23andYou: The 269th Evolutionary Lens with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying
In this week’s episode, we discuss 23andMe – what does its impending bankruptcy mean for data security, and why did people think their genetic data were secure before the company went into bankruptcy? As we protect existing rights laid out in the Constitution, we also need to innovate new protections in a world with new threats and possibilities. Going back to what was will not be sufficient. Then: Bobby Kennedy Jr. and anti-Semitism; and Columbia University’s response to the Trump administra...
Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse podcast, live stream number 269.
Now, interestingly, mathematicians are divided over whether or not it is prime.
The good ones all say it is, and the crackpots don't say anything.
Oh, I guess there are three caps then.
Yes, the crackpots are divided over whether or not it is prime.
But I'm going with the actually qualified mathematicians who all agree that it is.
I'm Dr. Brett Weinstein.
You are Dr. Heather Haring.
And I should say congratulations.
Why's that?
We survived another winter.
It's over.
Indeed. Winter is over.
Spring is here.
We woke up this morning on this beautiful island on which we live, and it felt like spring.
And then the hail began, and the thunder, and the lightning, and the winds, and we're back in the thick of whatever this is.
Yeah, although that's kind of...
The spring weather, especially the early spring weather around here, is a little unstable.
It's definitely warmer than it's been.
I think this is actually true in a lot of places that are so-called temperate.
Winter is actually a lot less exciting, by and large.
It's just stably cold or dreary or gray or whatever.
And it's the transition seasons of fall and spring that are tempestuous.
I remember from the Pacific Northwest, where we have now lived since 2002, I believe, that the characteristic is that, you know, it kind of always rains around here, less so on the islands, which are in the rain shadow of the Olympic Mountains.
But when it rains in the spring, you often get these Big, fat raindrops as opposed to the little tiny raindrops that are the rain of winter.
Yeah, they have more power behind them.
Yeah, and more water.
This is true.
Okay, so today we're going to talk about a number of things, 23andMe, Bobby Kennedy.
Jay Bhattacharya.
And speaking of Jay Bhattacharya, who we did not know five years ago, five years ago, this marks our fifth anniversary of doing Evolutionary Lens livestream.
So we're going to go back to that very first episode and just share some of the advice that, at least according to my notes, we ended that very first episode with, and we'll see how much we agree with it still.
Really? Yeah.
Yeah, we're going to do that.
It's funny.
I have things back, I can't.
There have been so many episodes.
Roughly 269.
269 episodes and a number of forced transitions of our set studio.
Oh, I thought you were going to say positions.
That it's hard for me to remember.
I mean, I know roughly, I know what motivated us to do this.
It was you observing that our...
Conversations surrounding the developing story of COVID would be of use to other people, and we should sit down in front of a camera and just start talking.
But as for remembering that first episode, I can't say I have more than that.
All right.
Well... We'll go there.
But first, thank you to everyone who is joining us.
Thank you to our supporters who are joining us from locals.
We've got a watch party going on there.
And we will...
We're not going to have a Q&A today, but we have all of our past Q&As up on local, so please consider joining us there.
And as always, we have three sponsors right at the top of the hour.
That's the only time we read ads.
If you're getting ads served to you on YouTube...
Other than these three that we are reading, that is YouTube profiting off us and sharing none of those profits with us.
So that continues to be the case for almost four years now.
Yeah. We will actually touch back on that issue later in the pod.
All right.
Okay. So without further ado, what is that?
I've asked that before.
Where does that come from?
Is it Shakespeare?
It sounds like it should be, but that's probably...
Much ado is Shakespeare.
Shakespeare invented so many of the phrases that we toss off as if it's nothing.
I don't know if he invented...
Probably he did.
Yeah. But...
And then there's always the fascinating question of whether or not Shakespeare was in fact Shakespeare, which I must say it's one of these conspiracy theories.
Was he a they?
Was he a she?
Was he him, in fact?
Well, my favorite idea is that it was Bacon.
Right. He was a different he.
Yeah, he was a different he.
And if it was Bacon, wow.
How exciting.
He was already an incredible individual.
Yeah. But anyway, it's one of these conspiracy theories that you think, all right, that's crap, but I'm curious.
And then it's like, oh, goodness, the evidence is way better than you think.
We talked about it here on Dark Horse at one point.
We went down that rabbit, Warren.
Yes. All right.
We went once more into the breach, dear friends.
Or the first time, actually.
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It's funny that it has brought back amplitude modulation.
Right. AM radio was not the highest quality radio.
Nope. Sort of low grade once FM came into being.
But it got you through those long stretches where FM didn't reach.
Right. Line of sight versus bouncing off the ionosphere, I think.
Sounds right.
We'll go with that.
Bouncing off the ionosphere so that you could pick up stray podcasts from a podcast.
Wow. All right.
1980s podcasts.
Stray broadcasts.
That's what we used to call them.
Radio stations.
Yeah, radio stations from far off places.
And it did get you through those stretches.
Because, of course, I mean, I guess for our entire lives, you could have a tape player in the car.
Those things were fraught with problems, too.
They did.
But anyway.
When the tape came streaming under the dash.
And then you cleverly wound it back up and you heard the wobbles in the music every time you played that section of the tape.
Good times.
Precisely. Precisely.
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We have been saying cacao nibs, but we have never said cacao but butter, which is even funnier, I think.
Cacao but butter.
Cacao but butter.
Yeah, well, we can start now.
All right, our final sponsor, Heather, is Caraway, and that is not a reference to the seeds that frequently travel under cover of rye bread.
That is a reference to the maker of high-quality, non-toxic cookware and bakeware.
On Dark Horse, we have talked at length.
We could use some spice sponsors, though.
Spice fun.
Can you imagine?
Absolutely. Yeah.
Bring them on.
This episode brought to you by cumin.
Right. For example, even turmeric.
Even turmeric.
Staining, though.
You gotta be careful with turmeric.
Yes. You know, it will stain you right here if you spill it there.
Abstain you.
Never mind.
All right.
On Dark Horse, we have talked at length about how modern life puts our health at risk, including exposures to agricultural chemicals like atrazine and glyphosate, fluoride in our water, food dyes, seed oils.
Seed oils is where you find seed oils.
Don't look at me that way.
I wouldn't look at you that way.
I was looking at Jen that way.
Oh, okay.
Well, that makes sense.
The hazard of nonstick coatings on cookware and bakeware is something else we have discussed.
In our house, we threw out all of the Teflon decades ago.
Teflon is toxic.
A single scratch on Teflon cookware can release over 9,000 microplastic particles, none of which you should be ingesting.
Many of which...
Many of which you will...
You will...
Comma, there should be a comma there, if you cook with Teflon.
What was that sentence about?
What happens when you scratch Teflon coating on a Teflon pan and the particles that are released, and you will ingest them if you cook with Teflon.
Over 70...
Yes? I'll wait until the end.
Okay. I'll add mine.
Yes. Editorial at the end.
Editorial. Yes.
Every ad should have editorials.
Unfortunately, you're not innovating here.
No. Yeah, I guess I'm not.
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Enter Haraway.
This is especially true if you're a man.
Who will tend to heat the pan up faster because...
No patience.
Right, exactly.
No time.
Absolutes, extremes, it's all binary.
It's off or it's on.
There's no middle ground.
Right, you turn the heat all the way up.
You close that jar down real tight.
You wouldn't want stuff escaping.
No, you wouldn't.
I don't know what you put in those jars.
It's trying to escape, but...
Kimchi. It's a living substance.
You don't want it.
Kimchi may be one of the very few jars that I could appreciate a nice, very tight glass.
Very tight seal.
Yeah. All right.
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To make the healthy swap to Carraway is what that says on the paper.
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That should be a comma.
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Oh, no.
We're going to have a disagreement about what that should say.
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What she said and wrote.
Actually, that's not me.
That's the CTA, man.
That's their language.
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So just one more thing to say about Carraway before we move on to the nuts and bolts, the meat and how many...
Nuts, bolts, and fruits.
Nuts, bolts, treats.
Oh, good.
Fruits. Fruits and freets.
Why not?
Steakfruits. Why do you never have steakfruits on menus?
I don't know.
We'll try cooking it and report back.
So I was in Portland this last week, as you know, but the audience does not.
Yes. I was like, where did she?
I said, there's someone missing.
And I stay, whenever I go back, I stay in Airbnb.
So far I've stayed in a different one every time.
Highly variable in quality.
And it's just interesting.
To me to stay in different places, different parts of the city that I still very much love.
And, you know, we stayed in a series of Airbnbs in our recent trip to Spain.
I have been staying in places like that, including before Airbnb even existed, using Vrbo back when we were traveling when our kids were young.
So I have been a fan of staying in these kinds of...
Rentals for a very long time.
They're almost always more affordable, and especially if you're traveling with people, you get more privacy.
But one of the things that is almost always lacking in such things is decent cookware.
And almost to a place, the exception being actually when we were in Spain, but in the United States, almost every Airbnb I ever stayed in, if it has a kitchen, has cookware that is...
Teflonated. So I actually took a Caratway frying pan with me this time, figuring that I might want to have some, you know, seed oil-free, cooked-in-real-butter eggs for breakfast some mornings, which I did, and I was not going to want to, you know, having gone to the trouble of sourcing awesome eggs and awesome butter in Portland, where the food available is amazing, I was not going to want to cook in Teflon, so.
I took a caraway pan with me, which, you know, you're not going to do if you're flying, but having a car, I had plenty of space, and it proved to be quite a good decision.
Yep. Also, being in a city where crime has gone through the roof, having a pan, I guess it wouldn't matter if it was Teflonated, but it's always good to have one with you.
Yeah, I mean, you really want to inflict more damage if you're using a pan as a weapon, so maybe you want to use the Teflon pans in that case.
Yeah, that would help.
I mean, I guess it's easier to clean after you have successfully bludgeoned somebody who had attacked you, the Teflon one.
But, you know, at that point...
I think it's a better use for the pants than to cook with them.
It is a perfectly valid use for your no longer needed for cooking Teflon pants.
There it is.
All right.
Keep your care away and your other high-quality cookware in the kitchen.
Where it belongs, or, you know, on the road, on the way to another kitchen, as is the case for me.
And use your Teflon pans for other purposes.
Yes. All right.
Go for it.
Yes. Where are we starting?
Wherever you like.
All right.
Let's talk about the news surrounding 23andMe, which just announced.
Actually, maybe, Jen, could you put up their announcement?
And we just read a little bit of it here.
So 23andMe, as everybody is going to know, is a company that for a fee will sequence your genome or large portions of it and ostensibly tell you things about your heritage.
Can we enlarge that at all?
All right.
We can maybe just skip to the fact of...
I could get through that.
You could read it?
Yeah. Okay.
I might squint slightly, but...
All right.
I should have kept the binoculars here.
We've got a giant new screen, but that's small font.
Oh, that's good.
You want to do it?
You want me to do it?
I can't see it.
Okay. You want me to just start at the top of the press release?
I haven't seen this before.
This looks like a legal document.
Start at San Francisco.
Okay. San Francisco, March 23rd, 2025.
Globe Newswire.
3andMe Holding Company is a leading human genetics and biotechnology company.
Today announced that it has initiated voluntary Chapter 11 proceedings in the U.S.
bankruptcy court for the Eastern District of Missouri to facilitate a sale process to maximize the value of its business.
The company intends to continue operating its business in the ordinary course throughout the sale process.
There are no changes to the way the company stores, manages, Keep going.
That's probably sufficient for this.
Okay. Now, you want to put up...
So there was lots of consternation about this.
Lots of people who have submitted their...
So they explicitly make the claim that there's not going to be any change in how they are storing data.
Storing data.
James O'Keefe claims to have evidence.
He showed video.
There's back and forth about the quality of it, but James O'Keefe...
Has somebody suggesting that the company has been sharing data in a way that seems to violate its policy?
Do you want to put up the Midwestern Doctor tweet here?
Okay, so Midwestern Doctor, who is somebody I quite like and have learned a great deal from over the course of the last few years, he says...
This is why I never used 23andMe and told everyone else not to as well.
Given the cost of DNA sequencing at the time 23andMe came out, the price they were charging for the test was way too low, so it was likely their actual business was selling your personal genomic data.
That sounds like something either of us could have said at the time.
Exactly. It was exactly our position.
Right. It was exactly our position.
In fact, you and I have...
We resist it, even though we've been given the opportunity.
We were gifted it by a couple of times and said no.
Said no, we weren't going to submit our material to be sequenced.
So this raises a number of questions.
Yes, I think there is legitimate reason to be concerned now that 23andMe is in Chapter 11, that in effect they're going to sell all of their assets, including your data, to who knows who.
On the other hand...
How are those data that they have collected over the...
When did it say they started?
Over a decade ago.
Well over a decade ago.
Those data are part of their assets.
And presumably, it's the biggest part of their assets, honestly.
It's the biggest part of their assets, but I don't understand.
Yes, the sale certainly introduces the possibility that this is now going to be...
Sold to somebody unscrupulous who is going to monetize that information in some way.
There's been a large number of people attempting to delete their data, which apparently you have the right to do, running into all sorts of problems at the level of the website.
Now, that could just be that they've created an inadvertent denial of service attack by the website being flooded with panic, people trying to get their data away from 23andMe.
It's like a bank run.
Right. On the other hand, I think Midwestern Doctor's point is an excellent one, which is it didn't make sense that they were trying to make money at the rate that they were charging for this service.
So it's not a charity.
It's a for-profit business.
But what he clearly knows and what you and I know, but which most people won't know, is that DNA sequencing was incredibly expensive.
So I wish...
I knew when 23andMe started, and maybe I'll look it up after I'm done talking here, but in the 90s, when we were in grad school and DNA sequencing was becoming a tool that molecular phylogenetic systematists were using, it was incredibly both time-consuming and expensive, and that is no longer the case.
You should have expected to be paying a premium for the service that they are offering and to have it come down substantially.
And I don't believe that that is what we have seen price-wise, which again adds support to Midwestern Doctors' supposition here.
Yeah, that this is, in fact, their business model was the collection of information.
And of course, that would be a perfect mirror for many other businesses.
You know, what is Facebook really doing?
Why does Facebook provide you an incredibly...
Useful tool for interacting with your friends and keeping track of people and collecting information and participating in communities that are physically dispersed.
Well, one of the things that they are doing is they are collecting, you know, the most amazing data set of what people You know, say, think who they talk to.
They know things about you that the closest people to you don't know.
It was founded the month that our younger son was born.
It was founded in April 2006.
Genomics had already been around for a bit, but it was still pretty expensive to be doing the kind of work that they were claiming they were doing on your behalf.
Yeah. 20 years ago, this was very pricey.
And so for them to be selling it at an affordable price that was attractive to so many people meant they were doing it at a loss.
One, yes, you should be concerned about who's about to own your data.
Two, why weren't you concerned about that when they collected it in the first place, right?
It was obvious that this was a problem, not only that the data might be sold to somebody else, but that, you know, well, when you sent in your material, how well did you read the EULA, right?
How well did you understand it?
Did you run it by a lawyer?
How bulletproof was it?
I've never heard.
Eula, pronounced that way.
I've never, I've never, so end-licer, end-user-license-agreement?
End-user-license-agreement.
Right. And I am kind of a gangsta in this realm making me the eulogy.
No. OG.
No. No.
No. Okay.
All right.
I do take that back.
I feel a little bad about that.
You should.
Well, now I feel less bad about it.
I know.
Okay. Just trying to help.
But, okay.
So. Why did you feel good about it in the first place?
Certainly you're not expert enough in the law to understand what potential hazards existed with this company that you didn't know anything about.
And in fact, as you discovered in looking this morning, this company is interestingly connected into a world of other murky businesses.
Through family relations.
The founder and about to step down CEO is the sister of the recently deceased CEO of YouTube.
I don't know how to pronounce their name.
23andMe and Susan with YouTube.
And Ann, I guess, was also married to Sergey Brin.
Married to Sergey Brin.
All the Silicon Valley tech connections that we should be paying attention to.
Yeah, we should be paying attention to.
These people have incredible power.
Frankly, I've seen no evidence that they are made of incredible stuff with respect to moral decency.
So even assuming that they're just simply average in that regard.
Well, and so not only have we seen no evidence that they are made of incredible stuff with regard to moral decency, as you just said, but one of my persistent concerns for decades, but...
An acute concern now is the hubris of the techutopians and the technocrats.
And one of our objections to 23andMe starting, I think we were first, you know, offered it back around when Toby was born, back, you know, back when it was first starting in 2006.
And then, you know, people were saying, come on, don't you like data?
Aren't you scientists?
Right? So, yes, the objection was partially legal and privacy and rights, and no, I actually don't want some entity whom I've actually paid to have my data that they will then use for we don't even know what yet, right? But also the promise was one of really understanding yourself, because, you know, the truth is the genetics.
And that was never a promise that could be actually realized with these...
No, in fact, it was a decidedly phony suggestion that you were going to get insight, that you were going to get medical insight.
The number of places in which, you know, there's some gene that you can spot that has a particular ramification, like the BRCA gene for breast cancer.
You know, every so often there is some...
Place where a single gene will tell you something.
In the context of producing children, genetic testing makes a lot of sense because of deleterious recessive genes that we carry but have no impact on us under normal circumstances if we have only one copy.
But the idea that you were going to mail away Spit or swab from your cheek or whatever it was and get insight into yourself was preposterous.
Well, I guess I also...
So there was the false promise of medical insight.
And there was also the false promise of having a real clear sense of your family history.
Well, hold on.
And where your people had come from.
And that is intriguing.
And there is some possibility.
There, especially for populations that have been more homogeneous and therefore have a stronger signal that persists throughout generations.
But, you know, there are many, many stories of, you know...
False positives and false negatives, effectively, of people who thought that they were one thing and are finding something else in these genetic records.
And it leaves you thinking, well, yes, of course, people and families lie about who's related to whom and who fathered whom and such.
But also, some of what is being used to indicate where your ancestors came from may not be nearly as accurate as a company that is profiting off getting you to...
To hand over your genetic information would have you believe.
Yeah, so I want to cover three things.
One, I don't know what 23andMe specifically promised with respect to medical insight.
That was sort of generally a promise that genomic entities...
It was much more lineage, like where are your people from?
Which, at one level, does work very well.
Managing to find relatives seems to be something that this can do.
In close proximity, but there's a misunderstanding.
Finding extant relatives or, you know, a generation or two back, like very close in.
Yes, that does make sense.
Yeah, that does make sense.
But the idea of, oh, you know, an eighth of, you know, somewhere at the great-grandparent generation, you had someone coming out of East Germany.
Like, well, maybe.
But also, there was a lot of movement, and there were a lot of people, and again...
For populations that have been very homogeneous, have been effectively inbreeding for cultural reasons for a long time, you're more likely to be able to trace that.
But for many populations, people who have been itinerant or, you know, either Because they were forced to be or because they chose to be, these indicators, these genomic indicators are less likely to be accurate.
Yeah, less likely to be accurate.
And it doesn't really matter if they're accurate because they're not interesting.
And the reason that they're not interesting is people do not understand this fundamental truth about genomes, right?
Genomes are important.
Your genome is effectively a bunch of genes trapped together.
That have a shared fate because the only way they get passed on is if your gonads successfully find themselves in a reproductive event, right?
So what that means is that you're...
Yeah, that was pretty damn clinical, huh?
Yeah. Not sexy.
But anyway, the point is...
Your gonads find themselves in a reproductive event?
Yeah. Okay.
Well, the basic point is, look, all of your cells are at a dead end except your genome.
Your genome in your gonads, right?
So the point is your germline can reproduce and the rest of your self is agreed on that being an objective.
That's the evolutionary underpinnings of this.
But the point is, what happens over time to your genetic stuff?
Well, all else being equal, if you are perfectly average in your reproductive success, you do not increase or decrease in...
Your genes do not increase or decrease as you go forward in time.
But what they do is get atomized very quickly over many, many individuals.
So, you know, your kids are super important to you.
Your grandkids will be important to you.
But as you get further and further down the line, the relationship that you have to your own descendants...
Drops off so radically that it...
And that's, you know, the example I give of an eighth, you know, on average, an eighth of your great-grandparents' genome is represented in you.
It could be as much as a quarter or as little as zero, right?
And so, you know, it just atomized, I think, is an excellent, excellent word for it.
And, you know, why are we interested, though?
Like, why, you know, neither you and I have ever done...
These tests.
But we have family stories.
We have family lore about where our people come from.
And that is interesting.
And that is the same thing that people are driven to get 23andMe results for because it allows them to then start telling stories.
Stories that they hope are accurate, stories that they are trying to use, modern technology and the promise of data science to give them a story that actually has some verifiability.
But the fact is...
Those promises of accuracy, much less precision, are way overblown.
And frankly, the family stories that get handed down to you about where your people are from are likely to come with more of the narrative structure that is actually meaningful anyway.
Right. So, you know, let's just say your one genome, you will on average, as a sexually reproducing creature, on average, an individual's success produces two offspring.
And those two offspring are each 50% related on average.
So your representation is divided over two people, each of which is only half you.
That process, if you extend it down ten generations, you've got a thousandth of you in a thousand individuals.
That means that to the extent that you're going to tell some story about your ancestor at the founding of...
Well, the point is, well, what does it really mean that that person was your ancestor?
It's this tiny, tiny fractional thing.
It's not meaningful.
So you're telling a story.
There's nothing wrong with telling a story about that person, but what is their relationship to you?
It's effectively nothing.
But we seek meaning.
Through any means we can find.
And similarly, before this technology was available and had this promise that because it's technical, people believe without investing in it carefully because they don't feel that they have the skills with which to investigate it carefully, we used names.
We used family names.
And so, you know, in a...
In a patrilineal, more or less patrilineal society, such as the one we live in, where typically women take the names of their husbands when they marry, and typically children take the names of their fathers, you can trace half of family lineage through names.
And so it's interesting when you discover someone with the same last name as yours, more interesting the more rare your name is, because it tells you something.
Oh, there's something to be discovered here.
Where do we go back to?
But even if you do that, You haven't necessarily revealed anything about who those people were, what their lives were, how they ended up living as disparate lives as the two of you long-lost third cousins twice removed have now discovered yourselves to be.
But still, you've come together over a shared name as opposed to, ah, a piece of technology assures me that we are closely related.
Interesting, I guess.
Very hard to fact check.
And obviously fraught with issues of privacy, which I know is part of where you want to go.
Yeah, but I also think the interesting part of what we are is almost entirely cultural.
And the name actually does report something important.
Like, let's say that you were adopted into...
A family, and you therefore carry its name, right?
You could argue that that's biologically false, but it's not biologically false, because the point is it actually says, you know, some stuff was transmitted from these named people, and that stuff gets passed down the same way a name gets passed down.
So it's actually a much...
More tantalizing reason to be telling stories.
And, you know, these are murky stories.
In many cases, American blacks bear the name of the person who owned their ancestor, right?
That's very real, though.
That's very real.
It's very different than saying, you know, because 23andMe sent me something that suggested I had a distant ancestor here, there, or somewhere else, that that's meaningful.
That is very unlikely to be meaningful.
In part because the genomes are constantly being shuffled and you are therefore going to be atomized in a matter of a small number of generations.
And when you're asking 23andMe to tell you about where you come from, the point is, well, you've been shuffled along the way every time there was a reproductive event.
That's actually, that's, we're far afield now, but what you said about names.
And adopted children, obviously, it's home.
As you know, my brother was adopted as an infant, as one day old.
And you don't ever hear about people having their adopted children keep their natal name, their family name from natal family, depending on when and where and what the circumstances are and how old the child is.
Sometimes there's visitation to allow a continuity there.
You know, my brother is a high-end every bit as much as I am.
And there's never been a question about that.
Although, you know, my father came from German stock, so I'm half German, and my brother presumably isn't.
What does that tell us beyond possible proclivities for medical situations?
Right. Basically, beyond stuff like diet.
It's likely to tell you very, very little, whereas the stuff that you picked up culturally is bound to tell you an awful lot, which does raise one of my pet peeves.
As a biologist who's thought a lot about genomes and a lot about culture, the idea, the way we speak, you know, that this person, oh, well, you know, my biological father, as opposed to the person who raised you.
Bullshit. The person who raised you is your biological father.
You could say your genetic father, somebody who skipped out on your mom and didn't contribute anything other than a genome.
But the point is, actually, which of these things is more real, right?
You know, the genome is important, but by and large, you get a lot of shuffling, and what you've got is a genome that has all the stuff necessary to function, whereas the cultural differences...
Now, am I wrong?
I feel like Dick Alexander, your graduate advisor, made a point of that in his own family.
He very much objected to the idea that some people were biological relatives and other people were somehow not biological because he, of course, understood that everything evolutionary is...
A kind of biology when it's organic life.
Now, he also understood, and I learned in seminars with him on many of the related topics, that the tendency of adoptive parents to actually treat adoptive children less well when they have a mixed brood is a profound pattern.
It's easily repeated.
Anyway, the pet peeve, though, is we speak about your biological children when we mean genetic.
And I run the following thought experiment with myself.
If I discovered, having nothing to do with infidelity, if I discovered that one of our children had been swapped at the hospital through some sort of clerical error and that we had raised the wrong person, not the person we were meant to take home from the hospital, Do I suddenly feel less connected?
Do I feel less love for this child?
No. Not in the slightest.
This is still my kid, right?
Yeah. Yes.
And it's going to be a little bit different for a woman who already has a relationship with a child at the point that that child is born.
Yep. That's true.
Right? That, you know, at this point, I, you know...
Obviously. Still our child in every regard, but the closer to the moment of birth, the more part of that life had been with some other child.
And so I think this is one of very many ways that men and women are not the same, do not have equivalent experiences of the world, including of what it means to be a mother versus a father.
And this is part of why People like me, you know, I don't know even what the term is now, but are particularly adamant that, no, if you are a man who has had children and have now decided that you want to be treated by the world as a woman, A, you're not, and B, you are not now, nor will you ever be a mother.
You're a father.
And yes, at the most basic, fundamental, reductionist, if you like, way, that goes back to what kind of gamete did you put to the creation of that child?
And you might argue, given some of our other conversation here, well, but adoptive parents are parents.
All the same, yes.
And, you know, adoptive mothers and fathers are going to have more equivalent experiences.
Still not the same, but more equivalent experiences as one another than are genetic mothers versus genetic fathers.
genetic mothers who, um, do everything the old fashioned way without surrogacy, without IVF, without, you know, without, you know, just everything, um, from, uh, conception to gestation to birth.
Um, that there's, that there's just, there's relationship that forms there, um, that is not, um, Not only that, but the trans activists have used sophistry to destroy the obvious logic, which is whether or not you actually go on to have children, right?
Some people are incapable of having children.
Through no fault of their own.
So they argue it cannot be the potential to have children because some of what you and I would call women who don't have that potential would also qualify in our rubric.
So obviously it isn't that.
However, if you are a born female, you are set on a trajectory in which the wiring in which You have the ability to relate to that process of motherhood.
Whether or not you end up having children or not is something that's built in.
And the fact that somebody may feel female does not mean that that circuitry is going to be there.
So anyway, we've lost sight of the fact that motherhood, both in terms of you having an actual relationship to your offspring before they are born, but also the pre-wiring that sets you up to To be ready for that relationship is, you know, part and parcel of being female.
I'm not sure I totally agree with that, but I'm not sure we need to spend time there right now.
Well, I mean, you disagree that there is wiring?
Well, I guess I don't agree with the idea that someone can feel female.
I think that we have a word for that, which is feminine and masculine.
Feminine and masculine versus female and male.
And feminine and masculine are the adjectival forms that fit the more typical, stereotypical if you like, but more typical, having nothing inherently to do with bias or lesser or more.
And this is the wiring that you're talking about, right?
There are typically more feminine...
Ways of existing and more masculine ways of existing, but I don't agree with the phrasing that a woman can wake up one day and say, you know, I feel male.
Or that a man more often can wake up one day and say, I feel female.
Say in your head whatever you like, but we actually, and this is going to seem semantic, it might even seem like it's sophistry, but I really don't think it is, that the adjectival form of what kinds of behaviors tend to be associated with that thing that is immutable, that can't be changed no matter what, you might be gender non-conforming.
I was, right?
And so you can say, oh, I have some traits that are more masculine.
Doesn't mean I feel male.
Yeah, I don't think I...
I certainly didn't mean to imply that.
My point was that there will be predispositions in a normal female that set you up for the likely prospect of reproducing as a female.
And actually, what you said does trigger what I think is a new thought.
I increasingly don't trust the claim that one, that for anybody, that they feel female if they're born male, or that they,
well, that I think what we have found through lots and lots of investigation of this topic is that There is a desire to be seen as female that is very real.
But as for I feel female, how would you even know?
I mean, in fact, there's a famous Greek myth about the gods who inflict on somebody.
They change somebody's sex.
Oh, I don't think I know this.
It's been a long time since I've read this, but I think the story goes, they change somebody's sex and the person lives half their life or whatever, you know, born male, and then they live as a female, having been actually changed by the gods who alone have the power to do that.
And then...
I thought I knew most of the Greek myths.
This is not...
I hope I'm not making this up.
And then the story ends.
It's very much a kind of a...
You know, a Plato's Cave kind of an ending where I think they ask this person, well, all right, which way is sex better?
And the person says female and the gods murder him or something like that.
So he's a woman or he's a man?
He starts out as a man.
The gods change him into a woman.
Then he's the only person who has the knowledge of what it's like to be both.
And anyway, he answers the question badly, and that's the end of him.
There's too many...
I just don't know what to make of that.
Until I know for sure that that's an actual story, I'm not going to ask you questions about it.
All right.
Well, they're still Greeks.
They can write it now if it hasn't been written already.
That's not how that works.
You know that.
That's not how myth works.
They can write as a narrative and a thousand years from now we can check back in and see if it has matured into a myth.
You may be around at that point.
I don't intend to be around.
I'm going to be atomized into who knows how many individuals, if I'm lucky, right?
What happens to a lot of people is that atomization process goes along with a, actually you get a bunch of underperforming descendants.
Exactly. But to close this out, let us say that the The case of 23andMe points out one of the uncomfortable realizations of this moment, something that you and I have been trying to tell our conservative friends, which is our conservative friends, conservatives in general, have been right about a tremendous amount.
Why? Because many of the gains of our ancestors, both cultural and genetic, have been under threat in recent years.
And so that threat has resulted in a need to defend things that were once understood because somebody was trying to uninvent them.
Okay, conservatives have been right about that.
But you cannot conserve your way out of our current predicament.
It is necessary but not sufficient.
It is necessary for us to conserve the stuff that was actually bedrock and then to figure out what to do about the stuff that our...
Founding fathers are writers of biblical texts that none of these people could possibly have understood or anticipated.
And yes, conservatives will often say some of these things are timeless.
I do think some of these things are timeless.
Some of them being timeless does not mean that they are sufficient.
The First Amendment, the Second Amendment, the Fourth and Fifth, all of these rights that are protected.
Under law, where we live, for speech and to bear arms and property and against search and seizure and all of these things are absolutely necessary, and they have been under attack.
And they're not sufficient to move us forward into a fully free society that we want to live in.
Yes, with technologies such as this, where, in fact, somebody having access to the information in your genome that you have given them, for one thing, You can say from here that there are ways that that information could be abused.
You know, your genome is evidence in a court of law of your having committed a crime or somebody else having committed a crime of which you are accused.
Obviously somebody having that information is the technology to generate You know, creatures with a genetic signature gets cheaper and cheaper.
Do we have a mechanism for figuring out what the changing status of DNA evidence is going forward after you've handed over a bunch of information in order to figure out, you know, if you have royal ancestry?
And how arrogant are we?
How arrogant has every generation of humans been?
Every single time to imagine that what we currently know, what we currently believe to be true and to be the limits of knowledge are a static and absolutely true.
Like we have arrived.
We have finally gotten there.
We are finally in full possession of all of the true information and there will be no more innovations such that what you can currently do with that information might change in the future.
We have this like double-barreled Overconfidence, both of which just come up and smack us over and over and over again.
Yeah, and in this case, you can tell that it's going to be this way because of precisely what Midwestern Doctor mentioned, which is that the technology was very new, still very new, and it's going to get easier and cheaper.
So, you know, one could simply list all day, you know, fantasy realms in which we do not yet live, but could, right?
Can this information...
Be used to infer that you've fathered children that you weren't supposed to, and could somebody then use it as an extortion racket?
Yes. You know, obviously.
Yes. So, the question really is...
Well, not for me.
True. See, earlier conversations about mothers versus fathers.
Right, exactly.
But... One can imagine all kinds of ways that the information in your genome could be abused.
Could it be used, let's say that you ran an insurance company.
Insurance companies function, when they function to the benefit of the insured, they function as a risk pool.
There's reasons to stratify a risk pool.
You do not want the people who are the most reckless with their bodies insured in the same pool at the same price as those who are most careful because effectively the careful people end up subsidizing the reckless people.
So there is a natural way for insurance to work in which your bad luck Yeah, although risk stratification works both with regard to the choices you make and the lot that you find yourself in about which you have no control, like your age.
Right, but nonetheless, all of those things could be done in an honorable system that was large enough so that we could adjust everything so that, you know, the ideal system, I hate to tell you, it's very simple, the ideal system.
It compensates you for your bad luck, stuff you really had no, you know, that's just luck of the draw, and penalizes you for your bad decisions.
In a world where that was true, it would evolve in the right direction because, you know, you could elect to pay a higher price for your bad decisions.
That's not necessarily a wrong thing to do.
Okay, but...
Guy dies while squirrel suiting.
Yeah. Bad decision?
Yes. Guy dies while hang gliding.
Bad decision?
Not as bad, yeah.
Guy dies while motorcycling.
Bad decision?
Yeah. So...
Well, I mean...
Guy dies while driving.
Guy dies while walking along the side of a road without a, you know, barrier between the cars and the sidewalk.
This is what I'm saying.
I'm not arguing that you can micromanage people's decisions, but I'm saying that you can in general.
And in fact, you know, predatory insurance companies that we have both do this and abuse it.
They use it as a mechanism to make a profit, and ideally you would just simply have a risk pool in which your bad luck was properly insured.
But anyway, the point is, there is nothing to stop a company from acquiring information that then becomes useful in predictions based on Why do we think that our browsing and buying habits shouldn't be protected,
but our genomes should be?
We've got this strange barrier in our heads about where we think privacy should start and end.
Well, what we have is no modern Rule set that can cover these things.
And it isn't just genomes.
In some case, in some ways, genomes are better protected because of their true complexity, right?
Which means that the promise of...
And they truly, like, they truly are part of your identity.
Whether or not anyone knows what to make of it.
That one's mine.
They were even before anyone knew that there were genes.
It is a fundamental part of who you are, except in the case of identical twins, a unique part of who you are.
But I would just point out that the failure of our ancestral wisdom to cover the privacy concerns and the property concerns of the present is profound and getting worse by the hour.
So think, for example, about the case of AI, LLM-based AI, or its equivalent in visual space, non-language space.
These things are trained on huge amounts of evidence that most of us did not decide to hand over, right?
So what happens if the AIs train on Yep.
Yep. Yep.
Yep. Is it legitimate for you to profit on insights that your AI can generate that come from what it's learned from people whose work they ingested?
Obviously, it shouldn't be, right?
If it's your insight...
And you just made the mistake of speaking it out loud, right?
The idea that's...
I made it onto a computer that was connected to the internet.
Right. So the point is, actually, we need industrial strength protections for the product of our labor because we're going to end up...
Imagine being put out of work by an AI that trained on your data, right?
It's a robot that can out you, you, and not without your help.
It's just that...
Well, it doesn't require your ongoing help into eternity.
It requires your help maybe before you even know that you're helping it.
Right. But your help will not be necessary forever.
Right, but it's retroactive, right?
So you may have said things into a camera before there was an AI, and the AI can train on it, and in the AI era, it can put you out of work.
So obviously that shouldn't be, but...
Does the copyright protection of your work prevent them from training an AI on stuff that's out in the public domain?
No. Did you have a reasonable right to expect that people would read it and be limited in the way that people are limited, but that computers could read it and be unlimited in some new way you didn't anticipate?
And does that mean that, you know, oh, sorry, that was your bad luck for not seeing it coming?
No, it shouldn't.
But that's where we are.
Punchline is...
Sorry, hold the punchline for a minute.
I think this makes me want to revise some of my earlier statements with regard to why do we imagine that our current understanding is what will always be.
I feel certain that I have made that error with regard to thinking.
That the beings that would engage what I wrote and said would still be humans in the future.
And so I made exactly the error that I was decrying over in that space, and didn't happen to make it over in genomics and 23andMe space, because that's where you and I were spending a lot of time thinking and learning.
But here's the problem, right?
And the problem is hinted at in...
The concept of hypernovelty in our book.
Hypernovelty is the state at which the rate of change is so fast that it is biologically not possible to keep up with it.
And what we are facing is a situation where the rate of change is now so fast that within the context of a lifetime, we can see our own errors from 20 years ago.
Here's the place where something set off my spidey sense and I didn't step in the trap.
23andMe, and here's the place where I did, right?
But here's the problem.
If you had properly understood the way things were going to unfold in the 2020s and the 2030s, and you had acted to protect yourself, you end up living like Ted Kaczynski.
You're a hermit.
Right. You have to be a hermit because...
And not just a physical hermit, but a tech hermit and everything hermit.
Right. Which means that you've done the harm to yourself And yes, you may have dodged the harm that would be done by the tech, but the point is, at the point you're living in a...
But I mean, it raises existential questions.
It raises.
How much does.
What then is it for?
What are we doing?
Right. What are we doing?
So in some sense, we have to participate in the world, but, and this was the punchline, you can't conserve your way out of our current problems.
You can't do it, right?
What you have to do is figure out how to innovate the new solutions, and that's going to terrify lots of conservatives because, in a sense, they have been right about the danger of liberalism, where people who don't anticipate consequences correctly and don't properly fear that they don't anticipate them have done a lot of what they thought was...
solution making that turned out to create radical new problems.
So anytime you hear somebody say you can't conserve your way out of this, the thought is, oh God, what are you proposing?
Yeah, I mean, what comes to mind is this, I feel like it's a very silly sort of pop psych or like, I don't even know where the phrase comes from.
It's like, yes and.
Can we get to yes and?
You've heard this, right?
So this actually feels like a good place to use that.
Yes. The Constitution, and yes, the older laws that we have been using for a long time and relied on have stood the test of time, and we will need new ones.
The and part.
The new ones do not require destroying the old ones.
That is the error that the modern progressives and the modern liberals have made.
Almost across the board, right?
If we want to go forward, we must destroy what came before first.
We must denigrate what came before.
We must realize that it was nothing and move forward from, you know, the ashes that we have burnt everything to the ground.
No, that is wrong.
And choosing between that and only the old, I go with the old, but it's not going to be enough.
It's not going to be enough.
So we want yes.
Yes, what came before that was good and honorable and has stood the test of time and new innovations going forward that understand that we can't tech our way out of this and our hubris will be our undoing.
Yes, it is also true that the style of remedy making that we have gotten to this point with will not work here because we are now truly dealing with Complex systems.
So it used to be that the way you dealt with this was you specify a principle, you encode it into something like a constitution set of laws, and then you have individuals with discretion figuring out how to apply it to things that were unanticipated.
That works in a world where there is novelty.
It doesn't work in the hypernovel world.
So, what do you do with the fact that we Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
So anyway, all of these technologies create new hazards, and all of the solutions will also create new hazards.
So what you and I have said is you cannot blueprint the solutions to problems in a complex system.
Blueprint is the wrong metaphor.
You can navigate to a solution.
That is to say, you can start moving in a direction and then you can correct your path as you find that you are Wayfinding.
Yeah. Navigation and the other metaphor is prototyping.
But the basic point is you need a living solution that can be modified.
And this isn't going to work in the context of, you know, a bunch of, you know, corrupt lawyers sitting in a Congress agreeing.
On the wisdom of a bill they haven't read.
That system isn't going to do it.
It's going to have to work in a fundamentally different way.
But, you know, here's the thing.
The only liberals that you should trust are liberals who are terrified at the dangers of this.
If you're not terrified at the dangers of it, you don't even understand it.
This is a terrifying change that we have to address in order to deal with the terrifying consequences of the world that we now live in.
You can do what we're currently doing, where an AI can put you out of work based on your own prior work.
Do you want to live in that world?
I don't want to live in that world.
You could blueprint a remedy to it, which is going to make things worse and not better.
Or you could agree that actually, not only do we need new rules, But we need a new way of thinking about how you generate rules in a complex system where you can't spell them out ahead of time.
That is frightening.
Yes. And I think there is an analogy, or perhaps it is just way more than an analogy to be made between several places where you're seeing this complicated systems thinking that uses static frames of reference, that uses rules that inherently stay the same from one iteration, one... Frameworked one situation to another.
We'll be outpaced, out-thunk, out-performed by complex systems thinking, which are inherently living.
And another place, which is exactly what you've just said, but another place where we see this is vaccines.
Right? That once you've killed off the thing, then you need to put in an adjuvant to prime your immune system, and then you're in really toxic vaccine territory.
The living vaccines have a risk, but they are inherently a better product.
Living dairy.
Dead dairy, pasteurized and homogenized.
Homogenized doesn't kill it, but it's part of the problem too.
Pasteurized dairy is dead dairy, and a lot of people can't deal with it.
And it's not particularly good for you.
Living dairy has a risk.
Has a risk.
But it is a live product.
And many people are finding that it is incredibly health-giving and very good for you.
So complex systems tend to be living, thriving, changing, unpredictable, slightly risky systems that are the ones that are going to be required, by and large, to deal with the problems that our 21st century world is handing us.
Yeah, I agree that the staticness is itself a huge obstacle to functioning.
But it's, of course, it's what the market wants because the market doesn't like uncertainty.
Yeah. Yeah.
Unpredictability, variability, any of it.
Right. Yeah.
All right.
I think that's it for the 23andMe conversation.
All right.
And, you know, try to spot this the next time somebody comes up with a new technology and you're trying to figure out whether or not you should, you know, just embrace it.
How many times have we had a new technology that seemed to have all of this promise?
And then, of course, 20 years down the road, you know.
Frankly, with every blockbuster drug, right?
You know, the sales pitch doesn't tell you about all the reasons to worry about it.
Maybe we don't even know yet.
From farther back, margarine, sunscreen.
Yeah, like, you know, NSAIDs.
Electric lights.
Electric lights.
Yeah. All right.
So that's it for that.
iPhones. Yeah, exactly.
Well, that's the mother of all of these, right?
This radically altered us in...
Ways, many of which are not good.
And, you know, it's not the box.
It's the business model, right?
Although the radiation is the box.
Yeah. Some of it's the box in the case of iPhones.
Well, it's the particular box it ended up in.
But the particular box it ended up in ended up that way because what was driving was our willingness to embrace the technology based on.
the wondrous things it can do not a balanced understanding of the costs and benefits so you know i'm super troubled by Our constant desire to increase the bandwidth that these things can bring us.
It's not that the bandwidth doesn't have benefits.
It does.
But the point is the bandwidth comes with radiation and, you know, a cost-benefit analysis that said, well, at what point is the added benefit of your videos being a little clearer, a little faster, right?
At what point is that benefit?
You're watching with it cradled in your hand this close to your face with the exponential decay that doesn't have that far to decay.
It goes to your hand and your face.
Yep. You're getting a lot of radiation.
You're getting a lot of radiation, and it's diminishing returns on the benefits, right?
The more radiation you're willing to accept, the better the phone works.
But a double dose of the radiation doesn't double the amount your phone can do.
It adds 3% to what your phone can do.
So it's not wise because we're only being told about the benefits.
All right.
Can we move on to the real pandemic?
Oh, no.
Yeah, I'm afraid so.
I don't relish talking about this again, but as much as this continues to be the direction that things are headed, I don't see any alternative to it.
Let's put it this way.
Maha is a great idea.
It is a force to be reckoned with.
But the question is, what is its fate in the post-election era?
Now, there are some very positive things going on at the moment.
Jay Bhattacharya and Marty Macaray were both confirmed.
So that is a huge step in the right direction.
I know less about Marty, and I think there are some places in COVID where he may have stumbled.
On the other hand, I am loathe to judge anybody completely because There was no good way to thread this needle.
So, in any case, congratulations to both Marty and Jay.
That's great news that they've been confirmed and deserved in both cases.
But I did want to point out that for the second time, Bobby Kennedy has put out a tweet that has this very strange ring to it.
Jen, you want to put it up?
So, this is...
Not only is this Bobby Kennedy, our new HHS secretary, tweeting this, but he's tweeting this in his official capacity.
Well, just, I mean, as you said the last time, it's not at all clear this is not a staffer who put this out.
Yeah, on the other hand, if it was a staffer who put it out, I would imagine that Bobby would have called that staffer in and said, what the hell are you doing?
And don't do it again.
And so the fact that this is happening again makes that problem even more concerning.
So, it says, this is from March 24th.
Instead of inspiring universal condemnation, the October 7th Holocaust triggered a global wave of anti-Semitism.
Ivy League campuses became a greenhouse for poison.
President Trump has ordered his cabinet to use every constitutional tool to upright this divisive weed.
I'm glad Columbia has agreed to this first step and will begin to restore itself as a garden of tolerance, reason, compassion, and respect.
Now, there are a number of things that are troubling here.
This is the HHS secretary.
It is not obvious why he is tweeting about October 7th and anti-Semitism.
In his official capacity.
I don't begrudge him his ability to do so as a private citizen.
You don't lose the right to speak as a private citizen just because you hold an official role, though maybe it puts some sort of informal burden on you.
But look, Bobby Kennedy is my friend.
I don't want to have to say this, but this feels like a hostage video.
This feels like somebody who has no choice but to say the things that he is saying from the podium at which he is saying them because of some force that we cannot see.
And the idea not only of making antisemitism the focus of this new health and human services era, but To call October 7th a Holocaust obviously is the most charged of terminology.
So I wanted to try to reframe this a little bit.
Very few people have thought deeply about why anti-Semitism is special, why it is unique among kinds of racism.
I've done a lot of thinking on this issue.
I believe it has to do with the unique way in which Jews have traditionally lived amongst other populations.
Which means that when times are good, Jews are tolerated and often embraced.
But when times are bad, there is an instinct to displace us.
So anti-Semitism is special.
Because Jews have lived traditionally as a diaspora.
The problem is, when you start using the special hazard of antisemitism, which became something that the world began to become clear on in the aftermath of the Holocaust and World War II, when you start invoking antisemitism as a way to deflect Criticism.
For example, criticism of the state of Israel, which is in a state of war, to create a zone around an event like October 7th where we cannot discuss the oddities of that event.
What it does is it creates anti-Semitism.
It can't help but create anti-Semitism.
The fact that people are afraid to talk about these issues when they wouldn't be afraid to talk about...
The foreign policy of any other state on earth where they wouldn't be afraid to be talking about whether or not another conflict had gone too far or was unnecessary.
The fact that we have to be afraid of being accused of anti-Semitism if we voice those concerns surrounding Israel, its war in Gaza, the October 7th attack, is of course going to create Exactly the preconditions that are going to unleash what I think will be an unprecedented wave of anti-Semitism because we are now living in a modern,
high-tech world in which this doesn't just result in people, you know, grumbling in their own neighborhood because, frankly, we're all now living in one neighborhood.
So, I don't know what's going on.
I will say that I believe Bobby Kennedy's commitment To defend Jews and to advocate for Israel is longstanding and it is genuine.
I don't think that that is in and of itself the problem here.
But the fact that he is tweeting this from his official account exactly at the moment when Make America Healthy Again should be firing on all cylinders.
This is the moment at which we should address the myriad of problems that Bobby Kennedy is in many ways uniquely encyclopedic about, suggests that something else has different priorities and that Bobby is experiencing some kind of pressure that he is not able to resist.
In that context, I think it is important to recognize This is not the last time we're going to see this.
The fact that there are forces shaping policy in the United States that are not fundamentally about the well-being of Americans is troubling.
And it is in our interest to figure out how to liberate people like Bobby Kennedy to do the things that I assure you, as someone who has...
Sat with him, spoken extensively to him on issues about the chronic health epidemic, about the health and well-being of American children, about the poisoning of all of us in the toxic soup, as he describes it, of agrochemicals and food additives.
We need to figure out how to free Bobby Kennedy and everybody else so they can go back to doing the public's bidding.
From their high offices.
And that involves thinking about this in game theoretic terms.
So my argument is we have to actually figure out how to give amnesty to the people who are supposed to be our representatives in government.
And that is not something that we can do willy-nilly.
Obviously there are things that are unforgivable.
And then there are other things which may persuade a person to do something other than what their conscience would have them do that are forgivable.
And, you know, for example, I would say it is a hard line for me, and I think it should be a hard line for all of us, that anybody who has willingly injured, damaged children, that is unforgivable, right?
That's not going to be Bobby Kennedy.
Bobby Kennedy is a very decent man, and he cares very deeply about children especially.
And so I'm not concerned that that is in play here, though I am concerned about that being in play with many others in high office at the moment.
Just to be clear, I'm not talking about the president.
I also think the president is not involved in such things.
But in any case...
I'm arguing that we have to figure out how to give people amnesty from things that are personally embarrassing or shocking, that they may be, you know, let's face it, the Epstein video library was collected for a reason, and the fact that we don't know in any official way who collected it, and that we don't have it, means that it is still at somebody's disposal, and it is...
essentially certain that it is being used for whatever purpose it was collected to shape the world around us.
Is it shaping the world around us, you know, a percent here or there?
Or is it shaping at 50%, 75% in We don't know.
But I think we have to imagine that maybe it is playing a much more important role than many people suspect.
And that, you know, defusing it, taking the power away from it by figuring out how...
As far as I know, although Kennedy did encounter Epstein, I don't think there's any evidence he went to that island or anything like that.
So I'm not suggesting that this is Epstein connected to Kennedy.
But in general, something has collected compromise on a lot of people.
And our system doesn't function, and part of the reason it doesn't function is presumably downstream of that compromise.
So we in the public have to figure out how to liberate those who we have elected to high office for the purpose of doing our bidding.
We have to figure out how to liberate them, and amnesty is going to be an important part of it.
So we in the public have to figure out how not to react in the way that we would predictably react to.
Shocking information that emerges on people so that they can stop being afraid of it coming out.
There's a lot to say there, but.
I'm only now diving into what has happened with Colombia and its response to Trump's The Trump administration's demands and such.
And all of that feels actually somewhat farther afield from specifically what you're talking about.
So maybe we should save all of that for another time or for not talking about, since there will be a million news cycles between now and the next time we're on camera.
Except maybe just to say this.
Obviously, some of the energy behind Trump's election this time had to do with reactions to the kind of free speech debacles, the total failures of protection of free speech, such as the one that we experienced in real life, viscerally.
At Evergreen in Olympia, Washington in 2017.
And so we have, you know, a particular interest in both as long-standing academics, as believers in the need for a functional society to have a system of higher ed that actually allows free inquiry, that all of the universities actually provide academic freedom.
To its faculty and students alike.
How they do that will vary.
There will be disagreements.
All of this is true.
There is a way in which what the Trump administration did will seem very heavy-handed in a sort of a doge kind of a way.
Okay, Columbia, we have identified that you have $400 million in federal funding, presumably annually.
We're going to yank that unless you do some things that we're asking you to do.
And your point, partially, is Why is Israel unique?
Why are we not allowed to discuss questions of Israel on the same way that we, or anything in the Middle East, call it the Middle East, like we are really anything else in the world?
And that does raise serious questions.
It is certainly true, as has been noted by Height and Lukianoff in Codling the American Mind and many other places that the professoriate has become ever more liberal, and I put that in quotes because it seems hateful and bigoted and the opposite of liberal in many ways, over the years, such that it is very rare to find conservatives on campus.
And indeed, back in 2002, when I started Evergreen, I was...
Dismayed, but in no way shocked to find there, just as in the other campuses that we've been on, a steady undercurrent of anti-Semitism among the faculty.
And that has been the case since we have been in universities.
And it is different from a discussion of...
What Israel is and what its existence should be, could be, must be, has been.
It's going to be hard to get a conversation on campuses with the current professoriate, but a ham-fisted...
What looks to me, and here I can...
Hopefully, Jen, you can see my screen here.
This is...
This is the four-page letter, if you can put up my screen, that Columbia put out in response to basically saying, okay, uncle, we need our $400 million in annual funding.
Here's an unsigned letter from the administration of Columbia advancing our work to combat discrimination, harassment, anti-Semitism at Columbia.
Some of it feels right.
You know, students who violated our rules during Columbia's first encampment or at Hamilton Hall have been suspended, expelled, or had their degrees temporarily hooked.
If they violated the rules of the university at which they were enrolled, then there should be repercussions.
And part of what we were seeing in 2017, before that at other schools, after that at other schools, was that universities and colleges had rules that they simply did not honor because they were succumbing to, you know, activists and their violence and their rage.
And that's not how civilized society works.
But there's also, you know, let's see.
I was just looking at this as you were talking.
All individuals who engage in protests or demonstrations, including those who wear face masks or face coverings, must, when asked, present their university identification to the satisfaction of a university delegate or public safety officer.
That's a weird one.
There's a question of masks, right?
Masks. Has emerged as a very strange thing, both for religious reasons and for pandemic reasons.
And so it became normalized, and what we saw living in Portland in 2020, first as COVID hit, and then when George Floyd died in Minnesota, you saw people spilling out into the streets, nightly violence, 100 nights straight, and they were all masked.
And they could claim that they were masked because they were trying to protect themselves from a virus, and they were not.
Some of them may have been.
And what you still see, I was just in Portland this last week, you still see so many more people walking around masked outside there than I've seen anywhere else.
And to some degree, they're simply scared and confused.
And to some degree, it offers a continuing costume.
It's a disguise.
And so, you know, saying actually, I don't know where...
We're supposed to fall with regard to religious protections, because there are some religious traditions in which masks are expected for women.
But masks at protests has always seemed dangerous.
On the other hand, papers, please, no matter what, if you're wearing a mask or not, this does not sound like it is honoring our Constitution.
Yeah. Honestly.
And you know, there are gonna be people who say, there are gonna be people who say, well, as soon as a private university, it's not like, really, now you're not gonna defend the constitution?
Now you're not for free speech?
When they're saying things you don't like, you're not for free speech, you're those people now?
Because we see this on both sides now.
As soon as people start saying things they don't like, people on both sides, you know, it's James Lindsay, it's the woke right, just as much as the woke left, saying, ah, well, I'm just gonna take your right to say that away'cause you've pissed me off.
That is not how this is supposed to work.
We don't get to do this.
And I probably should have dug it up before the podcast.
But Bobby Kennedy has famously pointed out many, many times that the founding fathers of the U.S. were absolutely aware of the danger of infectious disease and pandemics.
And yet they included no exemption from constitutional protections for pandemics.
His point is, the Constitution is not built for easy times.
It's built for tough times.
This is the same.
The fact is, our society cannot depend on muscling people into believing this and not that.
Our society has to tolerate, frankly, lots of stuff.
It has to tolerate people having suspicions of each other, hatreds of each other.
In effect, the system has to Don't overwhelm that with our freedom to discuss these things and get rid of the toxic views because they aren't right, not by telling people, if you have those views, we're going to take your funding.
So, you know, with respect to masks, how would you write that rule, right?
Either nobody gets...
They did, in order to get their money.
But you can't.
The point is we're not allowed to do that, right?
Do I know that the masks that were being worn in Portland as Antifa was attacking the court were being worn in order to anonymize people engaged in illegal acts?
Of course I do.
But either...
Nobody gets to wear a mask, in which case we have to have a conversation about whether or not that is an abridgment of a religious freedom that you are entitled to have or not.
But we can't do it in the context of...
You know, this one conflict or this one state.
Well, in this case, they're saying any protests.
But then, you know, what defines a protest?
And how slippery is that slope, if at any moment?
You know, is it a closed campus, as many campuses were during COVID, where you weren't even allowed on campus without proof that you belonged there?
But in general, university campuses are explicitly not closed.
And you do not need to prove who you are and whether or not you belong in a place based on Yeah, it's not a closed campus in that sense.
What's more, the distinctions between public and private are completely broken with respect to universities, as I used to point out back in the days of the Evergreen debacle.
Evergreen is a public college.
The vast majority of its funding coming from private tuition.
And Harvard is a private college.
The vast majority of its funding coming through NIH and NSF.
And DOD and all the rest.
I mean, to this, like $400 million federally annually from federal grants to Columbia and its professors and its situation.
So you can't do this.
The point is...
This is a quasi-public institution, and the very money that you are looking to pull means that you're not entitled to do this because the Constitution applies.
And look, I think, as I've said a hundred times, I don't think you can rescue the university system.
I think it's too riddled through with...
Fools who don't know what they're doing, and you can't threaten them into being smart and capable of teaching.
So we've got a problem.
We've got an entire university system full of people who shouldn't be there.
You can't threaten people into being smart and capable of teaching.
That's right.
You can't.
No, you can't.
It's patently not possible.
And do you find a lot of anti-Semitism amongst the faculty on these campuses?
You better believe you do.
And does it manifest in the students because the students are trying to please the professors?
Of course it does.
So yes, you've got a really Bad problem.
On the other hand, on the other hand, what shall we do about the Hamas supporters?
Well, that's a good question, but one of them happens to lead Israel at the moment.
An actual supporter of Hamas.
Now, yeah, he's a cynical dick, but he supported Hamas for his own cynical reasons.
You don't think that he needed to be thrown out before the state of Israel could even engage in a defensive action?
Of course he did, and they didn't throw him out.
So, where are we now?
Right? We are in a situation where the entire thing is going to be done through double standards.
And those double standards are going to be wielded on behalf of people that some powerful structure thinks need to be protected and against people who happen to be vulnerable because of their immigration status or something.
It's a completely incoherent way to run a civilization, and it can't be.
We can't do this this way, right?
Yes, anti-Semitism is a real problem.
It is a serious problem and it is a unique problem, but you are not going to threaten people out of it.
You're going to make the thing happen.
You are going to burn every bit of goodwill that Jews used to have protecting them illegitimately.
So this has got to stop, right?
We have to be able to think wrong thoughts and get over it rather than be told you're not allowed to think wrong thoughts.
That's not America.
Amen. um um um um um um Amen. Because it's the five-year anniversary of our first evolutionary lens, I want to just finish, even though that was excellent, just by sharing what I believe, and I have not gone back and listened, but in my notes, as how we finished our first episode.
As people were being locked down, the schools were closed, And not to share my screen here, because this is my notes from back then.
I will say...
We don't want the AI training on it.
The AI's got plenty to work with, fortunately.
We were talking about how you develop immunity.
Once you're infected, you're probably immune.
We're talking about serological...
Testing, the ways that it was transmitted.
This was back in the era when everyone thought it might be fomites, right?
And, you know, was it bodily fluids?
Was it respiratory droplets?
We talked about the O blood group being perhaps a little bit protected from infection, whereas the A blood group was somewhat more at risk.
This was the era of chloroquine phosphate, the aquarium cleaner.
That phony story.
Well, what we said, so we talked about the story that had man dies after eating aquarium cleaner, but we also said, or at least it's in my notes from then, this is a different chemical form of chloroquine than the drug hydroxychloroquine that prevents some forms of malaria and is used to treat lupus and rheumatoid arthritis and which may be useful in treating COVID-19.
So that was back in the very first episode.
We then, I think, did not really talk about it at the point that Trump was talking about it.
I think we didn't say anything, really, until after we, you know...
Yeah, this is one of the things that...
I fault myself for it.
It took me far too long to realize that hydroxychloroquine was actually useful.
But it's here in our very first episode.
That's interesting.
Yeah. And then it was only, for me anyway, I didn't come back to it until after I realized the depth of the depravity in the story about ivermectin.
I'm like, okay, let's see what other kinds of repurposed drugs.
So if I recall correctly, what actually happened in the aquarium cleaner story was a murder.
Oh, I don't know.
Yeah, I hope I'm remembering correctly, but I believe that the person who died, their wife poisoned them with it.
Oh, maybe that was the case.
Yeah, I think I remember that.
A lot of water under the bridge.
A lot of water under the bridge.
A lot of the story, you know, the aquarium cleaner story, it goes hand in glove with the...
People who couldn't get treated for their gunshot wounds because the ER was overrun by ivermectin overdoses.
Yeah, and one of those stories was, you know, the proof was like the lines outside of the ER and it was August and they were all like bundled up.
Yeah, it was a stock photo.
It was a stock photo from the wrong season.
There was nobody overdosing on ivermectin because it's virtually impossible to do it.
And so anyway, it was just total garbage that had been manufactured by the garbage manufacturers.
Yeah. Who got us demonetized.
Oh, I forgot to mention that.
You want to go there?
Well, yeah, I guess a brief detour.
I mean, it's relevant.
So we were going great guns, ferreting out the reality of COVID from that first episode.
First episode in March of 2020 and through July 2021, when suddenly.
When suddenly.
I had on Pierre Corey in studio, and then Robert Malone and Steve Kirsch.
And before, so there were three episodes that YouTube flagged.
The first one was one that we did, in which we talked about ivermectin.
That was the first one that they pulled, and they gave us a demerit, whatever it's called.
And then it was Dr. Corey, and then it was Steve Kirsch and Dr. Malone.
You know, interesting that the CEO of YouTube at the time, Susan Wojcicki, I think that's how you pronounce it, now dead under possibly related circumstances.
But in any case...
Related to what?
To COVID and...
Oh, some small cells of cancer or something.
Yeah, we don't know if this was a vaccine-induced cancer or not.
But anyway, the point is...
She is sister with the CEO of 23andMe.
So interestingly, we're still dealing with the same, you know...
Crime family?
Well, yeah.
So, you know, here's...
Actually, I did send you my tweet.
So back when we got demonetized, and again, we are still demonetized for no good reason.
We turned out to be right about...
The stuff that we got demonetized over.
Yeah, so we were not yet demonetized.
They had just flagged us.
Well, they had taken down, I think at this point, two of the three videos that they would ultimately take down.
Still not, or at least the one that we did is still not available on YouTube.
It's hard to find.
But so here was before they had actually yanked all of our revenue.
Yeah, so before they...
We appreciate your pay.
So jumping in to help.
This is the YouTube account on Twitter responding as I said something about the threat.
Jumping in to help, we've forwarded your video to the right team for a re-review.
We'll share updates here as soon as we hear back.
Appreciate your patience in the meantime.
And I said, what patience?
Stop stammering and wake the boss, by which I meant Susan Wojcicki.
We learned later from an insider at YouTube that, in fact, the decision to demonetize our channel and not re-monetize it was in the C-suite.
Very probably, Susan.
So, anyway, it's about time YouTube fixed.
This despicable attempt to control speech that in fact prevented, it threatened our channel and got in the way of us alerting to people that things that we now know to be true and important.
It disappeared overnight, what was then our major source of income.
Obviously, it's been a zero source of income since then, so we've replaced it with some other things, but not completely.
It's a private corporation.
It has the right to, oh, stop already.
Yeah. Oh, stop already.
Yeah. I believe that we finished that very first episode back on March 24th, 2020, with a list of what I have here in my notes are bullet points.
And here, I'll just make this bigger enough that you can share my screen.
Maybe not yet.
Yeah, maybe just don't share my screen because I don't feel like sharing all of my notes.
No, actually, you can share it at this point.
We did talk about masks in that episode, and we were wrong about masks.
Yep. Well, I want to come back to what we were wrong about.
Why don't you do that before I wanted to finish with this?
Okay. So what I wanted to say is we frequently shorthand and say wrong about masks in the sense that I, in particular, was an early advocate for masks.
I was...
Wearing one, a cloth mask before masks were a big deal because I thought they were likely to be helpful.
You made me grumpy.
I made you grumpy.
Yes. Turned out they were not helpful.
Upon seeing the evidence that suggested that they were not helpful, we abandoned them.
Were we wrong in the sense that I suspected that they were going to be helpful and they turned out not to be helpful?
Yeah, if that's wrong, then I was...
Wrong, and I accept it.
On the other hand, for those who think it was preposterous that they could be helpful, and you as a biologist should know the scale of a virus, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Sorry, no.
Had the virus been transmitted by fomites, that is to say, particles left on surfaces, then a mask that blocked the droplets from...
Your coughing from getting to the table would have had some value.
So was there a mechanism by which a tiny little virus could possibly be stopped by a mask that had large pores in it?
Of course.
Of course there was.
It didn't turn out to be that way, so they turned out to be useless.
But in those early days when we didn't know how the virus worked, it was a reasonable precaution to utilize and...
I don't feel bad about thinking that it was potentially useful, and I don't feel good about the fact that we did what we always do, which is when we say something and it turns out not to be true, we come back and correct it.
So anyway, there are lots of people out there who post pictures of me wearing a mask as if I've hidden this, as if I'm embarrassed by it, and I'm anything but embarrassed.
I think correcting your errors is...
A sign of integrity, and that's been our way all along.
And making errors is not a flaw.
Absolutely. Okay, so in that first evolutionary lens, before we were calling it that, live stream back on March 24th, 2020, we ended, or we intended to end, with a list of points.
What should we be doing now?
Individuals should, I said, socially distance.
This is the one I'm least sure about, given...
Given how that came to be understood and given that it provided fodder for lockdowns.
Get outside.
Get your sun on your face.
Viruses, we said, generally don't thrive when there is sun and vitamin D is good for you on so many levels.
If the weather permits, open your windows.
And at least sometimes when you're inside, open your windows.
Get moving and stay active.
Get plenty of sleep.
Stay hydrated.
Eat whole, real food and pursue the cravings that are for whole, real food, if not for things like Cheetos and Diet Pepsi.
So all of that is both fairly obvious, totally consistent with what we continue to say, very consistent with Maha as it exists in its organic form, and will actually go a long way to keeping you healthier than Picking up whatever the newest thing that Merck or Pfizer or whomever has created and is trying to shove down your throat or into your arm.
Yep. Wow.
I'm pretty impressed, actually, at how much was apparently in that first episode.
Yeah, and there's a lot more.
We talked also about how sick Zach and I had been when I had come back from L.A. in February with what I'm sure was COVID in February of 2020 when...
COVID definitely wasn't here yet.
Yeah, that was...
So in that episode, we had already reached that conclusion?
Yep. Wow.
Yeah, all right.
That's interesting.
It puts a lot of things that I would have said were later realizations right at the very beginning.
Yeah. The one that surprised me most was talking about hydroxychloroquine as there being preliminary evidence that it was useful.
Anyway, that's five years ago.
Yes. That's five years ago.
Amazing. Yeah.
It feels in some ways like a lot longer than five years.
Indeed. A lot of water under so many bridges.
Yeah. A lot of spilled milk under those bridges.
Yeah. Hopefully it's unpasteurized.
Right. All right.
I think that's it.
We will...
Oh, actually, I did want to share...
That we will be back the same time again next week, but the following week...
I have to find it.
I had pulled it up and now I've lost it.
Oh, here we go.
You can show my screen here.
We're going to do a live stream early on Saturday because we will then be going to Ralston College.
The week of April 7th to give their annual SOFIA Lectures on April 9th and 10th at 5pm both days.
Both of us will be giving lectures both evenings.
Ralston was founded and is led by Stephen Blackwood and it is really an extraordinary institution.
They've been a sponsor of ours that is unrelated to them having invited us to give their annual SOFIA Lectures this year.
Their theme at Ralston this year is nature.
And so I'll put this in the show notes.
You can go here and read our little description of what we think we might be talking about.
And if you happen to be in the area, I imagine that you could come see them.
Yeah, and come say hi.
Yeah, exactly.
But we'll be back.
That isn't for a couple weeks.
And in the meantime...
Find us on Locals, where you can see our Q&As and get early content and occasionally find us there.
And we appreciate you, always, subscribing, sharing any of our content that you find.
And until we see you next time, please be good to the ones you love, eat good food, and get outside.
