Or even just, certain publications are going to have some kind of editorial skew towards an agenda that they are trying to present the science within. examples of that being like big right-wing think tanks that publish studies that show,data that is technically not made up but heavily, you know, leaned into one direction because people understand that nobody reads past the abstract.

Aqua: Right.

Does anybody remember Dr. Sendler?

Tarro: The name’s familiar, but you might have oh.

Sigma: as say more, and I’ll, I’ll remember. I’m sure I think he still is a sexologist, and a sex researcher who did, a couple of big splashy studies about Zoophilia, which were later called into question because of some, impropriety around obtaining informed consent from participants and a few other things.

Aqua: but that was an example of, we think well intentioned and well-designed research, that was interesting to read and, and useful, but it was spoiled, because of eventual, retractions, in a couple of his publications. and now, anybody who, references or cites, Sandler’s work has to include a footnote, warning the readers that, it needs to be taken with a grain of salt.

And

it’s important context, but maybe not the most reliable, information out there. so, you know, that’s an example of something that yes, it, it could be considered misinformation. it doesn’t become disinformation until it’s spread maliciously in spite of those corrections. but it was spoiled after the fact. It was not designed to, disrupt or weed anybody astray while we’re on,other examples,Sigma, it sounded to me like you were starting to lead into, the possibility of generating outrage, or following a, a specific formula in order to create a moral panic.

and, you know, this is something that, the zoo community has experienced a number of times. L-G-B-T-Q certainly has, for at this point over a century. and it’s, just this unbelievable waste of energy and oxygen to try to combat this. but it works, and it sucks that it keeps working.

So I. I wonder if, either of you have thoughts about, like how this happens. know, and we actually, we talked a little bit about it in the, COSA episode that we did recently

where, one of the strategies was to be a weirdo person with a weirdo problem that most people do not share.

but then try to make it more relatable by connecting it to something else that is more generally understood to be bad.

and then hope that nobody notices the bait and switch. is this starting to sound,familiar.

Sigma: yeah. it’s this, negativity bias. when people get, sucked into this idea that, if it’s something horrible and scary or, something that disgust them or arouses any negative emotions, you’re evil. If you question it, you’re one of the bad guys. If you say that, it’s not really, what they think it is because, unfortunately people can get addicted to those kinds of emotions, because, in the cocktail of chemicals that get released in your brain when you go into a panic, some of those are either dopamine or related to dopamine.

And you literally get hooked on your own panic. And this can happen on mass, which is very bad. and it becomes impossible to question anything that, feeds that negativity addiction, without getting shut down or demonized just because you’re trying to take away their drug of choice.

Aqua: and there may also be, like an incentive mechanism built into it. you know, today we would call that reputation or clout, but if you are the person who discovers so and so is up to whatever, or is a witch or something, good job. Caught another one. so there’s this feedback mechanism where like, okay, everybody is upset and scared about this thing. Everybody wants a solution. here’s this person offering a solution. Okay, great. now what? And then it just sort of snowballs from there. So like the present and most terrible example right now, in the United States is, the horrifying treatment of transgender people.

that is now happening nationwide. and there’s now so much of it, it’s, difficult to know where to start. there are to us anyway, very obvious pieces of misinformation and disinformation. little soundbites, fake videos, fake images, fake stories. and then for every thousand of those, there’s one real story from an actual trans person, maybe a student athlete,or one of their competitors who came in second place and, you know, says something like, I don’t feel like I lost. Was the fastest I ever ran or whatever the sport is, and just because they didn’t finish first, it’s like that didn’t spoil the day. This happened in Maine, I think it was two months ago.

you know, for every thousand pieces of bullshit or whatever, there’s one out there that is an actual person who is, speaking their lived experience and is proof that the rest of this isn’t true.

It just doesn’t get the same attention.

Sigma: yeah,

As a transgender person, this, has troubling consequences for me, as a trans woman because, back in the two thousands, the only way that you could get hormone replacement drugs was to go through gray market, channels, which, could be dicey because you never really knew what you were putting into your body.

I, and I’m just imagining, nightmarish scenarios where people like myself. I might have to go through those venues to continue getting, the, HRT, treatments that we actually need to stay sane to keep a grip on reality, and not be, lunatics. ‘ cause me, before I started my HRTI was a mess.

uh, you don’t want to know me. I was, uh, before I started to take care of this, and some of the schlock, that gets pedaled out there, some of it, is, a deadly combination of both, real and impure. So people will continue to take it even though they’re poisoning themselves, ingesting things that will cause health problems that will never go away.

and, forcing people onto those gray market venues, it’s not gonna cause people to stop being transgender. It’s not gonna be the cure for all transgender people. We don’t have to worry about those freaks anymore. No, it’s not gonna work that way. what’s going to happen is that I’ll continue to be transgender.

It’ll just be, my life will be harder, more expensive and more dangerous. I’m more likely to die because of having to go through gray market, channels like many transgender people, men and women had to do back in the two thousands. And it was really dangerous. We had Silk Road back then. there’s even more efficient, dark web channels for getting stuff nowadays that you shouldn’t have.

and if we have to go through those venues, who knows what’s gonna happen.

Aqua: Yeah. to me it, it’s obvious, right? The kind solution to this, the one that is based in empathy and reason it’s to let transgender people have what makes them happy and functional and not suicidal. Right?

it just, it’s baffling to me that somebody could be presented with data showing that a cohort of people who are trans have very high suicidality and mental health problems, like severe depression, anxiety, and all kinds of other things which relate back to minority stress, something that we’re familiar with. and the answer seems to be to simply let people live authentically and then magically a lot of those problems are reduced or they go away. why wouldn’t we do this?

Tarro: It really does seem like the simple and easy answer. when it comes to gender affirming care being something that’s actually shown to be positive, and I think that’s a big part of why people having scientific literacy is really, really important because it’s so easy to, see headlines from other people who are disseminating the information for you.

And all of those people are going to read that information in a certain way and present it to you in a certain way. But I think it would be much better for society as a whole if people got more used to, you know, taking a look at the actual research itself and understanding what it’s actually trying to say.

Aqua: Yeah. I think that would be really good for holding people accountable for, maybe not the content of the research or the results, but how that information is processed and then, implemented if it is.

it would certainly elevate the discussions that we have to have about these things, uh, especially when, some other new scientific information comes along challenging it.

Tarro: Yeah, and it’s funny ‘cause a lot of these studies will like even included in them, list off the limitations that are present within that study. Um, and then acknowledge like we weren’t able to sample this percentage of the population. We had a really limited sample size or, you know, we, we would love to have tested for this variable, but we just didn’t have the budget or we didn’t have the availability to do

Even just that little bit of information and understanding the things that they couldn’t do helps reinterpret the information that you do have and such a, such a high level.

Aqua: Misinformation and disinformation show up in a bunch of different parts of our lives, and some of it is quite obvious. Some of it’s pretty subtle. so let’s look at some of the other forms of, misinformation and disinformation that we’re probably gonna encounter if we spend any time on the internet at all, especially social media.

So one area where you see both of these things, come together is in, performative activism, because there might be a product or a sale, or will a blog or something that will generate ad revenue waiting for you at the end of it.

Tarro: I mean, there’s, so many examples of performative activism. You could argue that, greenwashing is one as well. But I think the big sort of story around it right now is YouTubers, such as Mr. Beast, who do a lot of videos. Like, I helped a thousand African children walk for the first time, and, you know, the videos, really gaudy with him on the front, smiling and doing a thumbs up, and there’s like a crying kid in the background.

You know, the argument is that even if the content feels performative, it’s still, you know, helping people. But it’s hard to look at that kind of content that’s getting millions of views and making him millions of dollars and not feel as though part of that is the fact that it is going to get attention.

And like Mr. Beast is the big example of it right now. But there’s so many other YouTubers that are doing the same kind of thing with a much lower standard. a really common one is like. Giving a homeless person a hundred dollars or giving a homeless person a thousand dollars, and there’s so many videos like that where they’ll hire a homeless person, pay them 20 bucks and say, can you act really surprised if I give you a thousand dollars?

And it’s just, it’s so shitty.

Aqua: Yeah. you know, maybe there is some benefit, like, I don’t think we can argue that Mr. Beast does not donate money. He does. But there is this queasy, gross entertainment element to this where it’s like squid games, it doesn’t have any of,

the satire that’s built into, I.

Squid games. It’s not critical of capitalism, it just exists inside of it in like the most disgusting way possible. Yeah,

Tarro: charity feels weird when it’s in a video that starts with, Hey guys, what’s up? You know, it just, I don’t know. It feels so content first.

Aqua: yeah. And then there like, there’s really simple examples where there is no effort and there’s no intention. it’s just a selfie of somebody drinking a fancy or popular beverage and they’re using a paper straw and talking about paper straws, but then that’s it. there’s no action after that or before it.

Tarro: Mm-hmm.

Aqua: Yeah. Agreed. okay. So I want to change tracks a little bit to a version of misinformation that I think is the most serious, right now. For us and for L-G-B-T-Q more broadly, although our example is gonna be related to zoophilia, so it’s separate. but also just scientific and medical disinformation in general, which is a huge problem. and, anybody who is a science communicator is aware of this and I don’t know how they keep the energy up. ‘cause it’s just like this nonstop thing. so the, the example that I found, is interesting because, I started in the middle. I found an old handout from, a, uh, legislative session for the state of Vermont from about 2017, I think. which was, Basically a fact sheet for, a house bill, which I think was HR 3 25. and it was a law that would,criminalize bestiality, I think it, I’m not sure if it was already criminalized, but this one strengthened the, the punishments. And it, it also had much more modern, clear definitions of what, sex with animals actually is.

So it’s not like, you know, a buggery law that just says crime against nature. what I thought was interesting about that was it sat kind of in the middle of this process that happens to scientific research as it is processed and consumed and then discussed and implemented in some way. it did have citations, but it also had some really inflammatory bullet points that were, I. Designed to get people to call the, you know, the representative, whoever it was at the time, and voice their support for this bill.

and the very first citation was, from, Dr. Jean Abel, who, we actually had a problem finding this. Uh, we couldn’t, Tara and I both looked, but it was a presentation that discussed the link between, animal sex abuse, which is, you know, their modern term for this.

And, interpersonal violence,as sort of like an on-ramp, or whether it means somebody is predisposed to, committing those acts. Also, the, The study was quite large. it was over 40,000 men and boys. , And the main takeaway here is that, Dr.

Abel figured out, or at least found in this data that, an interest in bestiality or a history of it was like the number one indicator for, child sex abuse. so someone who, you know, expresses an interest in that is also probably, at risk of committing these other acts. And, it was not a small percentage.

It was like over 40% of everybody that they studied. it’s frustrating that we couldn’t find a copy of this to read for ourselves. What we got instead was, Kind of a meta discussion. A few years later. In 2014, Dr. Heida published, zoophilia in the Law, which discusses, this research among some other things.

And this is as close to the original material as we can get at the moment. Dr. Heida talks about this, occasionally. He’s published about it since then. But, he’s an academic. He did the right thing. He is able to discuss and, acknowledge the limitations of this study. And in this case, the, research, that Dr.

Abel had, it was, what he called cross-sectional. It was not, perspective. So that is, it’s basically what that means is that it’s able to identify, correlates. That is things that appear together frequently enough to be interesting. But there’s no causality there. it’s not clear which one causes the other, or if both of them are caused by some other unknown thing that is not measured.

it just appears together. And generally, correlative data like this is useful as a diagnostic tool or is the beginning of a, process to understand something, but it’s also actionable. And, that’s what happened. So this paper and this research was then picked up by the National Link Coalition, which is, an international effort.

I think they’re, they have a little over 3000 members in like 50 countries, which, exists basically to establish the link between animal sex abuse and interpersonal violence. And then, guide lawmakers into. Crafting legislation and to, you know, to try to protect animals from this seems fine. except that zoos like us are not in the picture.

We’re not in the discussion, and there’s no opportunity other than a discussion of the paper’s limitations, to really explore that.

Tarro: Yeah, I mean, like we’ve talked about a number of times all of the research on zoos comes from prison population and people that are having severe sort of symptoms that get them into some kind of treatment or therapy or something like that.

Aqua: Yeah. So when I say that I’m not represented in this data, I mean that quite literally.

I was not one of the 40 something thousand people that participated in this research. and I think Dr. Jean Abel probably knows that, and Dr. Heida certainly does. He’d probably say to me, well, yeah, we couldn’t find you, because you weren’t in jail and you didn’t show up at a doctor’s office with a problem to try to solve.

Okay? That means you don’t know how many people you’ve missed you. Like, there’s no information about how large a population is out there that is not covered by this research. And, and like everybody understands that,

Sigma: yeah, because what if,there are millions of zoos out there that are quiet introverts that don’t even really like to go out of their house except to go to their jobs. how many are really out there? and, and now I understand, in that light, the plane crash analogy, because, nobody’s really tried to study, uh, the people that died in the crash, because they’re dead.

Tarro: The technical term for what this is, is it’s called survivorship bias. And basically the idea is that, say that you’re on a plane and the plane crashes, you could theoretically look at the number of people that took a look at that safety card that comes in the seat in front of you that nobody looks at.

And you could say, okay, well, out of the people that survived this plane crash, how many of them took the time to fully read that safety card? And the presentation of data that you get from that can paint a picture as to, you know, the efficacy of that, action. But the thing you’re missing is that anyone that didn’t survive the crash, you know, rest in peace, Their data isn’t actually being considered into that. So it could be that every single person that died read the safety card, which would make the reading of the safety card actually increase lethality during a crash. Or it could be that nobody read it and you know, it, it, the safety card really does help.

the tricky part with this kind of research is that there’s no real way of knowing you. You’re basically in like a Schrodinger’s box of information.

Aqua: Yep.

, But the problem is, and this, this actually leads back into the discussion about the Vermont LE legislation, because intuitively I think we understand that there is a risk there in even discussing that information in an academic paper about this plane crash. It’s very clear that there’s a sampling bias problem and. It would probably show up in a discussion of the limitations of the data and say, Hey look, we couldn’t ask all the dead people if they read this thing. We don’t really know what this means.

Tarro: But, if somebody else comes along and doesn’t read past the abstract or skips most of the discussion, the headline about this could very well turn out to be 75% of the survivors read the safety card and then you’re only one or two hops away from people reading the safety cards wrongly, assuming that there is actually a tangible benefit to survivability.

Aqua: Maybe there is, but on its own, it’s not enough. that’s pretty much what happened with this legislation. it did eventually pass, and the coverage that it got after the fact was like really thin and disappointing. there were a couple of, animal rights websites that covered it. oh, the Associated Press covered it briefly.

That was pretty neutral and factual, so that’s good. Vermont humane.org covered it. and then for some reason, like a classic rock radio station also covered it. and it was, it was garbage. It was just some guy talking about how, like he read the law and it doesn’t say anything about sex with animals.

It just says you can’t abuse them. So maybe BDSM is okay. It was ridiculous and it was probably intended to make the audience laugh, but it’s still online and it’s still on the first page of Google results if you go looking for it. and it’s totally incorrect. The law actually does very specifically outline what they’re talking about.

you know exactly what acts are covered. they even define animal. To mean all living sentient creatures, not human beings. so they’re very specific here. so I got curious about that and, because I couldn’t find any other discussion. And, I found another website, animal law.info, which, has a, a freshly updated, like the beginning of this year, 2025.

it’s a table of state animal sexual assault laws, and sure enough, it has the correct information about Vermont, which is, I think it’s a small fine. And then the first offense is a misdemeanor, unless it’s like really abhorrent. and then any future offenses could graduate to a felony. that’s basically it. outta curiosity, I decided to ask a bunch of ais. To explain the Vermont anti bestiality law to me.

Sigma:

Aqua: they did terribly.

Sigma: they can be kind of weird. They can get, uh, large pieces of fact just completely off the wall.

Aqua: Oh yeah, this was hopelessly not correct. I asked three different models. I asked Llama, which at least, referred to the correct bill, which was Lake House Bill 3 25. but it made some kind of mistake about the penalties that was subtle and made it sound more serious than it was. let’s see. GPT cited an older law, which I could not find, and, just stated that it was a felony. and then added a bunch of flavor text about animal rights, which was like worthless. and then Claude three Haiku refused to answer the question at all, but had this moral judgment and said, I’m not going to talk about anything that’s unethical and illegal. So I asked it whether a thought animal husband tree was unethical and illegal. And it said, I have no strong feelings about that. My job is not to make moral judgements.

the reason that I did this is because, AI is being crammed down our throats everywhere we turn, whether or not we want it, and whether or not it works. And this is exactly the kind of thing that it sucks at. Detecting cancer in a radiology department. Yeah. Great. that is a, an enhancement of human capabilities. But searching Google for Vermont Antisi reality law and then getting a useless summary that is not correct, which you can then copy, paste, or screenshot into your Twitter argument. That’s where we’re at. And so, taken altogether, you go from, research, which is useful on its own, and which I have no problem with. as long as there’s follow ups and there’s an honest discussion about what it means and how to use it to, interested and invested groups of people picking it up, and possibly cherry picking in order to further their agenda, which is then presented to people in an uncritical way. Then passes, and then any discussion after that is stripped of any context, and you have to work pretty hard to get back to the beginning of it. So that’s how I spent my afternoon.

Yeah. AI is, it’s just a string of words that it’s heard before. Hey, actually that sounds like a slogan or , like a lexical bundle. Have you heard of those?

. So, lexical bundles and slogans, I guess I’ll start with slogans, right? ‘cause we’ve all heard animals can’t consent and on its own, those three words really don’t like, there’s no substance there.

I think it’s demonstrably false and it’s not a complete sentence. Like, can’t consent to what anything. but we all know what we mean.

Tarro: Yeah, the way that it’s used, I would argue, is actually harmful because it specifically, dismisses the intelligence of animals even in a way that it’s not necessarily intending to. The slogan is clearly obviously used sort of against zoos, and people mean in terms of sex, but, I’m always very frustrated to see it, not because it’s like, oh, the anti zoos are owning me, but just because it, it really does harm people’s perception of animals.

Aqua: Yep.

It’s an alliteration. so it’s catchy. Oh yes, it is very catchy.

Sigma: Anybody can do this. anybody can make up a slogan, uh, based on alliteration or rhyme, and make it catch on whether it’s, something altogether true or altogether false.

and, that is, why this kind of trick language, that, is designed to, turn into earworms, should never be confused with anything that should be held to be true. uh, things like rhyme and alliteration that are great for art, terrible for communicating anything that is actually true.

Aqua: Yeah, a good slogan, can catch fire pretty much immediately, especially on social media where, everything is instantaneous. you know, like Phish are friends, not food. Okay. We all know what that’s from, but,

Sigma: Finding

Aqua: there you go. They’re extremely powerful marketing and messaging tools. Generally there isn’t much of a problem other than it will collapse the context or strip it of context completely. And the risk is that it’s so catchy and so repeatable that it excuses people from really considering what it means and why it exists. and then it becomes a kind of lexical bundle, which is just this very generally, it’s a phrase that you will probably hear in a single context, or about a single topic from some person, and you’ll never hear that person use it anywhere else for anything else.

and when that happens, there’s a pretty good chance that they’re just repeating what they heard and they’re, they haven’t really like taken it apart yet. ‘cause there isn’t anything to take apart.

but it is convenient shorthand. if we’re offloading all of our critical thinking to magical spell check robots, uh, this seems like a, a pretty reasonable behavior.

Tarro: Yeah, I mean that’s, that’s part of why, corporations use slogans as well. ‘cause it’s really easy to remember, eat fresh or you pick any of the billions out there. It’s just one small piece of messaging that can easily be associated with a company or an idea more in the case of misinformation. And it just like earworms its way into your brain.

Aqua: yep. so I guess this all leads us to why does this work? We’ve talked about what misinformation and disinformation are and how good quality original research can slowly or very quickly be transformed into misinformation or disinformation, and how that can happen inadvertently, or maliciously.

but if we know what it looks like and we,we’re pretty decent at spotting it, why don’t we, why aren’t we better at this?

Tarro: Are you asking

me?

Aqua: I’m asking whoever

Sigma: so what makes this vulnerable to this sort of thing? one thing that can lead to a, much greater level of vulnerability to, these types of deceptive tactics is something that is called intellectual suicide. That sounds dramatic. Well, in a way it is because in a way, when people behave in this way, it is like they have given up their own agency, Their own right to decide on anything for themselves. And they just respond to external pressures, almost like they are corpses with strings attached to them, dancing on whatever strings people can manage to pull. because they have given up the right to think for themselves. They’ve ab advocated that.

And also responsibility, one form of intellectual suicide, for its sample is something called group think. Group think is a behavior in which people become afraid to contradict whatever, social group that they are in. They become afraid to disagree because they’re afraid of being socially excluded.

and in this way. They have surrendered their right to have any opinion of their own, because they have come to be so attached, to this, idea of fitting in. They become so terrified of social isolation that they have effectively made themselves into slaves of whatever. A demagogue happens to be best at controlling that group.

A demagogue being a person with a wide net of influence that is easily able to sway a large number of people’s opinion. whether those people have actually stopped to think about what they’re really saying or not. and it can be a really huge problem. there are other forms of intellectual suicide, for example.

there is, dogmatism and, usually I say that, dogma is about a set of rules that, people clinging to, but it’s not just the set of rules, but it, it is a belief that a person clings to. because they’re afraid to let go of that belief, it becomes, so much a part of their identity that, just cannot let it go in light of any evidence.

And it has, become, one of the things that, keep them from feeling afraid that the world is, suddenly gonna stop working the way that it’s supposed to. One example that I use, as far as why that is, actually deadly in some cases, was, during the Protestant Reformation, Mary, the first of England,actually had many Protestants murdered, for not being Catholic, because she had become so much a slave to this dogma that even her moral conscience took a back seat and while, nobody would really behaved very well during, this period of history, Protestant or Catholic, and especially the way Catholics were treated later on,this kind of persecution had been done for several centuries beforehand.

There, is a famous, place in, England, called the Lollard Pit. Or Lollard Pit, where a large number of early English Protestants were burned to death, for not being Catholic. and over the centuries. Millions of people have died because, people were not willing to shift on the basic tenets of their beliefs.

one, example of dogma that I think that zoos will understand a lot better though, uh, is the dogma that, it’s not consent unless they tell you in, in English, or American sign language, which, is really a dogmatic view of consent that, naturally cannot apply to animals.

And because they are so wedded to this dogma and they’re so terrified of anything that threatens that dogma, if you have a different understanding of consent,that comes from the same place, the same space, in you of respect for the autonomy of your partner. they will not see that it comes from the same place.

They’ll only see that you have a different belief, which makes you the bad guy, and they don’t see you as really being different from a violent rapist. They can’t because, if you are outside of their own dogmatic understanding of the world, then that makes you evil to them. and they have put their brains to sleep so that they’re no longer willing to take in new information.

They’re no longer, willing to reexamine their established, beliefs. They’ve killed their ability to form any new belief. and, you can start to infer many different ways that people do this. And, aqua you had, something to say about possible motives for why people, engage in this behavior of putting their brains to sleep.

I,

Aqua: Oh yeah. from what you just said, it sounds like a lot of this is fear driven. like once you’re inside a particular system or, ideology, then maybe the, the fear is, okay, well if I disagree with this or deviate from it, then that makes me a target.

But I wonder like that’s, that is a pitiable state. it’s difficult for me to be angry at somebody in that situation.

Sigma: yeah, that, that is something I was talking about with you before because, as infuriating as it is, I naturally it unleashes in a person that realizes this is bad. it may unleash, very strong emotions. It is upsetting to see if you see what it is and you understand it for what it is.

but it is the same, situation where your dog is tearing up your house anytime you’re gone at work. you don’t fits that by screaming at your dog. Your dog is lonely and isolated and afraid that you might never return to them. They might feel that they’ve been abandoned, and maybe they’re just bored out of their minds.

and it is very much the same with people that are engaging in this behavior where they put their minds to sleep. it is sad to watch,but, usually, it is better to feel sad then angry because at least if you start from there, that puts you in a quieter head space where you can think more clearly about what you’re gonna do next.

Tarro: Yeah, and I mean, I feel like another way that people get to this point is just exhaustion. Like we live in such a complicated world. There’s stuff going on 24 7, especially just in the last year it’s been, it’s been extremely exhausting to try and keep up with things that are also extremely important to, you know, the future of the planet even.

and it’s so much easier and to just, find that one person that talks in a way that you, like, who just tells you everything that’s going on, and you say, all right, well that all sounds good. And like I don’t even blame people for doing that because the, it just, it’s almost a necessity at some point to have that information diluted to you if you still feel like you need to be on top of everything.

Aqua: Yeah. So that could be outrage, fatigue, which is definitely a political tactic that at least some of us are enduring. So fear and exhaustion,and hopelessness, and or maybe frustration at a situation, is what makes somebody vulnerable to falling into this, trap where they just outsource all of their critical thinking or abandon it completely.

so what are some of the things that are not flooding the zone and outrage fatigue that, could cause somebody to get into this predicament? I’m looking at my phone, which is this little five inch, black rectangle of terribleness. and like I do my best to manage, what comes into it and what I see and when I look at it.

but if I start my day by scrolling the news or by. Opening up blue sky that’s gonna set the tone for the rest of the day. Whether or not I’m in a good mood or a bad mood, I’m glad I broke that habit. That took a long time to identify as a problem. but it wasn’t really doom scrolling.

It was just like, it was no longer safe for me to sit up in bed and open my phone and review any messages that may have come in during, quiet hours. ‘cause I, like, I couldn’t do a morning briefing anymore because almost all of it led to something that I just was not emotionally equipped to deal with without a shower and coffee and food. so all I had to do was make sure it wasn’t the first thing I looked at. and this, I think this brings me to, A concept that I’ve seen around the internet in a few places. ours, Technica had an article about this, I think, it was this idea that we are now in this age of paranoia where there is so much misinformation and disinformation and noise that we are just drowning in about everything all the time. That it becomes impossible to function and it becomes too much work to decide which information or which messages are legitimate and trustworthy.

and we were already primed to have problems with this because, at least in the United States,critical thinking skills, They’re changing. I would argue that they’re in decline. from what I’ve seen, there doesn’t seem to be as much value in skepticism and research and fact checking. and if it does still exist, it takes more of a malicious like haha got you kind of form. and unfortunately the tools that we have at our disposal to do this are also not particularly trustworthy because,they might just be generated, or unsighted. So like, it kind of ties into the AI discussion again.

and general media and scientific literacy issues. like this, distrust in, legacy media, which is, you know, I think probably earned I this

Tarro: I would agree for sure.

Aqua: but that doesn’t mean that people aren’t looking for answers. It just means they’re getting them from somewhere else.

Tarro: Yeah, I think that searching for information is still something that’s very necessary. Like it’s not possible for people to go out and check every signal story that they hear. It just means that you might need to be really thorough about checking the biases of where you’re getting that information and making sure that they’re actually correctly surmising the things that are going on in the world.

And also maybe having different sources where you can contrast and compare and see like what’s one person saying versus another person. it’s a lot of work to set yourself up in a way where you’re getting like the correct amount of information without either, flooding yourself or giving up entirely and saying, I don’t want to know anymore.

I don’t care. But it can be. It is very valuable to know what’s going on in the world, and I personally get that, so I, I think it’s worth the effort.

Aqua: I agree. the legacy media thing really gets under my skin too, because. I understand exactly why. traditionally high quality, well-researched, reputable sources are now so difficult to access. Now everything is pay walled or you have to sign up so they can track you. or there’s a crap ton of ads on the website that are really distracting and make it impossible to read anything. maybe there’s a subscription,but the bullshit is free,

Tarro: right? so like, if somebody sees a link, this happens a lot. somebody will take the time to cite a reputable source and then link to the article. But then when you go to the article, it’s not readable. there is a solution to this that I’m happy to see.

Aqua: if you have the money to do it, certain news outlets will let you gift link, articles. That will just let anybody read it, a certain number of times, which is fantastic.

and actually, uh, tech Dirt again, has made a really important decision. And that is, any coverage that pertains to, internet law or politics, is now free.

Tarro: Oh, that’s cool.

Aqua: yeah, those articles are just available for, for anyone. so they’re taking a revenue hit to do this, but, it’s important that like high quality information becomes more available again. and it’s not all coming from, I don’t know, fart Master 400, on TikTok who has 4 billion followers and sells supplements and, you know, quadcopters or something.

Sigma: yeah. We have, been through this before. We went through it during the early 20th century. the widespread availability of information in the, even in the early, uh, 20th century with, advancing telecommunications technology and teletype, there was more information going, around the world, than ever before.

And, people did not yet know how to distinguish between real news in a crap tabloid, and it took until. what mid-century? at the lease before, there was a journalistic activism movement to try to clean things up in the field of, journalism and get people to believe in real news that, is done according to a standard.

and right now with, the information technology we currently have, we have not reached the point where we’re even starting to do that very well. maybe in some places there a signs of hope, but but we’re still kind of in that era where nobody, even many intelligent people, even really has any idea what is true or not.

Tarro: So obviously, the media, and the technology is allowed to change. so I wanna make sure that I don’t come across as saying that TikTok is always bad or that blue sky is always bad, even though it does generally turn into just like an outraged machine.

Aqua: it is possible to organize and it is possible to learn about important things. Much faster on those platforms than wait for someone or something like the New York Times to get around to publishing it if they do. and I think the one, dynamic here that can really mess this up, is, it’s money driven, right?

‘cause the platform has to make money and the, you know, the content creator has to make money. and that is, the relationships that all these platforms have with, their, uh, with their creators. they’re all basically independent contractors. each website has its own algorithm and its own fee structure, and its own metrics for when a video, is considered a top performer and how hard to.

Present it to other people. YouTube is apparently pretty flexible about this according to Hank Green. you might recognize him from like side channel and, the crash course project.

Tarro: And having cancer that one time.

Aqua: Oh yeah. yeah. I’m glad he is. Okay.

Tarro: Me too.

Aqua: yeah. TikTok on the other hand, has a really brutal metric, and that is like, you know, if YouTube will consider a video successful, if it reaches, say, I don’t know, 30% of a channel subscribers, TikTok, the threshold is much lower.

It’s like 5%. And, and they’re much quicker to judge whether a video is, high performing. And if it’s not, then they just bury it and, it’s never seen again by anyone. so that creates an incentive to create a certain kind of. Product with a certain kind of message, and that may not be in your best interest As a consumer who is looking for truthful, trustworthy answers to whatever, it’s,

Tarro: Yeah, I mean, like we’re talking about before with memes, TikTok is made to create short clips that go viral, whereas something like YouTube might, incentivize longer videos that go into more detail. And so if you are finding your information from TikTok, maybe the best thing you can do is hear about a story and then search about it somewhere else.

Sigma: I have always been suspicious of any form of social media where they limit you or, incentivize you toward, short messages for people that have short attention spans. usually that leads to those kinds of issues in my personal opinion.

Tarro: So now we’ve talked a little bit about why this works and why it happens and how people get into a mode where they are vulnerable to, this kind of manipulation and, it’s, I think we can agree that it’s.

Aqua: In general, it’s not their fault. I’m never gonna blame somebody for caring so much that they just fall into despair and then they don’t know what to do okay. don’t buy a jade egg for your vagina. Fine. so like, what do we do about this? like how do we combat the bullshit? you know, I think first we need to acknowledge that as zoos, we are not immune to this.

and there are probably people listening who think that we engage in misinformation ourselves, and sometimes we do. so like we need to be aware that, uh, this is something that can creep into our own, behavior and then, and try to control for it. I like to think that we do a pretty good job, but, zoos are everywhere and they come from all walks of life, and I. Everybody’s in a different place with this.

Tarro: Yeah, and I mean, I wanna make it clear that it’s not even always a malicious thing like we were talking about, intellectual suicide. Sometimes, you know, a zoo doing this is just them retweeting something that someone else retweeted that they think is interesting without actually like doing any research.

Or maybe sometimes it’s, just a matter of someone who. Hasn’t spent enough time actually like learning about a topic and then talking about it in a way that they think is correct, but it’s not. I just think it’s really important to say that misinformation specifically can sometimes just be negligence amplified by a platform like Twitter where someone just wants to put something out and doesn’t spend that much time on it.

Aqua: yeah, I agree. I’m gonna, just remind everybody listening that there’s another excellent podcast out there that covers this topic in depth. and this is, from the UNSW Center for Ideas. the episode features Jennifer Gunter, who’s, a scientist and a communicator, who, is pretty famous, for making a mess on social media when necessary.

I think she likes to call it choosing when to get the baseball bat and when to just ignore it. but, that’s where, this phrase, asymmetry of bullshit came from, which I love. Her approach is, first of all to choose whether or not like she has the emotional capacity to respond to batter incomplete coverage,and to try to work that into her normal social media presence.

the way that she does this is roughly dividing her time on social media, into thirds where about a third of her activity is, directly related to her field of study and expertise. Another third is in some other adjacent field, where, you know, she’ll discuss or link to other concepts and then opine on them in an intelligent way, you know, without getting out over her skis too much.

and then, a third of it is just normal slice of life stuff. Because she recognizes that if you’re going to be an effective communicator, it’s helpful to appear to be a complete person, and not just a robot that does nothing but retweet things and then complain about them. I really like that strategy.

I haven’t really been able to do that on Blue Sky, but that’s kind of similar to what I was trying to do on Twitter. I don’t know. Tara, is that your approach?

Tarro: it’s what I hope my approach is. I’m admittedly sometimes bad at it and I have a tendency to, get into my rabbit holes, but I think that is a really healthy way to try and approach it when you’re trying to figure out how to still engage with the outside world while maintaining your mental health to some degree.

Aqua: one of the strategies that we should be trying to use, is just being more available. And, in a way, that’s the point of the podcast. this idea that exposure is a solution and that visibility comes first, and then then discussion and then, we go from there. we have had some opportunities to, to do this and we’ve had some, success stories and, you know, and some others that we had to say no or, you know, others said no, thank you. so like, you know, we talked about Taboo Science with Ashley Hamer. that was a lot of fun for a short episode.

It was pretty good. there were definitely some mistakes and some things I wish I had said differently, but that’s how it goes. there are some other projects that are up and coming, Toggle and I, for example, had an opportunity to, do interviews for, podcast in Norway. which, uh, I don’t have a release date.

I don’t know what it is yet. but it’s, it was structured fairly similarly. Like it’s gonna be a short series about Zoophilia specifically in Norway. But, we got asked to participate because,

they were having real difficulty finding anybody who would speak in defense of Zoophilia, and shed some light on that side of the community.

and I was very happy to be able to do that.

Tarro: Yeah, shout out to viewers from Norway.

Aqua: yeah, I mean, we, we definitely have some zoo friends there, so. we know what happens.

Sigma: personally I am thinking that, podcasts and other long form, communication, is most likely one of the best things that we can do to combat bullshit because in my personal opinion, what I suspect very strongly is that the more, a a form of media, uh, whether it’s social media or any form of media relies on, brief, short advertisements, the more it becomes infested with nonsense slogans.

and,it, it just becomes a meme hell. whereas,I feel like,not all podcasts are perfect, or pristine or completely devoid of anything negative, but at least with the podcast, you attract people that, Actually want to sit and listen to a longer form of communication and, uh, take the time to try to understand something, or at least there’s a better chance, than, over other forms of social media.

I am a huge fan of long form communication, whether it’s, um, actually sitting down to read a book rather than,something that, that is more condensed, or, uh, listening to a podcast rather than doom scrolling social media.

Aqua: Yeah, I like long format discussions too.

it’s just especially something as difficult, you know, as Ophelia, that’s so complicated and about which information is pretty scarce and pretty one-sided. at least for now. you know, you can’t really condense that down to 300 characters.

you just can’t. so that’s one strategy, like just being more available and willing,to speak and, and tell our own stories. oh, there was another one, that just finally got published on Vice.

Tarro: Yeah, I mean, it, it does fit what we were saying.

Aqua: So this is an interesting one because the amount of time that passed between, our interview, with the journalist and the story actually being published was a few years. but there is a vice article out there, that was published last month. I think the title is something like, we Are Everywhere meeting the Zoa Files Next Door.

it’s not my favorite article, but, it’s also not particularly heavy handed in one direction or another. and

Tarro: I would maybe argue against that, but I’m also maybe just more sensitive. I, I think it was pretty negative.

Aqua: yeah, I mean there’s definitely some, some parts of it that I don’t like. I really was surprised that they bothered mentioning, like medication, Interactions as like maybe clouding somebody’s judgment and turning them into like a sex fiend or something, like Alzheimer’s medication.

Tarro: Mm-hmm.

Aqua: is that even in there?

they, I could have done without that.

But, what’s interesting though is, we were interviewed for that, I think back in 2022. and then it was delayed for a bunch of, private reasons, that really don’t matter. And now finally it just kind of drops. And like we, we thought it was a dead project, but here it is.

Tarro: Yeah. And to be clear, private reasons, not you guys saying, please don’t put this out because of our reason. Private reasons on the side of the publisher.

Aqua: yeah, like there were very good reasons to not publish. and, uh, but I was expecting a turnaround of like three to six months and then nothing happened. And that was the end of it until suddenly it wasn’t. It’s worth reading. I guess the polite way to say this is that nobody is particularly thrilled with the article and maybe that means it’s a success.

there are parts of it that I don’t like. There are a handful of other people who are extremely upset that it exists at all. and they can just mold.

Tarro: I do think it is a very interesting look into the way that someone who clearly has not spent a lot of time researching the subculture sees zoos from the outside. I will say that, and I think that’s part of why some people see the articles so negatively, and some people see it positively because it paints a very like, interesting perspective that, you know, we don’t necessarily see a lot from people that are, are more involved in the discussion.

Aqua: Yeah. I also appreciate that unlike say, the Russia Today article, there wasn’t any apparent effort at shoehorning in some other group of marginalized people and like connecting them in a way to us that is not correct and just, you know, to make it more palatable or more universal for, readers to just hate everybody at the same time. it was just about Zoophilia, you know, and that was, that was kind of nice. There’s a docudrama series, coming out in the fall, from a MC. a few of us were in talks to participate there, and ended up having a, a pretty good, productive discussion, with the, documentary team. we ended up not, participating. and that’s fine, right? I think enough of our ideas got through that maybe some of them will end up in the final product, but we’re gonna wait and see what it looks like. I’m looking forward to it. but,that’s an example of one that didn’t work out and, that’s pretty typical.

If there is a production deadline or a budget problem, or the story goes in a different direction, it’s like you can’t take that personally.

Tarro: I’m excited for the, content that we put out about it, if nothing else. Um, and, feel free to check out a review of that on zoo.pub.

Aqua: Yeah. and like of course, you know, the, the Sizzler headline is out Therian some other people that, participated, or contributed to it are, you know, doing a bunch of their, like their PR work for them. and that’s all fine. That’s allowed. like I said, I’m, I’m looking forward to it.

I think it’s, there’s a chance that this could be, uh, it’s long enough, that it could end up being a really comprehensive,and good quality record of the events that it’s covering. you know, and not like a hit piece that just vilifies us. I don’t think that’s gonna happen. but that brings us to, like this idea of being proactive.

When information is coming or when a story is about to break, this is one that Jennifer Gunter calls pre bunking, which unlike debunking, in her experience, seems to take less effort. it requires that you have access to information, or deep knowledge about a subject before, it’s publicly available.

So sometimes it’s not possible. but the idea is if you know that a discussion or a story or a product of some kind is, is about to hit the mainstream, then if you have, the resources to do it, sometimes it makes sense to release something about it first and try to get ahead of it. and sometimes you can stop it from being published at all, but that’s rare.

Tarro: I don’t think there’s anything for me to pre bunk. For any of this, the other media projects that I just mentioned, I’m just gonna wait and see. I think that even just having this discussion as we are right now is debunking it to a certain degree where, you know, we’re, we’re making people aware of its existence in a way where they’re going to be more ready and more, I guess tuned into the discussion when it does happen as a result of that coming out.

And I think that’s like the sort of healthy limit for what we’re able to do with something like this.

Aqua: yeah, that’s true. I guess user clout where you can No, I, I have like, what, 180 followers or something, and I don’t want thousands. taro you have got me beat for sure.

on Twitter, you did. and then there’s the magazine, of course. you know, I can’t match that and that’s not really what I’m trying to do. I guess the, the other side of this is like kind of getting back to her choice about whether to respond to something at all or just let it go. So we were just talking about how to be more available, which is our general approach. The other option is to be deliberately unavailable. and there’s some good reasons to consider this.

like not every, media opportunity, not every story is worth, pinning your name to, it’s probably a bad idea to appear alongside grifters or trolls, as equals when they are not. like if you have expertise in a subject and they don’t, then you know, think carefully before you do that.

Like, why are you actually there? Are you there to give, a minority position that is incorrect or dangerous? Oxygen, and exposure. or are you there to speak out against it? and do you need to do either of those things?

Tarro: Yeah. there was a podcast that went out recently by a person who, I’m not going to name exactly for that reason, that, was extremely negative about zoos to a, you know, mediumly sized audience that ended with them. Doxing someone in the community, that came out six or eight months ago at this point.

And, the solution there was very clearly, let’s just ignore this ‘cause it’s going to go away and we don’t wanna spread the information in this to a larger audience, which we would have done even if we’d come out against it negatively.

Aqua: and like this is pretty common in activism in general. Like, Peter Singer, has his own podcast, which is pretty good. it’s a little bit of a dry listen, Anyway, I like it. but at one point, uh, he did note with one of his guests that on certain issues, for example, factory farming or zoophilia, it can be really difficult to find anybody willing to support the minority position. so like if you get invited as, uh, as an animal rights activist or a vegan or something to talk about the horrors of factory farming, you’re like, okay, great. I’m happy to do that. But you’re gonna have a really hard time finding somebody that is willing to take, you know, a position that like factory farming is good actually. which leads me to kind of a tricky, situation for zoos because right now we are the minority position.

Sigma: the extreme minority position for right now.

Aqua: that’s us. it’s almost like a reversal where, Sometimes we have to decide whether we wanna appear alongside somebody else that we prefer not to be, associated with, or with whom we are not equals that other guest might be having the same thoughts about us and,that’s not resolvable.

but like, it’s worth thinking about, like, which position am I here? am I coming on as a subject matter expert? or am I here to defend myself? And like, is that gonna work out? is this even gonna get published because, you know, maybe the host, doesn’t like something that I say and it just gets shut down completely.

that one’s tough. I don’t have an answer to that. it’s a case by case thing for us.

Tarro: Yeah, it, I mean it’s something that I think about a lot as it comes to social media. you’ve been having more luck with Blue Sky than I have, Twitter is famous currently for being like the right wing Nazi platform, where you can be racist or transphobic, and that’s super cool. and it also happens to be the platform where you can be an open zoo and nobody gives you any trouble for it.

Aqua: Well, nobody of consequence.

Tarro: And so there’s a

complicated

conversation around. As it comes to like platform staff, you’re not gonna be able to, you’re not getting banned for it, I guess. but at the same time, it is very frustrating being someone who’s trying to advocate for the cause that, that I’m trying to support.

and the only reason I feel allowed to exist in that space is because I’m also willing to be on the platform where others who are advocating for causes that I don’t support are also allowed to be on. So it’s always sort of a back and forth as it comes to, like, especially for our community, where you’re willing to put your messaging and in what kind of content and what scenarios.

Aqua: Like how much grief and effort is worth it to put, different information or a contrasting opinion into a thread for others to find, so that it isn’t just a one-sided, statement.

Sigma: This is one of the reasons why I have never really, trusted social media at all. I knew that it was going to go in this direction. That is why I have never had a Twitter account in my entire life and barely ever use my old Facebook account and quit using it entirely, uh, after they would not allow me to change my name to the one that I use like everywhere now, because they don’t think it’s a real name because it’s not a common name.

, I, think that, the issue is, that we. In my opinion, we’re wrong to ever think that form of social media was gonna come to any good at all. those of us that ever did trust that form of social media, and to me it goes back, to, the bias of those forms of social media, toward soundbites, toward, short term communication towards slogans is basically just a propaganda platform that is what it was created as basically as an advertising platform, but also as a propaganda platform.

we should have expected it to become a propaganda platform for Nazis and other lunatic groups. and the problem is that if you try to spread even good ideas about, zoo there, then those same Nazis are going to pick up only the bear’s fragment of that idea and turn it into something monstrous and evil.

And you end up with another group of Zeus sadists out there, that are trying to promote their particular thing. in the same way. uh, there is apparel, in putting any idea on a propaganda platform because you’re gonna see later a distorted form of it that turns into another form of, uh, misinformation or disinformation, and it just, becomes a mess.

I know that, some other people in the community disagree, and that they rely on, these systems to have any kind of a community at all. I have just chosen to abstain.

Aqua: Yeah. Understandable. I think that leads us to the authenticity problem that, a lot of this falls under. So, you know, we talked about how good information, can be transformed unwittingly or deliberately into something that is useless or incorrect, and then it can persist for a very long time.

that is not something that we can solve completely. It’s like impossible for anyone. It’s, there’s no way to do platform moderation at scale that is any good, uh, or that serves everyone equally. it’s intractable. Maybe there is an opportunity here to do something to, try to protect our words, and like including the mistakes. I bring this up because again, you know, the malicious version of this,disinformation, it wouldn’t be difficult to like manufacture or create, fake content. you know, like it happens all the time. But now there’s tools available that, could make any one of our voices, uh, you know, say something that we didn’t say.

How do we respond to that? How, like we don’t have any widespread universal, like technical countermeasures for this. like we don’t have it even for state or government communications. we don’t have it for images. I managed to sneak Will Smith eating spaghetti again into this. So there it is. one idea that I had, that I’m gonna explore with some people who are better at this stuff than I am is whether or not it’s worth, coming up with some kind of authentication mechanism for the show.

so that at least we have a reference that we all agree on and we all stand behind. Not sure what’s gonna happen with that,we’ll see we’re working on it.

Tarro: Yeah, I mean, especially as, some people would consider us to be controversial figures with hours of, our audio out on the internet, it, is more likely that we are going to get targeted by that kind of harassment, especially as the technology gets more accessible and easier to use. And so having some kind of way to be able to say, Hey, clearly this is not us, without having to tell someone to scroll through like hours and hours and hours and hours of podcasts would be great.

It’s just hard to figure out the best way to do that.

Aqua: Yep. So, yeah, stay tuned on that one, I guess. and then, I guess we’ll wrap up with, well, a question about what we should be spending our time on, aside from putting out the information that we wanna see and trying to facilitate the discussions that we want to have, what is the big issue that is at the center of all of this that, uh, you would most like to see addressed?

Sigma: uh, the one thing that leaks out, to me as a primary thing that, I would try to address anyway, whether or not it was, about this would try to address the issue that. the Western world in general has become a culture of impatience. We have become a, culture where it, is becoming a.

Nearly lost art to, sit down and listen to one thing, or pay attention to one thing, for maybe an hour. and to take the time to understand it fully and to research it and to,and to dig into sources and to, and to try to fully ground it. We are a. Culture these days that have forgotten how to grok. we have forgotten how to, put out an effort to truly understand something deeply, and it is a terrible dysfunction. I believe that we lose something more than just quality information. By that, I think that we, lose a major aspect of having a fulfilled life also by, turning ourselves into such a culture of impatience.

Aqua: That’s still a great answer though.

Tarro: Yeah.

Aqua: taro.

Tarro: For me, I think the big takeaway here is, as it comes to scientific literacy, and I know we, we spend a pretty good amount of time on that, but I think that as the community grows, if you are someone out there who is hoping that we get into a position where, we start seeing more studies on zoos and we start seeing the zoo conversation come up more in, in general society, a big part of that is going to start with the kind of research that people like Dr.

Zeidenberg are doing. And so I would really, really, really encourage people to just watch a YouTube video, even on the basics of scientific literacy. Maybe find a topic that interests you and take a look at a couple of different studies just to familiarize yourself with the way that it’s, framed and worded and that kind of thing, because.

Just like knowing how to read science in a way that you actually get all of the information that’s being put out is going to be so helpful for not only, you know, studying anything else that is of interest to you, but especially as it pertains to our situation, understanding a lot of the information that’s gonna be coming out about us and our community and our culture in the future.

Aqua: Yeah, agreed. so my answer is similar and it’s, it’s a little more specific than that. I would love it if, future research projects, focused more on trying to, correctly delineate, zoophilia from animal abuse. Because that doesn’t really exist in sufficient quantity yet. so I’m addressing like all of the dead airplane passengers, you know, or all of us who, want the opposite of what is being described in the majority of the research that’s out there.

you know, it’s, we’re not in them and, you know, we’re, we’re getting there. We’re like, the first step was just like being present and finding enough of each other that people can do research on us because there’s like a sufficient number of people available that are willing to take that risk or even just take the time. that’s kind of been the focus of, my work for a couple of years, on the podcast and off of it. I guess that’s what I’m gonna be doing.

I just want a more complete understanding. And, and at least in that way, I think I am in, agreement with, all of the other

researchers that have, uh, you know, already conducted various work, even if it comes out, not in our favor.

you know, because we have to be prepared to accept results that are, that are not encouraging. and, I don’t think it’s gonna go that way. I think that we will eventually discover, that zoophilia, as we know it, is a distinct category. And, we’re here and it’s worth considering and like we belong in any kind of discussion about animal welfare. the,one of the things I have to remind myself is, that in always, except for one, I’m probably in agreement and have a lot of projects that I could work on quite happily alongside somebody who works at the Humane Society is really just the one issue. so I have no idea how long this is gonna take or if it ever happens, but that’s what I’m focused on. you know, your desire for, better scientific literacy, and teaching people how to grok information, Sigma, that’s all gotta come along

with it.

I.

Tarro: To be clear to anyone listening, that does not mean Twitter’s ai different thing.

Aqua: yeah. Again, we’re back to fancy spell check that just hallucinates, but okay. Well, I think that takes us to the end. if anybody listening has ideas or they have particular issues that they would like to see addressed, or, if you think that we’ve missed something, drop us a line. there’s three of us here.

we have our perspectives and, I can’t hope to represent everybody here, but I’m trying,

Tarro: Yeah, and you can use the email for sure. You can contact us directly, but also wherever it is that you’re listening to this, or wherever you found the link to listen to this, feel free to to comment about it there too. We love seeing replies on Twitter. we love seeing people talk about the episodes on forums and whatnot.

You know, we, we are looking, we’re very excited when people, respond to the content that we’re putting out. So, everything should be a conversation, especially when it comes to things like this. So whatever means is easiest to you.

Aqua: on. well, Sigma an taro. thank you so much for joining me for this incredibly complex topic that, you know, we spent the better part of an hour and a half trying to tease apart and understand.

Sigma: I’m glad that y’all, thought of me for it. it’s, it’s always nice to be a part of one of these

Aqua: yeah, we can always count on you to bring a perspective that neither one of us would’ve considered. things, You’ve never been corrupted by Twitter. Your thoughts are so pure.

Sigma: and, that level of purity, you have to be either a unicorn or a dragon. And, uh, they’re two different kinds of purity, but they’re both, uh, sort of, uh, you know, that’s where all the dragons are. We are not on mainstream social media. we’re in book clubs. so find me at one of those.

Aqua: well thanks again to you both. Alright, everybody stay tuned for more Zooier Than Thou right after this.

Outro

Sigma: Thanks friends for listening to Zooier Than Thou.

Aqua: next episode is on July 10th, the Buck Moon.

Tarro: Zoo Pride episode, baby. It’s sure to be a fun one.

Aqua: You can subscribe to the podcast via our zoo RSS feed. Just point your favorite podcast [email protected]. You can also check out our extensive bonus [email protected]. If you want to show your support financially, head on over to donate zoo.wtf. Find us on Blue Sky at you. Guessed [email protected].

Sigma: Our podcast website hasn’t changed, and you can find a form there that enables anonymous submissions to the podcast, or send an email to mail at Zoo wtf.

Tarro: Share this podcast with someone who’s looking for ways to find the signal in the noise and help others too.

Sigma: I am Sigma and call people out on their bullshit rather than roasting them alive.

Tarro: I am taro. I’m a raccoon.

Aqua: And I’m aqua anxiously awaiting for my summer coat, and you’ve almost finished listening to Zooier Than Thou Stay Defiant Fellow Zoos. We’ll see you next time. You feel like howling at the moon. Oh.

Tarro: Oh,

Aqua: That was a good one.