Babies by Design: The 280th Evolutionary Lens with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying
Today we discuss hummingbirds, baby making, longevity hacking, and Jeffrey Epstein, before finishing up with a short discussion of the riots in LA. A new company is promising future parents that they will be able to create long-lived babies—what could go wrong? Also, how likely are they to be able to make good on their promises? We discuss, as always, with an evolutionary lens. Also: what a great business model! And: it is easier to fix something that is broken than it is to improve something...
Hey folks, welcome to the 280th Dark Horse livestream podcast.
So many words.
I can tell you have corrected me.
I got the number right.
I'm Dr. Brett Weinstein.
You are Dr. Heather Hying.
It is late spring.
It's very hot here, I will say, already.
Although when I check to see what temperature it actually thinks it is, it doesn't read as hot.
But it feels very hot, which may just be that we've become...
No, something is wrong with our measures, I feel certain.
At least with the app's representation of measures, because it has been startlingly hot, like August levels of hot for here in early June, early mid-June.
And, you know, we're told that the high was 64. Like, no, that did not happen.
Yeah, it felt like 80. Yeah.
No, and I think it did hit.
I think it is understood to have hit.
into the mid-80s places on the island, but somehow there's either inconsistency in really the technology or the way that we are measuring things, or as we've talked about before, there is something well beyond temperature that is relevant to our experience of heat.
And the sun going full wonk on everything right now may be related to that.
May impinge because conduction, convection, all the various different kinds of heat obviously impact us differently.
Now, I did make an interesting observation, it being late spring this morning.
As you know, we have a hummingbird feeder, which I have learned to manage.
It's not as simple as one would think.
But anyway, I'm now doing a good job of managing our hummingbird feeder.
And we have two kinds of hummingbirds.
We've got Rufus hummingbirds and Anna's hummingbirds.
Anna's hummingbirds somehow persist here through the winter.
I don't know how they pull it off absent these feeders, but apparently even in the absence of them they do.
But in any case, I observed something this morning.
We, I think, have a nest somewhere very near our feeder.
I've gone looking for it, but the brambles that it's in are so thick that I can't find the nest itself, but I see a lot of behavior that's consistent with parents going back and forth.
No, and there's a hole there in the roses and the berry vines and such.
There's a hole that you can sort of look into and there's a lot of other birds around too.
And it feels like there's a root in, and I definitely have also seen, I think the rufous going in and out there.
I think it is the rufous as well.
But in any case, here's what I saw.
And they have singletons, hummingbirds all, or mostly, they have at least very small clutches.
Small clutches, I don't know if it's always singletons, but in any case, And I'm learning a lot about hummingbirds this way.
Here's what I saw this morning.
I saw...
Hummingbirds are so small to begin with.
I think, a smallish hummingbird, which I take to be a recently fledged offspring of whatever pair is roosting in that bramble.
And the bird...
It approached a foxglove.
It approached a tree that I'm having trouble identifying but that is already in fruit.
So it's not flowering.
There's no nectar to be had.
It then approached the feeder.
But it approached the feeder and it sort of poked its bill at the glass bottle on the top.
And then it saw the...
And then it did.
And it sat there for a good long time drinking.
And so anyway, my thought was- It drank while sitting?
Or it drank while hovering?
It drank while sitting.
So that's also somewhat unusual.
Not unheard of.
But usually they hover while they're feeding.
even on the feeder.
They do it when the...
They save energy by sitting.
Often, and, you know, some feeders force them to hover.
But anyway, this one sat and it fed for a good long time.
But what it did was in, you know, if the hypothesis would be this is a baby hummingbird that doesn't know what to feed on or how to find those things.
And it's engaged in a kind of enhanced trial and error.
It's approaching things that look like they might be food.
Food edition.
It is.
But first of all, there's something about hummingbirds that's so freaking amazing to begin with.
The idea that you could construct this sort of tiny fighter jet fueled on pure sugar water is hard to believe that it, you know...
I mean, by virtue of being so small, the brain is minuscule, and yet what it's capable of is remarkable.
But this also says something which I think has to be true.
Because these animals can end up in so many different environments, and especially when those environments are now...
So they can't inherit the sense of which flowers are good to feed off of.
They have to figure out what that's here actually works.
So anyway, one doesn't know how they pick this up.
You don't know, are we going to watch them following their parent around and learning that way?
Or is it going to be a trial and error thing where they're going to be out on their own approaching things that...
So anyway, I thought that was interesting.
It was like, in a matter of 30 seconds of watching this animal, I had a much better sense of what must go on upon fledging.
In species, at least, and probably widely in hummingbirds.
That's amazing.
And it raises for me a couple of questions, although I got a little bit of an answer as you continue to talk.
The question I am increasingly wondering about, and maybe I even mentioned this when we were talking about foxes a couple weeks ago, is why is it understood among do-gooder, nature-interested types that you really should not be provisioning wild mammals?
It's just not a good idea.
They'll come.
They'll beg.
They're so adorable.
We've got this fox that I've named Vera who comes every night and sits, and she's clearly getting food from some people whom she does this from, else this wouldn't be a behavior that she was doing.
And we do not feed her because we understand that you are not supposed to do these things because it encourages a dependency and also potentially a danger to your own animals.
We have exactly no qualms about provisioning birds among the same people, right?
We put up feeders, you know, wild bird feeding stores exist.
Like this is a specialty thing that people do.
And I wonder if part of it isn't that because we garden,
Birds, and they don't tend to provision mammals, and when they do, we get mad at the mammals.
The mammals end up being destructive, the deer come in, the wild rodents, they come in and they take what we don't want them to eat.
Deer eat the flowers, the wild rodents and rabbits will eat vegetables that we're growing.
Whereas the birds come in, and although there are certainly some birds who poke holes in flowers rather than going in the honest way, they tend to help the flowers proliferate.
And so maybe this is part of it, that we have a sense of when you encourage birds, they help you do the things you're already doing anyway.
And when you encourage mammals, they end up creating problems for you.
Well, I think there are two questions here.
One is what the effect of the animals is on you.
And I must say, I have a very strong sense that provisioning Mammals is bad news.
And what happens is the mammals, not only do they become dependent, but they also frequent places that they shouldn't be.
So people should be somewhat off-putting to them and to the idea that people are encouraging them because they want a picture or something like that.
They are encouraging those animals to be On the road, which results in tragedy.
Well, that's actually consistent then.
I was going to say, well, okay, so it's a volant, non-volant issue.
No one is interested in provisioning bats exactly.
But what do we do for bats?
we do put up bat houses for bats.
Yeah.
And so the volant, interesting organisms, we do sort of allow ourselves to create either habitat or food for, and in part, this may be precisely about, they're not going to get in our way.
Yeah.
And they're not gonna get in the way of their own selves.
As we see these people who are provisioning foxes near the road and the foxes Right.
Now one other thing I would point out is as I've been learning To manage the hummingbird feeder.
I was already alarmed, but I'm increasingly alarmed at the fact that you can buy a hummingbird feeder in any hardware store with very little guidance on what you should put into it, very little guidance on what happens to what you put into it and what effect that has on the birds.
And the crucial thing is you're actually taking on a responsibility.
If you have the idea about yourself, I like these animals, and I'm interested in seeing them, and I'm willing to make the moral compromise of encouraging them in this way.
Mind you, I think the ideal way to do it is a garden in which the flowers do the job.
And we have a number of flowers that the hummingbirds visit.
But if you do this job badly, you will end up killing hummingbirds.
You'll never see them.
You won't understand what happened.
But these animals set up their lives based on where the resources are likely to be.
To the extent that you're adding a bunch of resource, you're probably increasing the number of birds.
And the birds that are added are dependent on the amount of resource that you've introduced being consistent.
And so, you know, I'm very careful about this.
In fact...
I never let it go bad.
And I always change it out at night when there's not going to be anybody feeding it for two reasons.
One, I don't want the hummingbird feeder to be gone when birds go looking for it because that may confuse them.
Probably they're smart enough to figure it out.
they probably understand something about a feeder and that that's a human thing and they're used to it behaving weirdly um but also Turns out that's a bad move.
But in order to get the sugar to dissolve, I use warm filtered water that doesn't have anything else in it.
It's warm drinking water from an InstaHot, but I don't want a bird to go feed when the water is too warm, and I don't know what too warm is.
So you want to have time to cool off overnight.
But anyway, it is...
We need a word for it.
It's just ambient.
It's not interesting.
Ambient outside temperature.
But anyway, I thought it was interesting.
And, you know, I've learned a bunch from this feeder, but this was, you know, in terms of the amount learned in a very tiny period of time, it was like, oh, am I seeing what I think I'm seeing?
Yeah, that's awesome.
Yeah, it was pretty cool.
All that before the ads, even.
Yes, before the ads.
Yeah, so we've got a watch party going on at Locals, as always.
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Yeah, that would be good.
Their packaging?
Yes.
Was something they arrived at after careful sashay, sashbee testing.
Is that right?
Yes, they compared and they chose sashays.
Good choice on their part.
I thought so.
Because if I didn't know how to pronounce sashay at first, I definitely wouldn't have known.
We didn't for like three head reads, but now we're confident.
Yeah.
Sashay.
In fact, I have it.
The mode of locomotion.
Exactly, which you are going to model for us.
But not today.
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Should I feel bad about the fact that I no longer try to distinguish between forward slash and slash when I read the ads?
No.
I just say slash, even though I know sometimes it's pretty much always a forward slash.
I just, I gave up on that one.
And for the Gen Xers, it feels like a musical reference?
Slash?
I think so.
Yeah.
Isn't he a member of U2?
I thought, all right, we're about to find out if I don't know what I'm talking about, but I think so.
Are you thinking about the edge?
Am I thinking?
Well, see, they're closely related concepts.
And again, Slash was some sort of a musical figure.
Not my first language.
English.
All right.
I was not actually a fan of U2.
I never quite got what was so exciting about them.
But one of my close friends in high school really liked them.
So I believe that you're thinking of The Edge.
The Edge, yes.
I believe maybe I am thinking of The Edge and Slash might be some different musical thing.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, I sit corrected in this case.
You do.
We are waiting to see you sashay corrected.
All right.
I'll work that up for a future episode.
I am not going to be able to goad you into doing this.
No, not today.
All right, shall we move on to the matters at hand?
Indeed.
All right, the matters at hand.
I wanted to address the change or would-be change in narratives surrounding the Jeffrey Epstein story.
What?
I thought that was going to be last.
Oh, we're going to have...
I do want to do that, but that's just a little teaser.
That's going to come later in the episode, so remain tuned in.
That's my suggestion for all of you.
You're going to have to sashay at some point, publicly.
You know, it was very popular when we were professors, and I would demonstrate the mode of locomotion of CFOX on the ground.
I believe that I innovated that.
I don't think so.
I was doing that first, man.
I don't think so.
With the students.
Alright, well, maybe.
But that's not how I remember it.
But in any case, yes, sashaying, but not this episode.
So, that does raise questions.
There.
Found the appropriate notes.
This is like a well-oiled machine.
The level of professionalism today is...
Right, okay, well, you know, technicality.
So, we are going to talk about an issue that came to our attention through an article in the Wall Street Journal, which maybe we should put up that article.
The article references an exciting new startup.
This is the Wall Street Journal, and the title of the article is Longevity is Now a Factor When Picking an Embryo for IVF.
Or it could also be read, longevity is now a factor when picking an embryo for IVF.
That is actually what it says.
That is what it says.
Either way.
So, in any case, if we scroll down, what we find is that there is an exciting new venture started by a guy who the story suggests dropped out of college, a 25-year-old entrepreneur.
And he began researching the possibility of increasing lifespan by choosing genes that predispose one to a long life.
So this fits very well with the fashion in tech utopian circles of thinking as Aubrey de Grey.
Aubrey de Grey, who I have sometimes regarded as my antithesis, Aubrey de Grey says senescence is simply an engineering problem.
that if you simply diagram the small number of factors that cause us to grow feeble with age, that we can address them each in turn.
And that if you do that, and the part I agree with him about is if you were to somehow successfully address all of the reasons for that, In fact, you would probably, if we really addressed them all completely, you would have a very strong chance of living to a thousand years of age.
That if we take out the increase in your vulnerability to all the things that eventually end our lives, that your life would be an extremely long one.
So that part is true.
The question is whether or not it say it's an engineering problem doesn't mean it's tractable.
In fact, at one point I was in a contest to challenge Aubrey de Grey and I used the analogy, you know, something like, you know, could you Something along those lines.
Not a tractable problem, just because it's an engineering problem.
So, anyway.
Right, but that also, the reason you brought up that analogy in your earlier discussions on this topic is precisely to point out that biology is not the same as engineering.
And it's the same thing over and over and over again.
It's the reductionism combined with utopianism combined with delusions of godlike grandeur that many in the tech space have with regard to imagining that humans are but one more engineering problem.
And I think your example there, your analogy, really points out the big error, which is it has to be a functional being at every step.
Whereas no engineer, even, yeah, what were your two examples?
I mean, those are two unrelated vehicles.
I think it was a Mustang and an Apollo rocket.
Right.
But so even, you know, even a Mustang getting its, I don't know when.
I don't know when Mustang changed its big form factor, but multiple times, presumably.
But even at the point that the engineers of the Mustang, the designers and the engineers of the Mustang, were told, actually, we're going to change this up for next year.
Do your darndest on it.
Which was not nearly as large a change as what you were suggesting.
They didn't, they had the designs and the blueprints and all the past forms, but they didn't have to keep those things running and make the changes on the existing forms.
That's, that's one of the giant differences between evolutionary changes.
Now, in this case, we're talking about looking at embryos.
So we're not talking about the final form of the creature, but we are talking about whether or not the story that is being presented.
Portrayed here that is involved in this business is a plausible story.
And I wanted to do something that I think others will not be able to do, which is to point our particular lens at this model, which basically involves couples who are in IVF, have multiple embryos that have been, these are fertilized eggs.
And they are able to be scrutinized.
And they will have something like 20 of them.
And this company is promising to tell you which of these embryos is liable to produce an offspring with the greatest chance of living a long life and maybe other things.
The first point that I feel obligated to make is this is eugenics.
We are talking about a technological Intervention aimed at genetic improvement.
And this is the very earliest point on that slope.
But this is a slope where there's no obvious reason why, if you're going to do this for the purpose of making your offspring healthy so they live a long life, that ultimately you're not going to end up doing this, attempting to choose for all sorts of other characteristics.
But I mean, this is a later stage.
A bunch of other characteristics are already chosen for, as I understand it, from we know a number of people who went through IVF, but also just from reading this article and some others.
We know, for instance, that it's absolutely common, and absent IVF, many people, especially, I had late maternal age, because I was going to be close to 35 when our first So, you know, that's also choosing.
Well, it is buried in several of the points I want to make, but I will argue that there's a difference.
And the difference comes down to essentially this.
What they are looking for with an amniocentesis, and mind you, I don't know what we would do if we had that chapter to relive faced with amniocentesis.
Probably reproducing relatively late in life, we might have chosen to do it because of the danger of a major chromosomal anomaly.
I will point out we also had a tiny amount of genetic counseling, which is common.
based on the union of two people.
I think, I think just because I think it was the, it was the required follow on to the amnio and, But the point is they're looking for basically deleterious recessives that might be brought together in a particular union that would cause a deformity or a vulnerability that was knowable.
So I know you have a lot of places to go, but actually let's just, I think this is a reasonable place to point out that we do know a certain number of things.
But the fact that we could have someone look for genetic abnormalities like trisomy 21 and then make a decision, which luckily we never had to make a decision.
These conversations are fraught with If you want to be allowed the choice, that means that sometimes you would choose to make a choice which others would find deplorable.
And luckily we were never in a position like that.
But trisomy 21, which causes Down syndrome, is one of the obvious ones that everyone knows.
Then there are some other simply genetic and
singly genetically I remember that as being part of one of the things that that genetic counselor said.
In the follow-up to the amnio, which I think, absent having made a decision to have this, frankly, invasive procedure that comes with it some risk to the pregnancy, you would not end up with that counseling.
But all of this knowledge that we have, all of this ability to find out these things that many people can now name, things like Tay-Sachs and Down syndrome, suggest that it is easy to make the transition in your mind, then, that we have all the power.
That we have all the knowledge.
And it is a tragic mistake to make that leap into, therefore, all problems are tractable.
Right.
And I will come back to that in.5 sub-point C. So now that you're on the right page, you are on it.
I am on it.
All right.
Okay.
Like a well-oiled machine that needed oil.
That did need oil in this case.
Yes, exactly.
Okay.
First of all, let's take the Tay-Sachs version.
And mind you, I didn't know we were going to be talking about this, so I didn't look it up.
But my memory of it is this.
This is a rare deleterious recessive gene.
If two people, let's say two Ashkenazi Jews...
It's going to be dominant.
Nope.
No, no, no, no.
It's going to be a rare deleterious recessive.
If two people reach reproductive age without...
They could both be carriers, but neither of them is going to have two copies, which means that many of the offspring that they produce will not have Tay-Sachs by virtue of the fact that they get lucky and they get neither of the Tay-Sachs copies.
Well, if two carriers have four children, there's a good chance that two of those children are themselves carriers.
It's not that the three kids who are...
That's true.
And people should consider then the implications.
You might decide not to have a child with Tay-Sachs so that you could invest in that child's full sibling, right?
So there is a murky moral question in there.
Yep.
But nonetheless, it I mean, your life is just radically different if you can avoid your child having Tay-Sachs disease, right?
So that suggests, well, what more?
Now that we know, how long have we known about the Tay-Sachs gene?
How much more do we know now?
How much more can we do with respect to making this kid, you know, stronger, better, longer lived?
And the answer is it's a completely false analogy because Tay-Sachs comes in a form that makes it so that there is a simple genetic predisposition.
one that functions in what we would call a Mendelian way, which allows us to say, oh, you've got that thing.
You know, well, if you've got one copy of it and you breed with somebody who doesn't have any copies of it.
Your child's not going to have it.
So they may be a carrier, but they're not going to have it.
They're in the same position that you are.
But if you breed with somebody who carries another latent copy, you've got a, you know, you've got a problem that is addressable with modern technology.
but That does not suggest that the vast majority of conditions and strengths and weaknesses that you might have can be navigated in this way at all.
And I would point out we've been here before, so I'm going to skip to point 5C.
Point 5C is that when the Human Genome Project was underway, And we didn't yet have the results of it, but we knew that there was a project and the human genome was being fully sequenced for the first time, and then there was a private effort to do it, and so two people were having their genomes sequenced.
There was all kinds of hype about, well, once we've seen the content of the genome, all of the diseases that we're going to know, what genes cause them, and be able to do this, that, and the other.
Well, it didn't happen.
Of course it didn't.
Of course it didn't.
Yes.
Because frankly, And some of them hopefully did, and just went along with the hype.
Oh, I don't think they did.
I think they...
And therefore, if you don't know enough about it, you're going to say dumb stuff like, hey, when we've sequenced the entire human genome, we're going to know where all of these diseases come from and be able to address them.
No, you won't.
That was obvious.
And in fact, I did say you're not going to find those things in there, not in large numbers, because they're not likely to be there.
And so we will come back to why they're not likely to be there when we get to the evolutionary logic.
But just once again, a few are, and that confuses people.
Things like Tay-Sachs and things like Down syndrome, which is at an even broader level.
But, you know, errors in numbers of chromosomes or particular simple Mendelian traits that track in simple ways that, you know, even Mendel, Mendelian, even Mendel 100 plus years ago would have seen with the technology that existed then.
Those things do exist, but they are the exceptions.
Well, they are the exceptions and there's a pattern to them.
Right.
So we can understand what it is that we might usefully go looking for and that you will find in the Human Genome Project and what things you won't find in there.
Right.
Simple cell anemia is another simple Mendelian.
Simple Mendelian trait.
Yeah.
The reason for which we know.
Why it is selected for, that actually the dysfunction is protective against malaria in that case, so that there's a countervailing evolutionary force.
But okay, so let's just go through these points.
One, this is eugenics.
this is the foothill of a giant peak of eugenics.
Now, the saving grace is that whenever So they fall in love with the idea that they're going to improve people by knowing a lot about genes and choosing for the right ones.
But really the only mechanism of eugenics that works is sexual selection.
That basically, you know, we favor people who are...
Well, but sexual selection at all the levels, not just sort of basic phenotype.
Chemistry is real.
What are we smelling?
What are we feeling?
Intellectual compatibility, all of these things.
It's not just how you look.
It's all of these things that make you choose, okay, that person is someone with whom It's like paint by numbers.
It's like conflating painting by numbers with a painting by one of the old masters.
Like, you're staying within lines that were drawn for you by nature, but you don't even know what the lines mean.
Let's just say a high-quality genome that has no major errors in it, where everything works and not only works but works together, is a prerequisite to a highly functional, attractive, accomplished person.
But, as a human, if you had to pick between somebody who had a Whatever the genetic predisposition is towards intelligence but was a dummy by virtue of the lousy environment that they had as they were learning how the world worked or somebody who had average genes for intelligence but had actually been exposed to important things in the world, knew a lot, had generated wisdom through experience.
Your kid is going to end up smarter if you choose for a parent who's smart.
By virtue of having interacted with the world, the genetic predisposition, in my opinion, is going to be, if there is much of a genetic predisposition at all, it's going to be the minor player for sure.
Okay, but anyway, so the point is, as a human, you don't want to pick for good genes.
You definitely want good genes in the person that you pick.
But the magic of humans is so much at the software level that...
There's a reason that all of these things impinge on whether we find somebody, you know, attractive or not, right?
Attractive is not strictly But okay.
So this is eugenics.
we morally have to decide what we think about eugenics.
I guess it's actually a decent comparison between putting a hummingbird feeder in your yard versus a, And I think the natural version has all kinds of awesomeness built into it.
And the artificial version in this case is a slippery slope to hell.
Also, they don't know what they're telling you they know or implying that they know, so it's not going to work.
However, wow, is this a great business model?
Slam dunk on this one.
Man, think about it.
You're going to get someone to pay you many thousands of dollars for you to peer into your scopes and sequencers and figure out which of these creatures is going to live disproportionately long, and then you're going to tell the people this, and by the time they figure out whether you Sold them a bill of goods or actually gave them a disproportionately long-lived offspring, they and you will both be dead, right?
So the point is, there's no feedback here.
There is essentially, as is so often the case, a bunch of statistical arguments and models that suggest there might be something down this road, right?
But I mean, I'm sure this is point like 8BQ or something on your list.
There's no Q under 8B.
You didn't go 8b.
No.
Small roman numeral one.
I forgot the small roman numeral one.
But even if they did, which they don't because they can't because longevity isn't going to be like that.
It's not going to be simple.
Trade-offs.
I mean, this is your work right here, right?
So is it 8b1q or no?
No, no.
It's 5b.
Okay.
I thought we'd already gotten to 5B.
No, we skipped to 5C, which was the experience we've had with the Human Genome Project promising lots of things that it failed to deliver that those of us who were paying attention to the evolutionary logic saw they were not going to be able to deliver ahead of time.
Well, the parents of said created child may also not live long enough to see that actually instead of longevity, they got cancer.
If these guys are actually able to do what they're claiming, which I don't see how they could be, but if they actually had the trick to choosing among an array of future embryos, those that were more long-lived, they would be more likely to be prone to cancer.
Right.
So, exactly.
There is an underlying evolutionary logic here that you can avail yourself of.
And let's start with the The shallow end of the pool.
One, there's a big difference between things like Tay-Sachs and Trisomy 21, which causes Down syndrome, and disproportionate longevity, right?
The difference is it is much, you will have noticed this in your own life, it is much easier to break something than it is to improve on the functional object.
Right?
You've broken many objects in your life.
How many machines have you taken what you got and made it better?
For some of us, it's not zero.
But the point is the difficulty in doing that is extreme.
And the difficulty in breaking stuff is trivial.
Right?
And this is the effect in nature.
So there's lots of stuff in nature that is broken.
And you can do better by simply swapping it out for a functional version.
So that's what happens.
Whether you think this is morally tolerable or not, that's what happens when a couple is told, your fetus has Down syndrome, and they decide to end that pregnancy and start another one.
They are going back to the drawing board.
They are not trying to improve on functional human functionality.
They're trying to improve on dysfunctional human functionality, which ain't that hard.
It's rather like in the case of, you know, Poppin' pills.
Are poppin' pills gonna make you better than you are?
Well, it depends.
If those pills are correcting for a deficit that you have, then they might, right?
You may be too low on vitamin D, and yes, the better way to do it would be to go out in the sun, but will taking vitamin D as a supplement improve on a dysfunction?
Yeah, that's very plausible.
Is it going to make you better than a functional human is likely to be?
No, that's unlikely.
There are ways, but...
very difficult, like improving on, you know, your toaster.
Okay.
So there's What was the relevance of the toaster?
That it's hard to improve on a functional machine, even a simple one, and it's very easy to break them.
Yes.
And so there are lots of places where something is broken.
Tay-Sachs is a case of a broken gene.
Trisomy 21 is, I would say it is a broken uh, meiosis.
He has a broken meiotic mechanism.
It's caused, An additional chromosome.
An additional chromosome, which I will just...
When chromosomes don't fully separate, presumably that happens to many chromosomes, is trisomy 21 particularly bad?
Probably quite the opposite.
Probably the ones that are particularly bad never produce a live baby.
Yeah.
And the fact is you can survive trisomy 21 and there's a whole range of how serious it actually is.
So anyway.
Yeah, just to go back to basics here, for people who don't know, we've got 23 pairs of chromosomes and it's at that 21st pair that They have three or they have an extra like arm.
I think sometimes it's one arm gets stuck.
I don't know about that.
The trisomy refers to there being three distinct ones, so maybe there are other ways for Down syndrome to manifest.
But to Brett's point, we don't hear about trisomy 2 or trisomy 8. And, you know, there might be a few of these that do exist but are exceedingly rare but still sometimes create functionality.
Interestingly, though, we do...
So you've got the first 22, which are autosomes, which look the same in male and female and are indistinguishable.
You can't tell, excuse me, we're looking at anything in the first 22 chromosomes of a human, if that's a male or a female.
It's that 23rd position in humans, and it's different across all mammals, that tells you.
But then there are, and you've looked into this much more than I have, but there are XXY humans, for instance, that effectively have a trisomy at the 23rd position and have a number of strangenesses at the 23rd position.
You mean what the phenotype of an XXY looks like?
Oh, boy.
Yeah, I don't remember either.
But there are trisomies at the sex chromosome position that produce functional but broken human beings.
I think they are phenotypically male, if I remember correctly.
If they have a functioning SRY gene, they'll be phenotypically male.
But I can't remember what other characteristics were there.
But in any case, okay, so it's easier to break things than it is to improve on functional things.
Now let's look at a case where there is an argument for an important piece of genetic information that one might deduce in something like an embryo.
There is the BRCA1 and 2 genes, which if you have Yeah.
Usually referred to as BRCA, right?
The BRCA1 and 2 genes.
Yeah.
Right, which if you have one of these broken forms, These are dominant genes, however, in which the harm is relatively late in life.
Which is part of why selection has not been terribly effective at doing away with these variances.
That, A, it's not like if you have it, you've got a certainty of having a breast cancer in your 40s.
you have an increased likelihood between your 40s and old age that is appreciable.
But nonetheless, because it's a simple dominant whose effect is laid in life, if you spotted it in an embryo, you could, again, the moral point, But you could decide, actually, even this embryo is better off if we terminate it and we raise its full sibling that doesn't have a copy of this gene and therefore is going to dodge that bullet.
I know this is not where you're going and I know very little about breast cancer, but I know, I believe that it is accepted at this point that...
Earlier and more frequent breastfeeding is protective against breast cancer.
I do not know if that mitigates the risks of having breastfeeding.
BRCA.
Yeah, but in cases where there is a genetic propensity, We are in even murkier territory than if you've got this, you're going to have the disease.
Tay-Sachs is a good example.
Ectasex, I think, is always fatal at a relatively young age, maybe almost always before reaching reproduction.
I may have those numbers wrong, but it is...
It's profound.
It is a profoundly devastating condition, which we do not know of any things that a person can do, either their parents or them, to mitigate the effects beyond making their life better and perhaps a little bit longer in real time.
but it's a terrible, terrible disease that you will die from.
Well, at some point, I think we ought to have the conversation about the moral dimension here, which I feel has never been properly dealt with because the interests that a damaged embryo fetus actually has in the world may often lean towards raise a full sibling who does not at a genetic level.
Now, human beings having the power to decide who lives and who dies And so it may be that it's just not worth tolerating human beings having that power because what happens as a result of it is intolerable.
But from the point of view of, you know, a single cell that has a predisposition towards something bad, that single cell doesn't have any of the characteristics that would cause it to override the logic that says, actually, if you're trying to do Me, and at this point, I'm really just genes and stuff.
If you're trying to do the genes and stuff good, then picking an embryo that doesn't have that defect would be a good idea.
But again, that's in the area of defects where this is plausible.
It's not in the area of picking superior combinations of genes.
So let's get...
This is rare that you have something that's really bad.
It's a simple trait.
Why is that not purged by selection?
Because it's relatively late acting, and so it leaves something for us to find.
But that is the exception, not the rule.
In general, to the extent, as Heather alludes to, to the extent that you have something in the genome that has some negative impact, it's there not because selection missed it, but it's there because there was some competing value that caused the negative thing to be pulled along with it.
We are very early in our understanding of how genes work.
In fact, the entire idea that what you're going to do is increase the longevity of your offspring by choosing between embryos based on the genes that they carry is basically evidence of a genetic model that's way too crude to be useful.
So you are engaging in, you are intervening in trade-offs where the only thing you know about is the thing on one side.
Right?
So, you know, oh, we've got some, you know, genetic markers that seem to be indicative of a propensity towards heart disease.
Really?
Do you know what the positive side of those predispositions are?
And if you were allowed to choose, which of these values would you pick?
You know, well, how big an advantage are you going to get from choosing against this predisposition to heart disease?
You're going to get a 47% relative reduction risk.
47%.
That sounds huge.
But that's 47%.
It's relative.
It's 47% of the 10% risk you had of heart disease in the first place.
So, you know, you're down to 5.3%, right, from 10%.
But that's not enough of a benefit, even if you could avail yourself of that benefit.
It's not enough of a benefit to go intervening randomly in trade-offs you know nothing about.
Yeah, I mean, I think there are a number of fundamental Non-intuitive, sort of quantitative-ish, not mathematical exactly, but quantitative-ish tools that people need to be deploying, including these guys who would mess with embryos that they are not.
and you have just raised a few of them.
There's trade-offs in which When you have found something that you can just dial down and feel like a winner for doing it because that's a negative I'm gonna turn it down.
Boom.
We won know that there will always And it's possible.
I mean, I shouldn't be the one speaking here.
This is the center of your work.
There will always be something in tradeoff relationship with it, many times multiple variables in tradeoff relationship with it, sometimes because the thing in question is not at peak capacity.
It hasn't hit its highest level of value.
You can actually mess with the one thing and you don't actually affect the other things much, right?
So your language around this is...
Sub-optimality space.
Just the sub-optimality space.
So many trade-offs will exist there.
But you don't know.
If all you've got is one variable, you say, aha, I found it.
It's negative.
I'm going to turn it down.
You're pretending that the tradeoffs don't exist.
They always do.
If you're lucky and you mess with it, that tradeoff was in suboptimality space and you haven't necessarily inherently turned up something else or also turned down something else that was, you know, also turned down something else that was good or turned up something else that was bad because we have no idea what kinds of relationships exist.
But then there's also the fractional advantage question, which does sound super mathy, but you know, like, oh, you know, we get a 50% decrease in a thing.
Well, if your original risk was less than 1%, how much are you willing to put up with in terms of potential harms, many of which we don't even know, for a risk that takes you from exceedingly low to slightly more exceedingly low?
Yeah, it's not worth it, but it sounds to the unsophisticated ear as if it's a major benefit.
Right.
But also there's something in...
Trade-offs explain why the negative stuff that might be found in the genome will be there, and that's because it's the downsides of positive stuff, and they're inseparable, right?
You know, that was a wonderful meal, and then somebody gave me a bill, and it's like, well, yeah, alright, you want to point to just the bill and talk about the cost and not talk about the meal?
You're not doing the full analysis.
There were two things.
Why did I give this money to these people?
Right.
Why?
They took my money, right?
But let's say you got a bunch of these people who sort of thought they were too sophisticated for evolutionary logic and decided to just plunge right into the hard science in the genome and go find the genes that do the bad stuff and figure out how to turn them off or select against them or whatever they thought they were going to do, right?
Those people are going to spot A bunch of weak correlations between, oh, this sequence and that disease.
And they're going to say, well, we'd like to live longer.
Longevity is reduced when you die of cancer.
It's reduced When you die of heart disease, it's reduced when your liver fails, it's reduced when your lungs collapse, right?
So it's reduced by all these things.
And you might find a genetic predisposition, a slight genetic predisposition towards your heart failing and a slight predisposition towards a cancer.
And then you don't understand that you're playing with two ends of the same thing.
You're not going to get to reduce all the bad stuff at the same time without reducing the good stuff.
But by focusing on one thing at a time, you could tell yourself that story.
You could tell yourself, oh, we're going to look at this like a library of things.
And as we come to read those things, we're going to be able to pick the stuff that makes you better.
But the point is, longevity is inherently intolerant.
It is enhanced when your ability to resist cancer and your ability to repair your tissues are in balance.
If you look at tissue failure in isolation and you say, I want more capacity to repair my tissues, I'll live longer because tissues fail and it kills people.
You turn that up, you're going to get a bunch of cancer and you go, what happened?
Again, I'm not arguing that these people's business model isn't brilliant.
It is, right?
Think about the parents, right?
Think about the parents who are fortunate enough to have the money.
Maybe they're unfortunate enough to be facing IVF, but they're fortunate enough to have the money, and somebody approaches them and says, you know, you're going to love this child with all of your heart, and you're going to want them to live the longest, happiest, healthiest life they can.
We are in the wonderful position to be able to predispose them in that direction by choosing the best of your embryos, right?
That is a marvelous story.
And a parent, a soon-to-be parent, Especially when faced with the idea that they have to go through this technological process anyway, and they have to jump the mental hurdle of, wait a second, we're going to create 20 embryos and we're going to implant only a small number of them?
And is there a moral question there?
Then they're going to be presented with this and it's going to be irresistible.
It's going to be very much like when the doctor comes to you and, you know, you've got a newborn and they say, you know, that newborn is marvelous and healthy, but...
And it's like very hard to stare down the doctor.
It's going to be very hard to stare down these gene jocks because they're telling you that they know a way to make babies better.
And the fact is, it's a lie.
It is a lie, and it's going to be a very profitable one, but it's one that people are going to need to learn how to resist.
Well, I think the field out of which the founder of this new IVF company came before, as you said, I think he dropped out, but is almost the antithesis.
Within biology, it's like the antithesis of evolutionary biology.
His field, did you catch what it was?
I forgot.
You can probably guess.
Computational biology.
Oh, right.
It is exactly imagining.
Hopefully, there are people within the field.
Who call themselves computational biologists who understand something about evolution.
But in general, that sounds like the same mistake that we are making across the board.
It's data-driven.
It's data-focused.
It's absent hypothesis.
You just generate lots and lots and lots of stuff, and then you go looking for the pattern in the thing that you have and pretend that the other layers of reality, as opposed to the data in front of you, don't exist.
Other layers of reality, that sounds postmodern.
What are you talking about?
Like, no, the trade-offs exist.
And the fact that you found a gene that you think does a thing, it may do that thing.
But you are unable to be aware, because of the method by which you have gotten there, what other things it might do.
Yes, and in fact, people just don't appreciate how little we understand about how genes result in creatures.
They don't get it because it seems, you know, at the...
It's a very elegant story we have to this point.
But in terms of how that actually produces creatures and how evolution interacts with that genome, and therefore how it manages to balance all of these trade-offs in a way that actually functions, it's still mostly mysterious.
And as I've ranted about before, there's something about our...
And really, the biology textbook should sound a whole lot more like, let's look at all of the puzzles we can't answer yet.
And then let's talk about what little we've figured out and the painful route that we got there, because this is where we finally engage complex systems.
And the fact is, complex systems are, they require a very different toolkit at the mental level and at the technological level, just interacting with them.
The number of factors is so high that it's very easy to...
Did we skip your point too?
Point two is that it's a great business model.
I believe we've handled that one.
Point three is that this is based largely on modeling and statistics, the computational biology, which you have just covered.
The final point that I want to make is there is always the question of opportunity cost.
You could invest Thousands of dollars in having a company scrutinize embryos and tell you which ones are likely to live a long time, knowing full well that if they're lying about their ability to do it or kidding themselves about their ability to do it, the point at which you know that is going to be so late and your ability to prove it is going to be non-existent that effectively this is just a pretty good story.
I'm willing to throw a bunch of thousands of dollars at it.
On the other hand, if you really were interested in the longevity of your soon-to-be child, there is no shortage of places that you could invest.
No shortage.
Really, what's going to make your child long-lived is high-quality food, a high-quality developmental environment, which means one that has been You want to provide this child with the environment for
which those genes are matched.
And if you provide this child with that environment, and you help to induce the habits that cause them to pay attention to their health, Exercise.
Then you will so dwarf any influence that is going to come from, you know, trying to read the tea leaves in the genome and pick between embryos.
There's no comparison.
The difference between a healthy person in 2025 and an unhealthy person is, you know, light years of distance.
But you, by your framing, elided why.
Why people will opt.
For the Gene Jock Solution.
Because it's not, on one hand, I can consider everything from the food to the bedding to the influences to the screens to the schools to everything.
Versus looking into the genome with my magic ball that sounds science-y and figuring out the things.
Because the people doing this are the parents.
The people doing this are the people selling the product to the parents.
And so what the parents have to do is say, I have the money to say yes.
It's one and done.
And of course it's not for all the reasons that we've talked about.
But people are always, I mean, and we all do this.
Life is too complicated right now.
There are too many options across every domain.
And this is why brand loyalty exists.
And this is why, you know, things like Marie Kondo exist, right?
Like we want simplicity in so many of our domains because there are too many choices all the time.
And so the prospect of you want your...
I have the solution for you.
Just give me your dollars and I will provide you that child.
It is one and done.
I am reminded of like the first time in modern times for me that I was reminded of the phrase one and done, which is now ringing in my ears ever since was, um, In this particular case, he was not trying to force them on me.
He was just having an interested conversation with me about why I would choose to, at that point, be.
This was a health professional who understood the actual value of ivermectin and said, yes, I get it, but you have to take it every day.
Whereas these vaccines, one and done.
Now, of course, he was totally wrong about that, you know, in every regard, not only not safe and not effective, but also one and then another and then another and then another.
I can do all of these things.
I'm like, what if I want to take them to McDonald's?
What if I don't feel like buying a mattress that doesn't off-gas?
What if I forgot?
What if I get divorced and the ex exposes the child to all the things?
I want the thing that sounds guaranteed, sure, but also that's simple, and if I can afford it, I'm going to do it.
One and done.
I agree.
It feels like people are so trained to consume everything that they once did.
Consuming is passive.
In this case, you're going to consume the information.
You're effectively consuming health on behalf of your offspring rather than...
The question is, how much do you love your child?
Do you love them enough to do the incredibly hard work of continually figuring out what in their environment is putting them in jeopardy and altering it?
Do you have enough love for your child To keep them away from normie doctors, even though everyone in your family is going to look at you like you have lost your mind, right?
But look, your normie doctor is literally being paid to make sure that their entire practice is full of quote-unquote fully vaccinated people according to the CDC schedule.
Right?
They're being paid to do it.
You are not being told that your doctor works on commission from pharmaceutical companies, right?
So avoiding normie doctors is a necessary part of your love for your child.
But if you think that because it's good for your kid that people are going to look at you like you're a great parent for doing it.
No, it will be exactly the opposite.
They will look at you like you are a crazy monster, putting your child in jeopardy.
So one thing you have to wrestle with as a parent is, is it about the child or is it about you?
and it has to be about the child.
But we see all too much evidence in modern times of parents and So that mommy land gives them kudos as opposed to their child ends up the best, most productive, most amazing person that they can be.
And that is a huge tragic error.
It is, but I want to actually navigate a little bit where it may have come from.
I think if you went back 300, 500 years, That what people thought of the quality of your parenting would probably be a pretty good proxy for the quality of your parenting.
So you could use people's impression of how you're doing raising your child Likely as a guide and the problem is that outsourcing that Judgment leaves it open to capture as you know as It captures the minds of lots of people.
And by taking their judgment of how you're doing, you get exactly the inverse message that you're supposed to be getting.
You need to be ignoring those people.
Maybe if proxying to other people's view is the right way to go or it's the way that you're wired, then proxy only to those.
So I think part of what is embedded in what you just said is that actually the need You know, this is a drumbeat that I've been on for a long time,
that women in particular, as the sex that is more likely to be agreeable and compliant, need to be standing up to the authoritarian dangers that are being posed to their children and to them, and that it is actually hyper-novel that So many choices that people have to make so much of the time have to,
right now, be in antithesis to what culture is advising.
That this is a moment where we have to come to use our framing of the terms into full consciousness so much of the time that it is actually exhausting.
And it is part of why people are just looking for...
And have it stick?
And, you know, one and done.
Like, not be thinking about that anymore.
I'd be like, I'm not gonna think about my toothpaste.
I'm not going to think of, you know, just be done with it.
And then there's actually no way to do that once you're talking about parenting.
In part because you're dealing with another complex system and the interaction between you two is complex, but also just development means that something that wasn't safe before is safe now.
And that's true outside of the hypernovel conditions, right?
Like, you're not supposed to drink while you're pregnant and that makes sense.
You're not supposed to give a one-year-old a bottle of whiskey.
That makes sense.
But we think that it's, you know, no one thinks it's great for you, but at the moment you turn 21, you're allowed to buy a bottle of whiskey.
You know, you're not supposed to be, you know, you're not supposed to have honey.
I don't know where this came from.
Like, that's some other rabbit hole, I'm sure.
But, you know, children under the age of one aren't supposed to have honey, but it becomes something that to satisfy a sweet tooth is a far better choice than most of the things on the market.
So what things you can and cannot expose your child to changes over time, and that, too, is hard for people to reckon with.
Yes.
I also think this goes back to the earlier point that you were making.
Relative to the natural version of what we probably shouldn't call eugenics because it's holistic.
The natural choice of who to produce offspring with is you selecting for quality.
It involves selecting for genetic quality, but it is far from limited to that.
You are selecting for features of character and other such things that make a person truly attractive.
Now, here's the point.
When you pay the cost, when your love for your kid is such that you actually pay the cost to stare down the normie doctor, for example, to stare down the friend group that thinks you have forgotten how reality works, you know, that looks at you like you're stupid, that blocks you from Thanksgiving because you're not vaccinated for COVID or whatever it is.
When you do that, when you pay that cost, and you do so in order to protect your kid from the things that are being pushed on them, your kid picks up that lesson, too.
They come to understand, oh, you loved me that much.
You were willing to do that, even though it would have been far easier to do what you were doing And I think there are lots of places where you and I became aware of where the hazards were too late to protect our kids, things I will feel bad about forever.
I know we tried, but I think we missed it on the foods that a child has to chew when they're very young in order to avoid orthodontia.
Yeah, we didn't give them bones as babies.
We didn't give them hard stuff to chew on.
We vaccinated them because we believed That the cost-benefit analysis was well-established and all of that.
We learned these things too late.
And they pay costs, and they will for the rest of their lives.
But when we knew that things were not in their interest, we didn't spare any effort to protect them.
And I think it took a while.
I think they did look at us a little bit like, are my friends maybe onto something?
and my parents are a little crazy, but the point is it didn't take very long for...
And I think, I'm sure they will do it for their kids.
Yes.
Me too.
We there?
Yeah, I think so.
Well, I actually, the little thing that I want to do before you talk about whether or not Jeffrey Epstein did in fact kill himself is a follow-on to that, actually.
And I think maybe we already have most of the conversation, so this is just going to be a quotation.
This is, before I turn it around, I will just apologize.
Fairfax, our epic tabby, has a thing for books.
He doesn't like to read them.
He likes to eat them.
So my beautiful new book has been chewed on by our epic tabby.
But this is Arthur Koestler's The Act of Creation, a 1964 tome.
Arthur Koestler was quite a guy.
And I'm not going to go into his biography here, but he was extraordinary.
He had interests and insight across practically every domain of interest in the 20th century.
He lived from something like 1905 through 1982, I want to say, numbers or something like, right?
And just had his finger in and knew sort of almost all the major players throughout that time.
And he wrote fiction, he wrote political analysis, he wrote essays, and he wrote this book, which is remarkable in many, many regards.
But I have just one quotation, which is mostly actually him quoting someone else, a book I have on order but I haven't received yet, which fits to me very much.
And actually, before I read the book, The quotation.
I'm reading this as sort of background for the book that I'm writing, in which I am trying to do kind of what we were just doing here, to help bring to people the recognition that they all have the capacity to think scientifically and that they all need to be doing so.
And one of the things I'm wrestling with is why don't people know this?
Not why don't they have the skills.
How have people been so successfully scared out of or convinced that the science is for the other people?
That's for the experts.
All I have to do is listen to them and do what they say and then things will be fine.
Which is, you know, from COVID a lot of people woke up to that not being the right move.
But in general in life it's not the right move.
What led me to this quotation that I'm about to share was my growing sense that people think that the experts have the facts, and because they will never be in possession of the facts, they, the people, they can't possibly bring conclusions.
They can't possibly make interpretations for themselves.
But as Koestler and people before him have pointed out, it's not actually the things that you know, but the order in which you put them that often brings insight.
Without the hard little bits of marble, which are called facts or data, one cannot compose a mosaic.
What matters, however, are not so much the individual bits, but the successive patterns into which you arrange them, then break them up and rearrange them.
We shall find, wrote Butterfield on the opening page of his History of the Scientific Revolution, that in both celestial and terrestrial physics, which hold the strategic place in the whole movement, change is brought about not by new observations or additional evidence in the first instance, but by transpositions that were taking place inside the minds of the scientists themselves.
Of all forms of mental activity, the most difficult to induce even in the minds of the young, who may presume not to have lost their flexibility, is the art of handling the same bundle of data as before, but placing them in a new system of relations with one another, by giving them a different framework, all of which virtually means putting on a different kind of thinking cap for the moment." That is incredible.
I will say just personally, you know, everybody's thinking process is You know, we often talk about the fact that you can't teach somebody how to formulate a hypothesis.
We can just kind of tell them to do it and they can either figure it out or they can't.
But that quote matches what it feels like to work on a problem.
And I will tell you, the most important piece is not jumping to the conclusion that you understand the thing, but leaving it unsolved.
Until you really do understand it.
That's the hard part, the discipline part.
Not finding certainty.
Right.
You can say, ah, this is my suspicion.
But you need to know, you know, I used to have multiple suspicions about why malocclusion happened.
Tooth malocclusion.
Yeah, your teeth failing to meet.
And I, you know, I, But as soon as I heard Mike Mew talk on it, I knew that the hypotheses I was working on were so inferior as to not be worthy of further thought because he clearly had a model that worked.
But how do you get to a model that works?
It is like, well, you have a spectrum of things that you believe are likely to be true.
That's a trick, it's making sure you don't But it is the sort of it's a kind of play.
You are reshuffling them and every so often you get a version where suddenly more things would make sense if they were oriented just so.
That's exactly right.
And you won't be aware that this book, this tome of Kessler's That is the third of his big subjects in this book, and it's exactly that, right?
Now that you take the things that you know and that actually everybody knows.
And you put them in relation to one another in such a way that it breaks something in the minds of the audience.
And that's when the laugh happens.
Yeah, actually, I wish I remembered his name.
There's a comic who is getting a lot of, I see a lot of clips in various places.
He's a very personable guy who is making a living basically by, it's all crowd work.
He points to people in the crowd and asks them a question and they shout something up there and he kind of repeats it.
And, you know, he makes comedy out of it.
But you can sort of, if you watch him, you know, he only gets away with it because he's so likable.
Because he basically is insulting everybody that he's interacting with.
But they're showing up in droves.
But anyway, you can watch him.
He'll get a piece of information from somebody at this side of the room.
If you've watched enough of it, you watch him bank it.
Right?
And it's like, he'll say something funny about it and then he'll bank it.
Right?
And then two people later, something will be said and you'll watch him juggle.
Like, the trick, somehow he does it while he's talking.
Yeah.
There's some other part of him that's juggling the pieces.
And then, blam, he'll connect these two things.
And it's like, oh, that's interesting.
You know, he's perfected.
Well, I think there's so much of what we find entertaining, so much of what we go to to watch in other human beings is this kind of, you know, sometimes it's just...
Sport is often raw skill.
But it may also be connecting the dots in a way that now you can say, wow, I just don't even know how he's doing that.
I'm going to watch more and more and more and see if I can figure it out.
Or, oh, I do see how he's doing it.
I don't yet have the skills to do that thing.
And maybe given what I am, that's not going to be the way.
I can now see that I thought you had to approach this problem from over here and he's approaching it from here and I could go up from here or maybe I have to come in in a circle from above like there's just there's so many ways in and what doesn't have to change for all of these different understandings is the actual balls in place that you know the facts the nuggets and yes
Like what we're just talking about with regard to what is healthy for a baby is not the same thing as what is healthy for a toddler or a teenager.
But if your pieces of data are good and you have them and your expert over here has them, they hopefully have a lot of experience moving around and getting different perspectives on it.
But it's also true that if this is their field, they are more likely to have become canalized.
They're more likely to be like, no, this is actually, this is the canal.
This is canalized into always approaching it in the same way.
Well, I've got these tools and they only work if I approach them this way.
And I've got, you know, these methods and these ways of thinking about it.
And, you know, it's Publisher Parish, and I'm just going to keep on doing it the same way.
So if you can extract from them that, that, And be like, I'm going to just pull those things that they think they know out of the paper and put their interpretation aside.
Their discussion means nothing to me.
Because I don't trust them.
They've been doing the same kind of thing over and over and over again.
I'm going to put it over here and let them float a while.
They're like, okay, they're going to float in with all the other stuff I think I know.
And I'm going to circle about it this way and this way.
And at some point, a new revelation.
Emerges not because you have necessarily found a new piece of information, but because you have put two pre-existing pieces of information that you knew together in a new way that no one else has.
And it points to, I think, finally explains in a way that I think will be intuitive why I make the argument that you're far better off not processing true things.
than allowing a false thing into your set of...
Because if you imagine that you had...
So just say that again clearly because the words were...
You're far better off not processing a piece of true information.
There's a piece of information, it's true, it would be helpful to you if you had it, but you're better off not processing it than running the risk of including something that's false in your set of things that are presumed to be true.
Maybe that's totally clear to everyone, but there are true things in the world, and what you're arguing is that you're better off not knowing some of the true things than taking the risk of taking on as true some things that are false.
Yeah, so imagine that you had a big marble puzzle.
I think it has to be a 2D puzzle for this to work.
But let's say you had a big marble puzzle where somebody had cut a piece of marble like a jigsaw puzzle.
And you were trying to figure out how the pieces fit together, and so you were playing with all kinds of different orientations.
Well, if the puzzle is incomplete, you can still figure out where the pieces that are present go, right?
you may and be left with a you know partial picture but if you have one piece of marble that looks like it belongs in that puzzle that isn't part of that puzzle it's And you require yourself to get all the pieces to fit.
There is no orientation in which they're going to work.
So when you have something encoded as factual that you are juggling and it's wrong for some reason.
One piece of fraudulent data or one piece of data that the methodology causes it to look like this when it was really that.
If you require yourself to process it.
Right.
It will cause you to falsify the correct answer.
Yep.
Right?
You will reject the truth.
And so that's what these fields do.
They absorb stuff.
They have a wrong idea that what they're supposed to do is master all of the things that are known in their area.
And some of the things that are known in their area are just not true and won't stand the test of time.
But if you take them as assumptions, you're done.
And they're all done in the same way because they all have the same set of assumptions.
So really, if you want to, if you're not hell-bent on getting credit, but you want to know what the fields don't know, you can look at their assumptions and you can figure out which assumption is suspect based on if you were to remove it, what suddenly falls into place.
for most of them nothing but they'll sometimes be one and it's like you know if that That was exactly what happened with the telomeres and the mice.
Right.
It was obvious something had to be off about the mouse result.
Which of all of the pieces have received wisdom turn out to be wrong?
Right.
And it turned out to be mice have long telomeres.
It was that simple.
Yeah.
All right.
There was a missing word.
Lab mice.
Have long telomeres.
It had to be, if people had said lab mice have long telomeres, which was frankly the only thing they knew, because those were the only mice they had tested, right?
If they had said that, and you had processed it, that would have been okay, because it would have left open in people's minds, well, maybe it's just lab mice.
But they generalized to mice, and it was fatal.
Yep.
All right.
Speaking of fatal.
Speaking of fatal, I don't have a ton to say about every Epstein story, but
So, I'm here because all of a sudden we have friendlies in the intelligence establishment who many of us thought were going to reveal whatever Happened in the Epstein case so that we could finally understand what role it is playing in the corruption of our government,
which many of us suspect to be a profound contribution to the corruption of our governmental structures.
To make it succinct, Jeffrey Epstein appeared to be collecting compromise on powerful people.
So putting them in sexual situations where they revealed their depravity.
He recorded these things and his library of videos could then be used to control a great many people's behavior because they would fear being exposed if they didn't do what he and whoever was in charge of him.
Presuming that was somebody wanted done.
And in fact, we've had some indications that may be false.
In fact, Pam Bondi, the Attorney General, said there was a tremendous amount of video evidence and it was taking time to go through it all, but that this was going to be done.
And then on the heels of that hopeful announcement, we've got some perplexing data from Dan Bongino and Kash Patel.
So do you want to run that little clip of the interview with Kash Patel and Dan Bongino?
You said Jeffrey Epstein committed suicide.
People don't believe it.
Well, I mean, listen, they have a right to their opinion.
But as someone who has worked as a public defender, as a prosecutor who's been in that OK, now,
first of all, I don't know what to make of Dan Bongino saying he's seen the file and Epstein killed himself.
For this story to make any sense, the file, to the extent that it reflects him having killed himself, is a crime scene of its own.
Now, I'm not saying I know one way or the other, but I am saying there's something shocking about the idea That the place that these new intelligence officials have gone in order to figure out what happened is the file.
that having seen a file that reflects a suicide that um they are satisfied by this is very surprising i also think it is worth so there's lots of speculation on why do you want to maybe run the other cash patel with uh This guy's not the only guy to kill himself in prison.
It happens, I don't know how often.
Right.
All the time.
Even if he killed himself in prison.
So if he was murdered in prison, crazy, right?
Yeah.
You could see why very powerful people wouldn't want him talking.
If he was murdered in segregated housing, in isolation, after being on suicide watch in a place in a detention center that I've physically been in myself, it would be fiction.
It's not doable even for the most powerful and wealthiest people in the world?
Yeah.
All right.
So point one that I think has to be on the table.
Again, I don't know what happened to Jeffrey Epstein.
It is possible that he understood.
What the rest of his life was going to look like and decided not to live it.
But the idea that Kash Patel, the FBI chief, is convinced because he's been inside prisons that it would be impossible for a murder to have taken place and readily possible for this guy on suicide watch to have Killed himself.
Doesn't pass the smell test.
So let me just point this out.
If Jeffrey Epstein was a compromise specialist who was willing to traffic, to sex traffic children, let's say that he was That he belonged to some intelligence agency of somebody's.
Well, then that intelligence agency is willing, or whatever arm of it ran Epstein, was willing to sex traffic children.
It was willing to destroy children.
Of course it's willing to murder in order to keep that quiet.
How many people do you have to murder?
In other words, if everybody who saw something that Kash Patel is assuming would have come out has been given credible evidence that if they voice what they've seen, that will be the end of them, then you would imagine it would be unusually quiet.
So, my point is, again, I don't know what happened to Epstein, and I don't know the truth of what he was up to, but I do know that the people who are in charge, of intelligence in the US should be thinking along these lines.
They're dealing with a potentially major conspiracy in which the most powerful people in the world have everything to lose if they get to the bottom of it.
They should expect All tactics, including the intimidation and murder of witnesses, are on the table.
And therefore, they should assume when they get to the FBI file, and it doesn't contain incriminating evidence with respect to a murder of Jeffrey Epstein, or, I guess maybe we'll play this clip in a second, or doesn't contain evidence of compromise in the videos recovered from Epstein's island, That that is not evidence.
And actually, this goes very well with what we were just discussing.
If you attempt to reconcile the story of Jeffrey Epstein with a file that contains evidence that suggests nothing special happened, if you force yourself to process that file as if it's factual, then you will not be able to figure out what happened to Jeffrey Epstein.
You'll just have to accept that false story.
On the other hand, if you say, yeah, I would absolutely expect the level of concealment of the evidence of Jeffrey Epstein to be spectacular and to require absolutely unusual approaches in order to unearth it, right?
This is liable to be the most protected story in the history of the world, given what we think, the number of people who were seemingly compromised by this.
So you should expect after cloak after cloak after misdirection and to have to have the chief of the FBI telling us Telling us this, it doesn't, it doesn't And so, of course, there's been lots of speculation about what this means.
Do you want to play that last clip of Kash Patel on Rogan talking about the videos?
Is there video from the island?
Not of what you want.
The people out there have filled the void with, can't wait to see X, Y, or Z. Right, speculation.
And I'm like, here's the other thing I've been asking for, right?
Openly.
If you have information on this, call us.
Tell us.
The best resource we have is the American people in the world.
Fantastic.
He's almost cracked the case.
He's found the best sources, and it's us.
Yeah, okay.
Why would the American people who've been following this a little bit and pretty sure the evidence suggests that there's a lot of nefarious stuff going on, why would any of us have any particular data?
No, in fact, what we've done Why do we say Jeffrey Epstein did not kill himself?
It's not just because it seems like it's awfully convenient that he died, but it just so happened that the cameras weren't working and the guys that were supposed to be watching him to preventing him from doing that were asleep.
So the point is the story is fishy.
It's implausible.
No, going to the American public is not the way.
So weird.
There's been a lot of speculation.
But maybe quite effective.
Maybe like the business model for the, you know, IVF company.
It's like, oh, but this is going to make you look like such a good guy.
It's so open.
This is transparent.
Well, he's very likable.
I want to believe him, but what he's saying doesn't add up.
And let's put it this way.
I think in the world of the sophisticates, So there's one thing where some story has broken wide open, like the lab leak.
At first, we were insane for thinking that this virus might have leaked from a lab.
And then...
It turned out the pangolin story didn't work.
The frozen badger, ferret badger steaks.
Ferret badger steak popsicles.
Yeah, the whole thing.
One story after another collapsed.
And finally...
And then something will pop up and it'll be like, nope, finally.
And it will attempt to unmake all of the progress that was so hard won in the direction of reality.
And so, you know, we've got one of these with...
However, given what we've learned about the mRNA platform and all of the harm done, it's weird that it gets to rebrand as new with a smaller piece of the spike protein.
It's like, well, what evidence do you have that any of that worked to the benefit of people?
Right.
And it's like, you know, you would have to improve it an awful lot before you got anywhere near positive, right?
So it's that sort of thing.
And there does seem to be a wide-scale effort.
A lot of bots or sock puppets online are suddenly chiming in.
Accusing you of being a conspiracy theorist if you think there's something wrong with the Epstein story.
It's like, wait a minute.
Didn't we solve that like years ago?
Isn't Ghislaine Maxwell in jail for the crimes that she and Jeffrey Epstein committed?
Right?
She's in jail.
So what was that about if not about the crimes that Kash Patel is now telling us he doesn't have evidence for?
So anyway, lots of speculation.
About whether or not somebody has gotten to Dan Bongino and Kash Patel, that would be truly frightening.
What would that even sound like, right?
You're going to go muscle the head of the FBI?
Maybe, right?
That would be one explanation.
Another explanation, one that I think a lot of us would prefer, is that there's some deeper story here in which they're having to lie to us because Jeffrey Epstein is in witness protection and, you know, For one thing, it's a hypothesis that makes predictions about what cases are going to emerge.
But anyway, it's at least a hypothesis on the table.
But I have to wonder if...
Whose body was pulled out of the prison that wasn't Epstein?
Well, there's lots of photographic evidence that seems
But if this were that story, if there was somehow a corpse that had been swapped in in order to get Jeffrey Epstein out of the prison, he's somewhere, and as despicable a human being as he is, he's been given some kind of amnesty in order to go after the people who are really even much more terrible.
Okay, but then does the chief and deputy chief of the FBI destroy their own credibility on major media by saying that these files don't contain any of this information?
That seems a really weird way to spend.
Their credibility, but they need their credibility.
We need them to have their credibility, and they're blowing it apart in public.
That does not seem like the move you would make if this was about witness protection.
But all right.
The final point, the one that I think is maybe most important, is let's say that the thing that we all suspect is actually true.
Jeffrey Epstein was working for one of the elite intelligence services of the world, collecting Compromat for the purpose of the state that controlled that security service to control politics elsewhere, like in the US.
Then there's a library.
There's a library of materials that Epstein collected that exists somewhere.
As you try to advance the case, as you try to discover where that material is, what role it is playing in governance, as you attempt to do that, human beings are going to find themselves faced with, as we discussed before, threats necessary to keep it quiet.
But also, you're talking about a control architecture for some huge part of the governance structures of the West.
Which means that the danger of people who get close, instead of them outing what they've discovered, them partnering with that and becoming...
So I just think we need to understand that when we are talking about a potential conspiracy with this much power, the novel problems in revealing its nature are liable to be profound.
And we in the public ought to.
To just remember that that's bound to be part of what's going on.
I'm not saying that's what's going on with Bongino and Patel, but I am saying that part of why this story seems impossible to break, even though the rough outlines of it seem apparent enough to us, is that when you have that much power, that is a tremendous advantage in corrupting or silencing anybody who gets anywhere near it.
And whoever has that library still has that power.
Yes, they do.
Yep.
All right.
Well, on that happy note, I think I have exhausted...
I am going to the desert on a horse named Miguel.
Miguel.
Miguel, the horse.
And not actually going to LA, so you're not going to get your eyes on that.
That chaos.
Riotous chaos.
Yes.
What's that?
That riotous chaos which seems...
From a distance, that's what it looks like.
It looks like that, and there's an awful lot of circumstantial stuff too, indications of organizations fueling violence, maybe luring the administration into a battle Gone are the days when activism was grassroots.
Yeah, this is definitely not grassroots, and it's very frightening.
We've got to stop, but that does seem to be one of the themes of so much of the chaos of the last several years, beginning with regard to at least my understanding of it, what happened to us at Evergreen.
That that was not confused college students who showed up at your classroom.
Like, yes, at one level it was confused college students, but they had literally been sent there by people with different ideas about what was wrong with you and science and, you know, the things that were happening at Evergreen.
And they weren't there under their own power.
And so, you know, just as some number of the people there presumably really thought to join it because it sounded like a good idea, and some number of the people...
And even some of the people, once night fell and they became riots reliably for a hundred straight nights in Portland in the summer of 2020, even some of them probably actually thought that they were what they were.
but there were forces above and beyond them that were goading them into action in all cases.
This feels like it has to be a repeat of something we've talked about many times, but I can't actually remember that we've said it this way.
I'm looking for the right word.
There's a segment of society which, for reasons both real and imagined, is angry.
There always will be.
That is a chaotic situation.
Energetic force that is always there for the use of those who wish to play the game in a certain way.
So, in other words, you're going to find people who are looking to act out because they're angry.
They may not know what they're angry about or they may have an idea that may have some truth in it or none at all.
But those people are ready for somebody to tell them a story about why they're angry.
That sounds very compelling.
And then to participate in whatever action they are told addresses that story.
And so I think we always have to be concerned that somebody is going to figure out how to take this random explosive force and put it in a cylinder and turn it into energy to drive us somewhere.
Yes.
And this does feel an awful lot like that.
I feel like we are being frog-marched towards an event that is supposed to remind us of Kent State, that will have a very different explanation.
You know, Kent State, you had students protesting an unjust war.
In this case, this story doesn't add up.
You have, you know, Americans at the state level opposing The enforcement of border policy and deportations at the federal level.
And that is at least a complicated story.
It's not a simple, you're the good guys and you're deporting them.
You've got a lot of people who broke the law.
I'm sure some of them are just looking for a better life and some of them aren't.
But anybody who thinks it's a simple matter of we should oppose federal deportations and enforcement of border policy has lost the plot.
Well, the plot has become engineered so that it is easy to lose.
That's a fair point.
Yeah.
I am not trying to give a pass to the people who are actively losing the plot as chaos agents, but it is harder and harder to figure out what is going on.
The plot has been greased.
Okay, so this is where all the oil went.
Yes, exactly.
The scene that needed the oil didn't have the oil, and it's moved over to narrative space.
The plot has been great and is now easily lost, yes.
Okay, well, we'll be back again next Tuesday, again, once you are back from traveling with Miguel.
Yes, in the desert.
I hope he likes his new name.
As far as I know, Miguel, the fictional horse, has always been Miguel.
Ah, okay.
Yes, has changed genders several times.
No, no, and no.
Also no.
Yep.
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And we appreciate you subscribing, liking, sharing full episodes and clips.
Lots of places, including Jen's been doing an amazing job on Instagram lately.
And why are you looking at me like that?
Because I wanted to jump in and just say, if you're going to be at Freedom Fest in Palm Springs, come say hi.
Good.
Brett will be there with Miguel.
The fictional horse who has always had one gender.
So if you see him from a distance, Brett, not Miguel, talking to himself, he's not talking to himself, he's talking to Miguel.
It's fictional horse.
This is...
But Miguel looks great.
Okay, until we see you next time, be good to the ones you love, eat good food, and get outside.
