I have here a schematic of the hemisection of the eye, and it's nice and simple so you can imagine a light coming from where my arrow is and passing through the cornea where the light rays are bent to a certain degree, and then through the aqueous fluid that occupies this anterior chamber, next to the lens where the light rays are bent even more, and back through the jelly-like vitreous to end up if you're looking and focusing on something right here in this pit called the fovea in the back of the eyeball. The fovea is part of the retina, which is this dark red structure here, and if we look at the retina in more detail, we can look at a cartoon that illustrates the different types of cells found in the retina, although they're not distributed in exactly this fashion. This is a composite view. So here comes our light. It's coming through and it has to move through a layer of cells here and another layer of cells here, and the cell bodies of the receptors to finally reach the outer part of these receptors where the photopigment is that is important in the initiation of the phototransduction process. Wait, you say. Light's coming in here and has to go all the way through these layers in order to begin the process. That's right. It's just inside out from how a logical person would have designed it for the best visual acuity. But be that as it may, let's now go backwards from the phototransduction moment back to cells here in this intermediate bipolar layer, processing information to another layer of cells, ganglion cells of different sizes and shapes doing other types of visual processing, and finally to the axons, the axons coming from these individual ganglion cells and forming a nerve fiber layer on the inner surface of the retina. These axons are not myelinated so that light can pass through them more easily, but only when they come to the surface and amass here at the level of the optic nerve where they're going to exit do they pass through and at this point these little dotted lines represent the myelinated axons. The myelin allows the nerve impulse then, which is now generated, to be propagated all the way to the thalamus. So we have axons in the optic nerve, but notice we have something else. We have a red retinal artery coming in and splaying out over the surface of the retina, and we have this blue retinal vein exiting through the optic nerve. So we have retinal vessels going and coming and they're not floating out here in the vitreous. They're plastered up against the surface. So now let's look at a diagram that will show us in more detail the foveal area and the optic axis. This hemisection of the eye is turned 90 degrees from the last one. So light now is coming from above here and we want to focus on the visual axis. So light rays coming in get bent, and you'll notice if it's coming from the left side against bent a little bit and ends up to the right side of the optic axis. And that's the way that we want to think about light falling on the retina. This pit here is that fovea that we have this dip in the retina, which is for acute vision. It's acute vision because it has a thinner surface for the light to penetrate. It doesn't have all those cell layers. The cells have been displaced laterally. So light falls without as much disturbance upon those receptor cells, cones in this case, in the fovea. And the rods for peripheral vision are concentrated around the outside. So think of the foveal region for cones and the peripheral region for the rods. High, acuity, color, low acuity, low light, and dispersed light. So now this area on either side of the fovea has an amacula. Amacula means spot and lutea means yellow. So we have this yellow spot, but when you look at it through the ophthalmoscope, it really doesn't look very yellow. Now let's look through the ophthalmoscope and see what both the optic nerve or disc would look like and what the fovea looks like. This is the image you would see if you were to take your ophthalmoscope and look through the right eye of a patient with skin that has very little pigment in it. So we have the two post-prominent areas, the optic nerve, very, very easy to see. And notice you can see those retinal vessels, the artery and the veins coming through the optic nerve head. And the axons from the ganglion cells would be passing back through this space. So this is the optic disc, also called the optic nerve head, also called the optic papilla. And over here, this is the area of the fovea. There's supposed to be a yellow spot, but I personally can never see it. What I see is a blush and the retina is thinner, particularly in this pit. This is the axis upon which the collimated most focused light rays fall. This is the area of acute vision. This is cone vision, color vision. And this is the area which degenerates in macular degeneration. And now you can understand why macular degeneration is such a huge problem because it is the type of acute vision that you use for reading and focusing all of the time. Now let's look at what it would look like if we looked at both eyes and compare them and put them side by side. Now we have a picture with the fundoscopic view from both eyes. So you have to imagine the nose in the middle, and this is the right eye and this is the left eye of the individual. And note that the optic disc and the fovea, the optic disc and the fovea, and the fovea is always to the side of the optic disc. In other words, the optic disc is more nasal when the eye is looked at through the ophthalmoscope. And you can see all these little retinal vessels just beautifully. And this is the area of the fovea. So this is the macular luteum, but it's not very yellow. And then here is the deeper pit of the fovea, which is just a fraction of a millimeter. And we also can see that this retina is different from the last one in that it looks browner. And that is because this is from a person with more pigmented skin. We have here a person who is looking out at their visual world and we're hovering, looking down from above. And we put up this blue wedge which shows what the left eye sees when the right eye is closed. And we put up a red wedge which shows what the right eye sees with the left eye closed. Now we both open both eyes and we see both the red and the blue wedges. The central area between 60 degrees is seen by both eyes. This is how we get stereoscopic or binocular depth perception. However, if the left occipital pole of the brain, which represents the right or red part of your visual world, is damaged, then the black lesion wedge between 60 degrees and 95 degrees is lost. However, with both eyes open, the patient may be totally unaware of this visual loss. That is why it is important to test each eye separately in order to pick up a massive visual field loss with an occipital lesion. To orient you to the visual system, I have this little animation which let's walk through as an overview of what we're going to see later in other diagrams and growth specimens. This represents the visual field of what each eye sees when the other eye is closed. So this is the right eye visual field and this is the visual field of the left eye. Now there is another term that I want you to avoid using and that is retinal field. That is where the image falls on the retina. Because what you test in a patient is what they see as if you were standing behind the person just as we saw with the wedges. Now the back of the eye has the retina with the ganglion cells. And these ganglion cells are connected with other cells, the receptors, which we'll talk about later. But what you need to understand is what part of the visual field falls on each retina. The visual field is described in quadrants. There is the central macular vision for each eye. There is the upper half, the superior half and the inferior half. And there is the right or temporal half and the left or nasal half of this eye. So we have nasal because it's toward the nose. We have temporal because it's on the outside. We have superior because it's above the horizon and inferior. So we have all these quadrants or hemispheres of the visual field. We use terms superior, inferior, temporal, nasal, peripheral, central or macular. And we describe each visual field for each eye in that way. Now the ganglion cells, because they are stimulated by light rays in the opposite half of the visual world and are bent onto the retina by the cornea and the lens. The retinal fields are just the opposite of the visual fields. So to avoid confusion, we only talk about the visual fields. Now the ganglion cells are the cells that send their axons back to the thalamus. Now let's look at the left eye here. The left eye has two halves and those that are nearest to the nose are going to cross after they come back through the optic nerve. This is the optic nerve. And there is at the chiasm, the optic chiasm, a partial decussation crossing. Some of those axons cross to the other side and some of those axons do not cross to the other side. The result of this is that the information that is coming from the left half of the visual world, the left visual field of each eye falling here on the retina is crossing and not crossing to end up in the right thalamus. Left half of the visual world is going to the right thalamus to a nucleus called the lateral geniculate. From that nucleus come axons called the optic radiations. They're similar to the internal capsule, the back part of the internal capsule. And those axons come back and terminate in the visual cortex, in striped cortex along the chalcorin fissure. And this represents the upper bank of the chalcorin fissure and this is the lower bank of the chalcorin fissure. And there is a retinotopic projection such as the lower part of your visual world is on the upper part and the upper part of your visual world is on the lower part. You ought to be used to things being backwards from what you expect by now. The end result of all of this is that the left half of the visual world of each eye is now in the right thalamus and the right cortex. Very similar to sensory information. Sensory information from the left side of your body ended up in the right post-central gyrus. Visual information from the left half of your visual world is going to end up in the right visual cortex. Now before we go to the gross specimens, let's look at this model. And we can see here in the left orbit we can see the optic nerve in the back of the orbit. Now let's see what happens as the nerve comes in through the optic canal. I'm going to turn this and now we're looking at the inside of the cranium. And here we have our two optic nerves, the right and the left. And behind here we have the chiasm, the optic chiasm. This is where some of the axons are going to cross to each side. This is our partial decussation. And behind the chiasm these are called the optic tracts, the right and left optic tract. The left optic tract is looking at the right half of each visual field. And the right optic tract is looking at the left half of the visual field of each eye. Now notice here some relationships. This is the internal carotid artery. It sits right here, right in the notch between the optic nerve and the optic tract. And if you recall some anatomy, underneath the chiasm, not visible here, is the pituitary gland. So remember that pressure from a tumor of the pituitary gland can push up onto the optic chiasm and disrupt some of that visual information that's coming in. Or pressure from a dilatation of the internal carotid artery could press on some of the axons in the lateral area. So now let's move on and look at the gross specimen. So here we have the ventral surface of the brain. And to orient you we have the olfactory bulbs and tracts coming in, cranial nerve 1. And here is our cranial nerve 2, our optic nerve. And behind it we have the chiasm, the partial crossing or decussation. And behind that the optic tract on each side. This small artifactual hole is where the pituitary gland was attached. And the stalk has been torn off, leaving us a nice view of the ventral surface of the hypothalamus. Now, each optic tract on either side comes around the cerebral peduncle on either side. So the optic tract wraps around that side and that side. And notice that is in close proximity to the posterior cerebral artery. The tract is going to relay in the thalamus in the lateral geniculate. And the posterior cerebral artery is going to supply our visual or occipital cortex. Alright, so now we're going to pretend that we're making coronal sections through this beautiful brain. I don't want to disturb it. And we're going to make and create three slices, three coronal or frontal sections. And we're going to look at the most rostral one right here. This section is through the optic chiasm right here. This is the third ventricle. And here is where the pituitary stalk was attached. And out here we have the chiasm beginning to form the optic tract. So here is the temporal lobe on either side and the third ventricle, the very front of it. You can see a bit of the anterior commissure and the two lateral ventricles. And here are branches coming off of the middle cerebral artery. Now let's go to the next section. This section is back a little bit farther. We have the level of the thalamus. This is the central part of the thalamus. This is the third ventricle and hypothalamus down in this region with the mammillary bodies. And out here to the side, on either side, this area, if you look at it carefully, up close, this is the optic tract that's coming back. Remember we are more caudal than the last section. So here's the optic tract coming back and it's looking for the lateral geniculate where it is going to relay or synapse. So this section is really far back. This is the level of the pineal gland and the superior colliculus and the aqueduct. So this is midbrain. We're at the very back end of the thalamus. A region called the pulvanar, which isn't important for our discussion. And then right out here to the side below the pulvanar are two geniculate bodies, a lateral one and a medial one. The lateral one is for vision and we're going to learn that the medial one is for audition. So the way I remember that is lateral light, lateral geniculate, medial music. We're just going to focus on the lateral and then out here come the axons from the lateral geniculate out into the back part of the internal capsule and they're going to continue posteriorly caudally toward the occipital pole. So next we're going to look at an axial or a horizontal section as if we had cut through in this direction. So just rotate this like this and then we're going to put the brain down and we're going to lift up an axial or a horizontal section. So orienting you, this continues to be the frontal lobe. This is the occipital lobe. This is the ventricular system, the frontal horn and the occipital horns of the ventricles. And now if we come in close we can see kind of a white band of fibers. Those are called the optic radiations. They are the axons coming from the lateral geniculate which was approximately here but down a little deeper, coming from the lateral geniculate on each side and going back to the visual cortex. They're going back to the visual cortex in an arranged fashion. We call that retinotopic. Remember that if this is the right hemisphere these are going to be axons representing the left half of the visual world of each eye and if this is the left hemisphere then these are representing information coming from the right half of the visual field of each eye. So now let's look at a mid-sagittal section of the brain and look at the organization of the visual cortex. So now we have a very nice right hemisphere and we can see the occipital lobe going back like this and this sulcus is the chalcorin sulcus or the chalcorin fissure and the cortex on the upper part of the bank of the fissure is representing the lower part of your visual world and the part on the lower bank is representing the upper part of your visual world. Yes I know it's just backwards. And this area that's more toward the rostral pole is the peripheral part of your vision and the part that's back here, particularly around the pole here is the macular or foveal area. So there is a greater area of cortex devoted to your central and important foveal vision than there is to the periphery and it's just the same as in the somatic cortex.  So we have a retinotopic projection with the macula and then the periphery coming along the bank here. So this occipital pole back here is your foveal or macular vision. This is the important part. And all of this area is supplied by the posterior cerebral artery. So as humans we are very visual people and this occipital lobe is almost entirely devoted to visual processing. Now we've only been talking about the primary visual cortex but surrounding it sort of in concentric circles are secondary or association visual areas. There are probably several maps of the retina onto the cortex but they're doing more sophisticated processing than is going on in the occipital pole. And in general we like to think about information in the association areas as going in two directions. There is this dorsal stream going up toward the parietal cortex and a ventral stream going down toward the temporal cortex. And some people say that the dorsal stream going to the parietal area is trying to help you with location of things in space, where things are. For example, if you're doing visual guidance and trying to coordinate a hand movement. Whereas the ventral stream is more involved with object recognition and knowing what it is including things such as faces or naming of objects which occurs when you have the information coming down into this ventral region toward the temporal lobe. So there are a few take home messages. The most important one is that the right hemisphere is looking at the left half of the visual world of each eye. You just have to remember that. And the other thing is that most of the time you're using your central vision. You're using cone vision. You're using daylight vision. You're doing color vision. And the periphery is looking at night vision or rod vision. It's important now to realize that the visual pathway extends all the way from the eyeball which was right under the orbital cortex here back through the optic nerve, the optic tract, through the thalamus all the way back to the occipital pole. So there are many places in the brain where you can have visual defects or visual lesions which will give you changes in their visual field testing. So there are various arteries. We already looked at the retinal arteries supplying the retina but there are other arteries supplying the chiasm, the tract. The middle cerebral artery is important in supplying some of the optic radiations here and we've seen the posterior cerebral artery that supplies the posterior region. So anterior circulation and posterior circulation problems when your vascular system can give you a visual defect. So the visual system is very sensitive way of analyzing the brain.  Right? The eye, looking at the back of the eyeball, you're looking at central nervous system.


talk to you today about why Go Global, the opportunities and challenges of changing the world at scale. My name is Allison. I'm a managing partner of Fresco Capital. We're a global early stage venture fund and innovation studio. And our mission is building global ecosystems. But first, I want to tell you a story about how I got here. This is me looking super awesome. And this is where I come from. I was born and raised in a place which was not very global at all. I'm from Illinois. The town where I grew up was the same town where my parents grew up, and their parents grew up as well. And basically, everyone was exactly the same. But for some reason, I've been trying to do global business since I was six years old. I've always been very interested in people that are different from me. And so when I was six, I did a project in school on Tanzania. And I was fascinated to learn that in Tanzania, they don't use toothbrushes. They were instead using these really cool twigs to clean their teeth. And I thought, I'd really like to learn more about this. So I wrote a letter to the embassy, and I asked them if they could kindly send me some of these toothbrush twigs so that I could distribute them to my friends and family. Obviously, no one ever wrote me back. Then I kept trying. And when I went to summer camp and I was 10, I met a girl who was here from Tokyo, who was there from Tokyo. And she started teaching me about Japan. And I was fascinated, because as I've learned over the past few years, the way you do things here is very different. So I started an aggressive campaign toward my parents, asking them to send me to Japan to learn more. But unfortunately, we couldn't afford it, so I had to keep trying. After I got to Harvard, I studied Japanese for a year, and I thought, great, this is the time. I'm going to go work in Japan. I ended up getting an internship at an architecture firm, but it was unpaid. And I figured that if I needed to come here, I should probably make a little bit money so that I could at least afford somewhere to live. So then I tried again, and I applied to this small company called Goldman Sachs. And it wasn't because I had a big dream to work on Wall Street. It was largely because they had international offices. And I wanted to go work either in Hong Kong or Tokyo and finally have that experience I'd been dreaming of. But they took one look at me and heard my Japanese language skills, and they said, nope, you got to go to New York. You can't come out here. So I went there, and I started building my reputation on Wall Street. And I thought, OK, people know who I am. I've done a good job here. It's the perfect time to start pitching them on transferring out to an international office. But we were in the midst of the financial crisis. We were in the midst of the financial crisis. And the firm was under siege from the regulators so the timing wasn't right. So then I thought, OK, maybe I should go to a place that's faster moving and innovative and more willing to move fast and break things. So I joined an early stage startup based in New York called General Assembly. General Assembly started as a co-working space but then was launching at the time an education business to train working professionals in digital and entrepreneurial skills. Our mission was to empower people with the skills they needed to pursue work that they loved. So I was an early member of the team. It was an amazing experience. We developed those programs and launched them in New York. We had just raised a new round of VC funding, and I thought this timing is perfect. Now I'm going to pitch them on why they need to be a global business. So I put together a beautiful PowerPoint, and I went, and I met with the founders, and I told them all of the reasons why they should go global. And the answer was no. So we sat there and we had a conversation about, even though it sounded really great, there were tons of reasons not to build a global business. It's actually insane. The first reason is that nobody knows you. It doesn't matter how famous or beloved you are in your home market. When you show up in a new place, none of that matters. I got a call from one of our founders based in Silicon Valley the other day because a Japanese corporate had reached out about meeting with him about a potential investment or acquisition. And he said, Allison, I'm really busy building our startup. I have no idea who these guys are. Is it worth meeting with them? And I look at the email, and it's actually one of the most famous well-known companies here in Japan, and the CEO is somewhat of a celebrity. But that meant absolutely nothing to our founder in Silicon Valley. So I had to explain to him just how important this meeting could be. The second reason is what you did before won't work now. When you launch in a new place, it's guaranteed that things are going to be different. And localization is required for your product, for your team, your business model. And there's a million other reasons why it's totally crazy to build a global business. And I've heard them over and over, over the years. But as I was sitting there talking to our founders, I kept thinking at the time, I kept thinking of this quote from Steve Jobs, which is that the people that are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones that do. So I decided to do something crazy, and I told them I was gonna do it anyway. So I bought a one-way plane ticket to Hong Kong and decided to move out there to launch these education programs. At the last minute, they realized I was both crazy and serious at the same time, and they gave me the go-ahead. And that's what I did. It was an amazing time. We launched these education programs. In our first year, we empowered 2,500 people in Hong Kong with the digital and entrepreneurial skills they needed to pursue work that they loved. And over that time, I was able to build a team, and I could see that the opportunity was so much greater than I had ever realized before having landed on the ground there. But the challenges were great too. And one of the biggest challenges was convincing our founders to give me the kind of resources and flexibility that we would need in order to truly pursue this opportunity. So I went and sought the advice of some people that I trusted. They were my friends at the time, and now they're my partners at Fresco Capital. But they also had experience building global businesses. My partner, Steven, was born and raised in New York, and he is the technical co-founder of five different VC-backed startups. His last one was a developer tools company called Telerik, and he had run around all over the world, setting up their international offices and connecting with local developer ecosystems there. Before that, he had done something similar for Microsoft. Antitis, my other partner, was born in Poland, grew up in Canada, and had spent time living all over the world, scaling financial businesses once for HSBC and once for himself. And we realized that there was a gap in the market. Most early-stage investors are very local. They think only in terms of their local ecosystem, and that's very important, especially at the early stage. But we felt we had something unique to offer that we could leverage our experience, our network, and our capital to help companies go global. So we set up our first fund, we raised the money from some other globally-minded investors, and we started making investments. We made those investments in companies no matter where they were based, and then we got our hands dirty helping them go global. That meant getting them their first sales customers in Asia, or helping them negotiate with manufacturers in Shenzhen, or helping them move their engineering team from San Francisco to Europe in order to save on runway. And then we started making some more investments and learning in the process of what our companies needed and what their challenges were. And through that, we started to build a really amazing team of other people that were just the right amount of crazy, just crazy enough to also build global businesses. Started to notice some patterns. So we've now invested in over 50 companies around the world. We've helped about one-third of them launch internationally in some way. We've co-invested with 600 other investors, and we've even started working with our LPs and other strategic corporates who are looking for help helping their, creating their business at a global scale. And that's what I want to share with you today, is for every reason there is not to go global, there's plenty of reasons to go global. The first is there's a larger market size outside of your country than inside of it. I don't care who you are or where you're from, even if you're from the US, China or Japan, your market is larger outside. Take Facebook, for example, one of the most powerful companies in the world. It's worth about $400 billion, and they have 1.23 billion daily average users. It's definitely known as an American company. It was founded at my alma mater. But they created this beautiful map of where their daily active users are based, and as it turns out, 75% of them are outside of the US and Canada. Second reason is optimizing your operations, no matter what you want to conserve your resources, as well as leverage the unique offerings that every kind of local ecosystem has to offer. Take a company called Automatic. I'm sure many of you have never heard of it, but they actually power about 25% of the internet through wordpress.com. They have 175 million monthly unique visitors, and they've been able to do that with only 540 employees, which is drastically less than other companies that experience the same amount of traffic. And they've been able to do that because they have a 100% distributed workforce. We have another portfolio company called Spire, which is building a truly global business. They've launched about 25 small satellites into space, and they're collecting the best cheapest data about what's happening on the earth right now. And they've only been able to do that because they've built a team that's truly global and they've leveraged the talent that's available in each unique ecosystem. So they built a software engineering team in San Francisco, a weather science team in Colorado, a space team in the UK, and business development teams out here in Japan as well as Singapore. The third reason is you can have a first mover advantage. Whatever you're trying to do, if it's a big opportunity, I guarantee there are other people trying to do the same thing. And showing up first globally can make a big difference. Take Netflix, for example. They made a dramatic move in January of 2016 by launching in 130 new markets overnight. Thank God one of them was Japan because I'm a big Netflix fan. But the number one way they were able to justify this to their investors was by saying it was the only way they could get a head start on their competition. And their investors are happy because now they're getting 73% of their new users from international sources. And the stock is trading at 340 times earnings per share which is one of the best performing stocks on the NASDAQ stock exchange. The fourth reason is access to capital. The most successful and powerful companies are staying private for longer. And they've been able to do that because they brought in large later stage investors from international sources. It's estimated that 26% of US unicorns have at least one investor from China. And that's ignoring the huge pools of capital that are now becoming available in the Middle East as well as here in Japan. The last, one of the last reasons is better exits. So I'm sure you're all on a mission to change the world, but we all want to make a little money in the process. And if you have more options for exits, that can significantly improve your valuations. In fact, five of the top 10 deals done last year were cross-border. SoftBank bought ARM, which is a UK-based company for $32 billion. Samsung bought Harman Industries, Micro Focus, a UK company bought Hewlett-Packer Enterprise out of the US for almost $9 billion. And 10 cent from China bought Supercell, well, most of Supercell for almost $9 billion. So whether you're on the acquirer side or you're looking to get acquired, having a global strategy can significantly help you. Another important reason is that we're living in times of unprecedented uncertainty. So whether it's natural disasters like the earthquake that hit Japan in 2011 or unnatural disasters like Donald Trump getting elected as president or the recent financial crises that have been happening in South America, you need to diversify your sources of capital as well as revenue if you're gonna stick around to solve the problem that you're hoping to solve. Another great reason from my main man, Tony Robbins, is you have to grow so you have something to give. No matter how well you're doing in your home market, if you wanna keep growing, the only way to grow up is to grow out. And most importantly, and what I wanna leave you with today is that we can't afford not to. We are facing some of the biggest challenges that humans have ever faced, whether it's the global refugee crisis, the threat of nuclear bombs, technology changing the nature of jobs, or the pension time bomb that's being passed down from generation to generation. The fact that we have an outdated education system that was built after the Industrial Revolution and is no longer relevant for the technology driven world we live in today, or cybersecurity, cyber terrorism, fake news, there's a million problems that we need to solve and the only way we can do that is by working together. We spend time in all different ecosystems around the world and I see so many people trying to reinvent the wheel. We need to work together to find the best solutions to these global problems and share them with every ecosystem if we want to move forward. So my last point that I wanna make today is about the top lessons learned throughout this process because there's no doubt that building global businesses is incredibly hard but also incredibly rewarding. The first lesson is that creativity is required. You're gonna have to start from zero no matter what you do and you need to think outside of the box. You need to be willing to get your hands dirty and figure out what works and test some things. Second thing is to invest in what makes you different. When you're a company showing up in a new market it's important to understand the local ecosystem and that's a huge part of our strategy.  But in fact what's most valuable about you is precisely what makes you different. So don't forget that instead invest in it where you can. And the third thing is that you cannot do it alone. No matter what you're doing or how famous you are or how much cash you have on your balance sheet it's impossible to build a global company without the right partners and the right help. So whether you're a corporate or a startup or an individual if you're interested in solving problems at a global scale please join us. We'd love to work with you. And I just wanna leave with this last quote from Steve Jobs. We're here to put a dent in the universe otherwise why be here. So let's do it together. Thank you.


why why do you open a heretics manifesto with an essay called her penis and what is the the main point that you're driving up there? Yeah so as soon as I thought to myself I'll do a collection of essays and call it a heretics manifesto I knew from the first day that the opening chapter would be called her penis and that the opening line to the whole book would be we need to talk about her penis because I find those two words fascinating I find that the way in which they've become accepted speech you see them in newspapers the Times here in Britain which is our newspaper of record the BBC you know renowned for its publication of vital information to people around the world those outlets will say her penis you hear that phrase in courts of law if a biological male is charged with rape or sexual assault and he now identifies as a woman he people will say she used her penis to do A B and C I'm fascinated by how a two-word phrase like that enters the mainstream enters the public consciousness how does that come about what are the mechanisms through which a phrase that would have made no sense to us 10 years ago become a part of everyday conversation and the argument I make in that chapter is that this is this speaks to the essence of the new culture of intolerance I think because I think one of the key problems today is the manipulation of language as a means of manipulation manipulating thought this is a point George Orwell made many many times 1984 is basically about this phenomenon that if you change language if you change the words people use and the phrases people use you can change how people think you can change how they relate to one another and how they engage with society itself so I use her penis as an example of a change in language that is designed I think to change how we think about sex gender and the relations between the sectors and I find it a bit slippery and a bit authoritarian so you find her penis a little bit slippery yeah um can I ask what what are the stakes with something like that because I you know I I agree with you the the kind of I wouldn't say manipulation of language but the insistence you know that certain phrases just you know enter the parlance and oftentimes you know it might come from an authority you know that is a cultural authority or a religious authority or a governmental authority and sometimes it's risible you know when you know the French Academy tries to police the use of English phrases in French and it just fails because ultimately you can't contain that in other cases you were talking about in the past where you know if you said certain things you would be put to death because even if it had no clear impact on the world because it's heretical or whatnot what are the stakes with you know acknowledging a trans trans woman's you know preferred pronouns I think the stakes are pretty high actually and I've had many arguments with libertarian friends of mine maybe we'll have an argument now which I love to do because it's a really good way of working things out because I don't see the trans issue as an issue of freedom and I think there's a number of reasons I would say that the first is if this is a civil rights movement if this is a movement for greater liberty which is how it's often presented why does it feel so authoritarian why is it so angry why is it so intent and determined on silencing women who have the wrong opinions and no platforming certain people and getting people sacked or shamed or publicly harassed for daring not to use preferred pronouns and instead sticking with what would have been the right pronouns a few years ago so why does it have that authoritarian streak I find that very interesting and it's particularly hostile to freedom of speech and freedom of dissent on this issue but then the other thing is I think it I often compare it or contrast it really with the movement for gay liberation in the 1970s which I do think was a movement for freedom and I talk about it in the book I think it was one of the great steps forward in Western society over the past few decades alongside the women's liberation movement the fight for racial equality and so on because I think with the trans issue what's happening is that sadly I don't think trans activists are actually calling for freedom they're calling for recognition they're calling for validation and they're actually enslaving themselves in some ways they're making themselves the psychic slaves of the modern state and the medical establishment upon whom they increasingly rely for validation so I actually think it's a movement that binds people into a closer more authoritarian relationship with the powers that be with power structures particularly medical structures of power rather than making the cry you know leave us alone the great cry of the Stonewall riots in New York City was get the hell out of our bars leave us alone let us do what we want to do this says something quite different yeah I think that's fascinating at the same time I'm thinking of you know in in American history and you know proclamations or demands for racial equality you have somebody like sojourner truth demands saying ain't I a woman she you know you have you know people like Frederick Douglass who shows up in your book a couple of times and who's you know just a phenomenal historical figure that everybody wants to claim because he's really great at articulating so much and I want to come back to him in a little bit but you know there there part of it is a demand to be left alone right like that the state does not have the right or or a religious community or your neighbors have a right to poke into you know what you're eating or what you're sleeping or what you're smoking or ingesting but part of it is a demand for recognition blacks in the civil rights era would wear sandwich signs saying like you know ain't I a man and things like that I'm black and I'm a man and they were insisting on recognition is recognition itself the problem or is it something more than that well I mean the first thing to say about that is that where that to the extent that that was a demand for recognition in the civil rights movement it was a demand for recognition based on universal truths ain't I a man yes you are ain't I a woman no you're not and and so that's that's makes it a very very different question because then we're talking about you know the guy with a sandwich board saying ain't I a man he is liberating himself from what we can all now agree were structures of racial discrimination and authoritarianism which made his life palpably worse than it should have been I think very often what trans activists and I do make a distinction between trans activists and trans people I think most trans people just want to live a nice normal life free of persecution and free of shame and they should be entirely at liberty to do that but I think what trans activists are often calling for is not freedom from oppression but freedom from truth freedom from the shared understanding and the shared language that makes life possible in a in a diverse society and can I can I push on that a little bit though because the truth and you know it's funny because you are I think either an still a Marxist or a recovering Marxist and I'm a libertarian post modern so we you know you know we've got some explaining to do to our own sides but isn't part of what is you know recognized as true is changes over time and you know there was a period of time where blacks in America certainly I think this is obviously also true the British Empire you know the blacks and to some degree Irish we we share in Irish heritage as well you know we're not seen as human or as fully human in a way and you know that the science behind that didn't change what happened was a political or a social or cultural and you know change happened and I guess when you say you don't you're you're not talking about being anti-trans like you're you're not against I'm assuming you're not against adults deciding to identify as or live as or have gender reassignment surgery or hormone therapy whatever to live as whoever they want to be right I mean you're not saying like the you know because what has been creeping into at least in an American discourse is a kind of a lemon eliminationist rhetoric where it seems to start sliding from saying you know it's one thing to say I identify as a woman so now I'm going to compete in sport you know in female sports categories to you know and people being upset about that to saying like no trans people are the problem you're not in that camp are you no absolutely not and I mean I do make a distinction between hormonal interventions and surgical interventions in children which I think is an incredibly problematic thing even with parental consent it it's a very problematic thing and adults I think adults should be completely free to make alterations to their body to change just to ask people if they will use certain pronouns to change their names to wear whatever they want to to live as a woman as they understand it absolutely they must be free to do that the self-government means nothing if people are not free to define themselves yeah I think oftentimes when people get on a kind of high horse about pronouns and whatnot I or names for that matter I think there's you know a phenomenal moment in the 1960s when Muhammad Ali you know a boxer born Cassius Clay had changed he became a member of the nation of Islam and changed his name from Cassius Clay to Muhammad Ali and Floyd Patterson also a black boxer a former heavyweight champ fought him and refused to call him Cassius Clay or rather to call him Muhammad Ali he insisted and they had a fight and Ali pummeled him badly and was standing over the unconscious body of Floyd Patterson saying you know what's my name and that you know I think about that as an incredible act of reinvention and of you know kind of self-definition and self-liberation obviously there's a lot wrapped up in that and on some level I get uncomfortable and I'm not lumping you into this category with people who are like I will never either say or call or admit that this person is living as you know who was born a man is living as a woman or vice versa and that strikes me as problematic to say the least or you know in a liberal society you don't want to compel people to do anything or believe certainly believe anything they don't want but yeah it's also kind of like what is wrong with you that you cannot meet adults where they are I think there's a couple of issues here I think on one important fact I think is that the trans movement again distinguishing that from the from trans people the trans lobby I think overplayed its hand that's one of the huge problems here I think if we went back 10 years people were perfectly okay most people were perfectly okay with men who said they were women who wore certain clothes who had sex change surgeries you know there was a bit of a kind of a voyeuristic interest in those lifestyles but generally people were okay with it I think they overplayed their hand though because what happened subsequently is they said trans women are women you have to legally recognize that we are literally women otherwise you're a bigger otherwise you're someone deserving of cancellation they said we want to play in women's sports we want to go into women only areas we want to go into women's changing rooms we saw a case of like that in Los Angeles a couple of years ago a man with a semi erection in a woman's changing room in front of in a place where women and girls undress and that's the point at which I think lots of people said okay hold up what's happening here because what is presented as a movement for freedom looks increasingly like an encroachment into the hard-won freedoms of womankind and so that absolutely raises a question of a conflict of interest and I do think it falls down to the question of whose rights do we support do we support the right of a man a biological male most of whom are intact now sex change surgery is is less and less common right to go wherever they want regardless of the impact it might have on the women in that area or do we support the right of women to their own zones their own sense of safety their own sex-based rights that is I think a fundamental question and I do think it's important to stand with the women who are saying look we don't have a problem with trans people we just don't want biological males in our spaces yeah and at what level because this is something it seems that you know as heated as the rhetoric can be in the United States it it's much more sharp in in the UK and you know part of this is because jk Rowling is a you know is a British subject and has really become a kind of poster child for you know somebody who is just you know inexcusably retrograde to the to the degree I mean this is fascinating that you know literally the children who were in the movies based on the harry potter books almost with with that exception I mean I think the actor who played Draco Malfoy of all people was the only one who's like siding with jk Rowling so it's like okay you've got the punk of Slytherin house you know on your side what good does that do you when you know Harry and Hermione and Ron Weasley are denouncing you some of the you know from what I understand in the UK a lot of the people who get written off as terfs as trans exclusionary radical feminists are actually saying that it should not be up to the individual to simply designate themselves as female and hence they have access to all female places including prisons including dressing rooms including sports competitions but rather that there should be some policy that you know make sure that it's not simply men masquerading as women who have nefarious nefarious purposes is that accurate or is that off yeah that is accurate and I actually think I have said before that I think sometimes the so-called terfs I'm very supportive of terfs I think jk Rowling who I would disagree with on 95 percent of political questions especially Brexit I think she's been very heroic in this situation she could she could easily have a nice lovely billionaire's life but instead she keeps speaking out on the thorniest issue of our time she still has a very nice billionaire's like other than you know okay occasional twitter bombs and things like that but but yes I think um what those women are saying what I've said to those women rather is that I do think their emphasis on the potentially nefarious desires of trans women biological males I think they overemphasize that and I think a better argument is not the safety one although I perfectly understand why women make that case but it's the privacy one it's the right of people to a sphere in which you will not encounter the opposite sex for various reasons because it's a space in which you are going to be naked or in which you might have to sleep like a shared dormitory for example or in which you might be imprisoned and you have no way of getting out I think in those areas women absolutely should have an expectation of dignity and privacy and the trans movement does threaten that but you said earlier um about religious extremism being on the back foot um which is true I think to a certain extent although certainly in the west in Europe and the EU is worse than the US by far in all of these counts but yeah yeah of course and you know as as you guys know very well we have had executions for heresy by Islamist extremists here in Europe Samuel Patti Charlie Hebdo and numerous others um but the thing is you're right about that traditional religions the old world religions are not bossing people around in the way that they used to in the west but there are I think there are new kinds of religion and I must say I think the idea of a gendered soul the idea that all of us you me everyone has a soul whose gender might be different to our biological encasing to me that is a absurd religious idea it's one that is not based in fact it's one that's not based in any genuine attempt to understand the truth of human experience it has become a catechism that is and you you risk being a social leper if you don't bow down to it it has the feeling of a religious idea it has the impact of a religious idea in terms of wanting to restrict how people can deviate from it and question it and I think that's why the preferred pronouns matters because what some terfs will say is that when they are um cajoled or pressured or sometimes forced to use a person's preferred pronouns that's more than just being polite that is acquiescence to what they consider to be a modern day religion that they don't believe in and just as I don't think anyone should be forced to say I love the Quran or I worship Jesus Christ I also don't think people should be compelled to say she about someone who they think is male