Can the internet make you sick? The 297th Evolutionary Lens with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying
Today we discuss the experience of returning home after timeway—culture shock, social media, and seeing your home with fresh eyes. Then a difficult set of topics: anorexia, physician assisted suicide, “terminal” diagnoses, social contagions, and what people have a right to do with their own lives. Finally: AI has been used to predict potentially useful drug combinations to fight cancer. What does this mean for the future of medicine, and AI? 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline: https://988life...
Welcome to the Dark Horse Podcast live stream number two ninety-seven.
297.
297.
Prime?
Yes.
No.
No.
All right.
Well, I I'm over it.
300 minus three.
That's how you know it's not prime.
Right there.
So you just got like a right.
So, you know, 3.99, 9 and 27.
No, 9 and 33, 11 and 27.
Yeah.
Yeah.
All right.
Well.
Okay.
So it's not prime.
Yeah.
Good over it.
That actually takes the pressure off.
It does, I think.
Yeah.
Um this is our second live stream in a few days.
Um, I will say on the last live stream, I was headed in a bad direction, getting sick, and I am now still sick, but headed in a better direction, getting better, and you are now getting sick.
So anyway.
Oh man, I'm right in the middle of it.
Um I uh so apologies.
Um apologies for that.
Uh we are we both I I guess you picked something up on the plate, one of the planes on the ride home, as often happens.
But um, but here we are.
Uh check out the watch party on locals.
And uh you had a Patreon conversation this morning.
I'll have another one tomorrow morning.
Uh we got It was off the hook, by the way.
Was it?
Yeah, it was off the hook, yeah.
What does that mean?
It well, it means that we uh we made some interesting.
It feels like it means you lost the fish.
Oh gosh, no, it's a phone reference, which still Well, to make progress with the phone, it has to be off the hook, or at least it did back when phones were on hooks.
Hey, that's weak.
Do you remember the I mean it's true, but it's weak.
So I I feel like off the hook has this like really strong sense of like, man, that was awesome.
But a pre a precondition for success, most of which won't result in success, does not strike me as the same as like that was off.
I agree.
That phone call was totally off the hook like du.
Yeah.
Okay, it was off the hook.
Was it any good?
Did interesting things.
We don't we don't know anything on the basis of this.
So I feel like it's neither a fish reference nor a phone reference.
I think it's a third thing that we don't know.
That's possible.
Do you remember the band X and the song Your Phone's Off the Hook, but you're not?
I don't.
It was a favorite of mine, I was a good song.
It's at least good line.
Yeah, it is a very good line.
Yeah.
All right.
Uh let's let's pay the rent up top.
Um with our sponsors.
Three awesome sponsors, as always, right at the top of the hour.
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I'm gonna start that paragraph again.
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And he also, which isn't in the script, uh sends out descriptions of not just um what what he and his tasters taste in the various olive oils, um, but where they are grown, who they are grown by, how they are processed, what the history of the land is and the farm and the olives.
Uh and it just it's just such a great way to um add to your sense of um the the what you're eating and the terroir of where it's coming from.
You can tell it's a labor of love.
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All right.
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Oh man.
I know.
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And I will say, you and I have both been using Monocora honey in uh honey lemon tree, which is our start that sentence again.
We have both been using monocora honey in honey lemon tea, which is our family uh remedy for uh severe colds and other things that are like them, and it really is uh it makes you feel so much better almost instantly.
Yeah, and it's soothing and uh um it's not uh you know it's not a magic bullet.
Uh we're not all the way better.
No, better than we would be.
Exactly.
I think it seems like absent the monocora.
Yep.
Yep.
Okay.
So excuse me, I've got a lozenge of my mouth now.
You were gonna start by picking up on something you wanted to say from last time about our experience on the Camino.
Yep.
And then I'm gonna talk about something truly crazy, and uh, and then you're gonna wrap it up with something um laterally crazy.
Laterally crazy, exactly.
Um yes, I wanted to pick up uh in our last podcast, we talked about three important lessons from the Camino.
You do not have to have watched that podcast for this to make sense to you.
Well, except that maybe what's the Camino?
Ah, the Camino is this famous hike in Spain.
There are actually many versions of it.
Uh Heather and I did the primitivo, which is the original hike.
Um, and anyway, we learned many things and are still learning many things uh upon our return.
Um the three lessons from last time were that it finds every defect if you push yourself to your limits.
Every physical defect, every physical defect, every repair that you've had, all those things come to the surface.
You discover capacity that you didn't know you had buried within you, largely as a result of being able to get used to and tolerate suffering that you couldn't have tolerated before.
And equilibrium is the key concept uh to pulling off something like this.
You need to earn back whatever debt you've created during the day during your hike over the period of rest.
And if you don't do that, then you begin to lose ground and it gets worse and worse.
So equilibrium is the key.
The fourth lesson, which we didn't talk about.
Hold on.
The equilibrium is key lesson, uh could also be uh restated as don't burn the candle at both ends.
Don't burn the candle.
If once you're off the trail, um you continue to spend in whatever way you might want to spend, um, you are unlikely to be back to your baseline by the next morning.
Yep.
And it's not like failing to hit baseline one day is gonna do you in, but you can't be losing ground every day, or you'll never regain it.
You'll you'll uh drop out of the I'm guessing how many um how many ways that we speak uh use metaphors that involve walking, right?
You can't lose you don't want to lose ground every day.
Well, like you're literally hiked, and then once you're stopped, you don't want to lose ground.
That's metaphor, but uh meaningful here.
We are swimming in a sea of metaphors.
All right.
So the fourth I know you're giving me that look.
I'm it's just not relevant.
We weren't swimming, we were walking.
But it felt like swimming.
It is it is true that metaphor is in just about every single sentence that we utter.
The fact that there are other metaphors that don't have to do with walking, isn't that surprising?
We are drenched in metaphor.
All right, I'm gonna stop doing that.
Actually, I can't stop doing that because our language is so full of metaphors.
All right.
The fourth lesson though, and actually, would you put up the uh picture I sent you?
So um this is a picture I couldn't find the last time.
Um this is a picture uh I mentioned that on the Camino, because everybody's hiking in the same direction, you tend to r meet the same people again and again.
Uh here we have Matt and Chris who were part of our party, and uh Lisa and Amber, a mother-daughter duo who were hiking in the same direction uh that we were hiking, and we encountered them many times.
They became friends along the way.
So in any case, they when we met them, actually Matt and I met them hobbling, like literally hobbling to the supermarket one night to pick up some dried fruit and some oranges and shortly after the hospitalis, right?
Shortly after one of the um most remote and and steepest climb days.
And this is when I was not with you guys.
Yep.
So we, you know, it was three blocks from where we were staying, and we were like kind of limping to the to the supermarket, and on the way limping home, we ran into these two, and uh they uh stopped us to ask a question about something that we had all seen on the trail, these uh slate roofs and all.
But anyway, uh struck up a friendship, discovered that they had actually been hiking, they had taken uh a much longer route, and they had been on the road for a month.
Um so anyway, and they told us interesting things like um scuttle butt on the trail is uh you hit your stride after two weeks.
That's the point at which you can reach the equilibrium uh every day.
In any case, the long duration, either that month that they were out or the uh two weeks that we were out.
Sixteen days.
Sixteen days is enough, especially given that you don't have lots of bandwidth to spend checking in, you know.
There is internet access in many places, but you just don't have the mental capacity to engage.
And so it breaks you of your connection to the online world.
And what that does is it actually reminds me of what used to happen when you and I did extended field seasons away, extended field season away back when you and I were doing it, where you really weren't checking in with home, you couldn't, the technology wasn't sophisticated enough to make that easy.
You would return home and you could briefly see your own culture with a kind of objectivity and clarity that is just not available to you when you're drenched in it.
As I would say to students before we embarked on study abroad, everyone has heard of culture shock.
You expect that you will experience culture shock.
Um, but even if you have never before traveled more than 50 miles from where you were born, as many of my students who I took on study abroad had not, uh, and I was taking them to places like the Amazon, um, you will actually experience greater culture shock not upon arriving in Panama or Ecuador, um, but upon returning home.
That that that is the point at which you come to you begin to come to terms with what has felt neutral and baseline and fundamental to you all the time.
And now upon having been away from it, either looks like exactly what you wanted, exactly what you need, or something that that feels foreign now and not what you want.
So it actually creates a greater both appreciation for everything that we do right and a greater awareness of those things that we're not doing right in our home land.
Yep.
Um I must say that uh I experienced this every time it happened as a kind of whiplash.
Yeah.
And you sort of want to preserve the ability to see your culture with that objectivity, and you of course lose it because everything is so normalized.
Um, I remember being particularly shocked, you know, this is dirty years ago, but uh particularly shocked by advertisements.
Yeah.
Right.
Just the way in which you are being manipulated, and it's so commonplace that you stop noticing it.
and then to see it, be able to briefly understand, you know, what these forces are and how they're affecting you is powerful stuff.
I remember being particularly shocked by something that will seem silly, but after my longest, loneliest field season in Madagascar, where you were not with me, it was five and a half months, and, you know, there was nothing, there was not even a sat phone or
anything, so really no connection to the outside world practically for many, many months, and my parents at that point were living in London, so I flew back from Tana through, you know, whatever, Nairobi, Munich, and then to London, and got dropped into London after having been living in the bush on an island off the coast of Madagascar for five
months, and my mother and I were walking during rush hour on some busy street in London, and I came up short next to a window for a store that I didn't know existed, which was Baby Gap, and for some reason, my thought, I thought, we are, we are just so so ridiculously pampered and specialized.
You know, the gap makes genes, but we need a store for the babies who need the what?
And, you know, at this point, this would have been in 96, I guess, or seven.
Seven, maybe.
It seems like an absurd thing to be jolted by.
But at the time, that was my example of, oh my god, like what, how far, how far from our roots have we come that this is the sort of store that exists and is is is thriving um and it's it's akin to being thrown by advertising I think.
Well I mean in fact I think it strangely presages our current distortion because you know as you've pointed out many times kids are sort of overly reified in the present,
you know, because they go online and they have an avatar they can they can cultivate and curate and um they can make a splash and you know you can get Greta Thumbberged into you know importance at a very young age um and the idea that you know the baby needs you know not just nice clothing but like a particular you know bent on fashion right particular kind of nonchalance
you know babies actually do nonchalance pretty well without the gap but you know some that's right there for them yep it's right it's got their back and the other sides of them and their parents' money.
Yes, a lot of that.
But okay, so very jarring to see your own culture as it is.
But the point here is that in this case, you know, the Camino experience was particularly isolating in a strange way, because it took up so many resources all at once.
And then returning to life involves checking back in with a world that's spent weeks...
weeks in motion while you were away.
And what I'm dancing around here is returning to you know my own internet life.
It looks crazy.
This world You know why?
Because it is crazy.
Uh-huh yeah it it's I mean and it's not like I wouldn't have known that six weeks ago I knew that formally but the degree to which the battles look insane and look almost tailor-made to make us ununderstandable to each other is shocking.
So I'm curious.
I didn't have this experience.
I'm less online to begin with.
And I think there are a number of reasons that I did not have this experience that you're having here.
But we both have had the experience in the past when mostly before it was possible to be completely online back in the real world.
Although I ran enough study abroad trips where we'd go deep into the Amazon where there's just nothing possible that even just a week of no contact is a remarkable way to practice.
to break some some bad habits.
And it can you know get in the way of good habits as well.
But I'm curious you said um you said upon returning to at least some of the online life that you had before the Camino, the arguments appear to be particularly crazy, I think is what you said, although maybe I have that wrong.
And I'm wondering if you can pinpoint that at all.
And what what specifically are you seeing, or does the whole thing just look like chaos?
Well, one thing I'm seeing is that the focus on Israel is disruptive of the sort of fragile progress that we in the public had made on many fronts trying to make sense of the world.
And I it's not the first time I've seen this.
October 7th did this.
You noted this explicitly at the time that there were that there were uh groups of people who would come together with understanding who are now being riffed.
The medical freedom movement rifted.
Yes.
They were experiencing unbridgeable gaps.
Right.
And it felt uh after October 7th like it was a direct hit on the medical freedom.
Now maybe I'm seeing things that don't deserve to be connected but it felt like you had a powerful political force emerging that had endured uh that had effectively been in a kind of war and that had galvanized them into uh you know a community that had its own language and had its own assumptions and and that that just shattered in in an instant and you know presumably that was largely maybe entirely incidental.
But what I'm now seeing is that the way that all things Israel have taken over every conversation, it's like it is an unavoidable lens that obviously has nothing to do with most of the substance of life.
And yet because people have divided into teams on this topic, maybe understandably, but they've divided into teams on this topic that the those teams are causing every other discussion to uh fragment and disintegrate and descend into uh mutual suspicions of disloyalty and it's not sustainable.
I mean the basic point is this is something that I and we have said and others have pointed out once upon a time there was Walter Cronkite.
I don't know that what Walter Cronkite was saying was true.
I don't know that it was more true on average than what the news says today but the important thing about it was that it was shared.
We did not have an infinite diversity of sources of low quality which is sort of what we have now we had a few sources of indeterminate quality but the point is they created a shared narrative that allowed people to progress from that shared narrative and discuss the things that they didn't agree on.
And I mean this is the argument in favor of institutions.
This is the argument in favor of uh the what what is the New York Times called the gray old lady um you know that that uh they need to be saved rather than burned to the ground and have new things um built in their place.
And I don't you know I I see I see credibility in both arguments.
But you you know usually you take the other position right that we that uh that none of the existing institutions can be saved um but what they have done in the past is indeed provide us a shared narrative on the other hand technologically we may just simply be past an age in which synchronicity is possible.
I don't think I mean I don't think we'll survive if we can't get to shared agreement about basics of reality um I do feel like our institutions are fatally compromised.
That is not an argument against institutions.
The institutions have to exist in order for us to function we just you know it's like you know we have to get rid of the tumor is not an argument against the tissue that the tumor sprung out of um we just have a totally malicious or the concept of tissue perhaps so um anyway the I think it is both true that accidental features of our internet life,
the fact that you have corporations competing for your attention and keeping your attention is done through a limited number of hacks into your biology, you know, and one of them is you know, keeping you uh agitated, yes, um, angry, those sorts of things.
So that could just be, you know, that that could be non-malicious profit-seeking behavior doing this all on its own.
I don't think it all is.
I think there's a good bit of divide and conquer where to the extent that we're at each other's throats, we're not noticing the dangers that we face together, you know, and uh those two things mixed together have created um what I think amounts to a um forgive me if I've said this before,
but something like a uh a hall of caves, you know, it's Plato's cave mixed with a hall of mirrors, and the point is each of us has our own cave wall on which we are watching the shadows,
and we are sitting next to people who are watching shadows on their cave wall, and we can't the normal thing to be able to assume if you're a human being, is that uh if you are sitting next to somebody that you and they are seeing a very similar picture.
Yeah, and that is no longer a valid assumption, and because it's no longer a valid assumption, even the cave itself is kind of a chaos where we you don't understand why that person believes what they believe because you literally didn't see what they saw.
Yeah.
And yeah.
Um it has always been true that we bring our own uh biases and you know, particular position in the world, both literal and metaphorical, to anything that we experience together, and we will have a different take.
But um but the fact that we are literally fed different things that then become more and more tailored to where we indicate any interest at all uh means that our worlds are ever more different.
And I think you know, one of the things that is maybe uh, you know, to use the biblical reference, one you know, one of the horsemen of the apocalypse uh that is that is happening um is sitting together in a room on two different devices uh where you're both taking in information.
It's one thing if you are like it's one thing if you're creating like there's there's a number of things that you could be doing on different devices that um that might be really no different from, you know, he's doing the crossroad puzzle and she's knitting or you know, whatever might might be a uh a story from an era not that long ago which doesn't seem toxic.
Uh and that's certainly a possibility with two people on two different devices.
But if both people are scrolling through what seems to be what happened today, like if if that has replaced the shared screen with the news, which may or may not be lying to you, uh, there is actually very little together in being together.
You're you're not living a shared reality, even if you can reach across and touch the other person.
If you are you if you're receiving information into your eyes and therefore your brain, they're wildly different from the person sitting next to you, in what way are they sitting next to you?
Like it the actual physical reality begins to begins to be torn asunder as well.
Yeah, and it ultimately manifests in a lack of capacity to understand each other, to collaborate, all of those things.
Yeah.
Um, and I will say, just the final piece of this uh from my perspective is that my relationship, at least temporarily with my phone, which is my primary device, is you know, it feels like a necessary evil.
If I had a life that allowed me to walk away from it, I would be very tempted to.
Now, I told a story uh a month or so ago about having checked in with two friends who Did walk away from social media and finding them confused by the present.
Because frankly, the I think the only prayer you have of figuring out what is going on is to try to cobble together that story from sources that beat the average in terms of their reliability.
But um but the physical feeling, you know, you you check back in and you're looking at this device and you can see briefly the insanity of the you know, the back and forth and the senses that's toxic, right?
It's like you put something in your mouth and it's super bitter, and it's like, well, I don't want any more of that.
Yeah.
Um unfortunately, you're just damned if you do and damned if you don't.
I don't feel that I have the luxury to walk away from it because, you know, our professional life depends on knowing at least what other people think is going on.
Um, I think we all know that there's something uh very bad for us coming through those devices, and uh we would be wise to figure out how to limit the toxicity.
I I don't feel that um any of us have figured out a good solution to it.
All right.
You want to talk about uh social contagion?
Um you know that I do.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Okay.
Uh this seems a good segue, uh, what you were just talking about.
Uh I think I'll start by just reading this op-ed, and you can show my screen here from the Denver Post, published on October 14th uh of uh this year, uh, so just a few days ago.
The headline is it's an op-ed.
Assisted suicide was offered to my friend Jane Allen.
She had an eating disorder.
It's a little long, um, and I'm going to share some other things about the story, but I'm just going to read the whole story for now.
Here's a picture of the of the woman who is being discussed here.
By Matt Vallier.
The big selling point of assisted suicide laws is that they are supposedly compassionate and a progressive step toward enlightened autonomy.
But assisted suicide is anything but compassionate for vulnerable people, like the tragic story of my friend with anorexia, Jane Allen, which shows how assisted suicide laws threatened the lives of the young and carable.
There is a controversial diagnosis circulating called terminal anorexia, which is an arrow to the heart of young people with eating disorders who are already experiencing distorted ideas of their worthiness to live.
Now, where assisted suicide is legal, they have the state and part of the medical profession telling them they were better off dead.
After struggling with anorexia for most of her life in 2018, Jane was living in Colorado Springs and getting help for her mental health disabilities, including her eating disorder.
She ended up in the care of an exclusive boutique, eating disorder practice.
She was in and out of hospitals and residential treatment.
Jane's condition resisted treatment, and she ended up receiving a terminal anorexia diagnosis.
Jane wrote that her eating disorder doctor would make an exception for me and allow me to die if that was my choice.
It didn't feel like my choice.
I felt coerced and spent an incredibly agonizing months in an assisted living facility.
Jane did not get the lethal prescription directly from her eating disorder doctor.
Instead, she was referred to another doctor who promptly checked the boxes required under Colorado's safeguards and saw to it that Jane got the lethal drugs.
Jane's life was saved at the last minute when her father received a guardianship order from a Colorado judge and was able to have the lethal drugs destroyed.
After that, Jane said, quote, I ate just enough to not die right away.
And then I ate more.
I weaned off the morphine and all the other hospice drugs that kept me in such a fog.
I was getting better, and then I was told that I was too much of a liability and dropped from the boutique clinic.
I moved from Colorado to Oregon.
I have a job that I love, a new puppy and a great group of friends.
I'm able to fuel my body to hike and do the things I love.
I am repairing my relationship with my family, and I have a great therapist who is helping me process all of this.
Things obviously aren't perfect, and I still have hard days, but I also have balance and flexibility and a life that is so much more than I was told would ever be possible for me.
A week before she planned to go public with her story, however, she died suddenly of complications to her health caused by over two decades of starving herself.
To this day, I wonder, that's the op-ed writer, whether the months of treatment lost during Jane's detour into terminal anorexia care worsened her condition, whether she could still be with us today doing all the good.
We'll never know.
What we do know is that these laws are not so rosy as the propaganda would have you believe.
They are as messy as life itself, and there has been and will be more collateral damage in people like Jane or Colorado and Mary Gossman, who is told by a nationally renowned Denver eating disorder treatment facility, quote, there's nothing we can do for you, end quote, which qualified her for lethal drugs under the law.
She's in a better place now and has joined as a plaintiff in a lawsuit to overturn the law, so I ask, how many collateral deaths are acceptable to you?
For whatever purported good they do, these laws just aren't safe.
That stands on its own in one regard, um and is full of tragedy.
But one of the things that I did after reading this was look for the idea of terminal anorexia was a new one on me.
Anorexia nervosa itself is a relatively new uh diagnosis, but the idea of terminal anorexia, uh, the idea of terminal almost anything uh feels uh dire and diabolical uh because especially when we are talking about uh mental health conditions, uh what we have understood for decades, I think, um, is that what you do not do is tell people there is no hope.
And so a terminal diagnosis uh specifically says there is no hope.
So I went looking for where this where this diagnosis comes from.
And it turns out uh it's not so long ago.
Um here's a paper, a peer-reviewed scientific journal article in the Journal of Eating Disorders from 2022 called Terminal Anorexia Nervosa, Three Cases and Proposed Clinical Characteristics.
I'm just going to read the abstract and a couple of uh a couple of pieces from it.
Let's see if I can make this any bigger.
Oh, not like that.
There we go.
Abstract.
Most individuals with eating disorders will either recover, settle into an unrecovered but self-defined acceptable quality of life, or continue to cycle from crisis to relative stability over time.
However, a minority of those with severe and enduring eating disorders recognize after years of trying that recovery remains elusive, and further treatment seems both futile and harmful.
No level of harm reduction proves achievable or adequately ameliorates their suffering.
In this subgroup, many of those with anorexia nervosa will experience the medical consequences of malnutrition as their future cause of death.
Whereas anyone who wishes to keep striving for recovery despite exhaustion and depletion should wholeheartedly be supported in doing so.
Some patients simply cannot continue to fight.
They recognize that death from anorexia nervosa, while perhaps not welcome, will be inevitable.
Unfortunately, these patients and their carers often receive minimal support from eating disorders health professionals who are conflicted about terminal care, and who are hampered and limited by the paucity of literature on end-of-life care for those with anorexia nervosa.
And in this paper, they say three case studies elucidate this condition.
One patient was so passionate about this topic that she has to be a posthumous co-author of this paper.
So you can see here on the screen, we've got three authors.
The lead author, Gadiani, was involved in two in facilitating the end of life for two of the three cases in this paper.
And the second author is one of those cases.
So she is uh she is a now dead uh young woman who whose expertise in this is that she suffered from uh something that we call anorexia, and that these authors would like to be uh relabeling terminal anorexia.
I'm not gonna read the rest of the abstract, but just one more, uh, two more bits from this paper.
Oh, it doesn't seem to have.
It doesn't seem to have collected my um my highlights.
So um there is a rejoinder to this paper, published soon thereafter in uh the same the same journal.
Terminal anorexia nervosa is a dangerous term.
It cannot and should not be defined.
This is by uh strangely the first author's name looks similar, but it's a totally different group of authors.
Again in the Journal of Eating Disorders in 2022, in which they say in the abstract, recalling the paper I was just reading from, a recent article proposed defining terminal anorexia to improve access to palliative and hospice care and to medical aid in dying for a minority of patients with severe and enduring anorexia nervosa.
The authors presented three cases and for two, the first author participated in their death.
Anorexia nervosa is a treatable psychiatric condition for which recovery may be uncertain.
We are greatly un we are greatly concerned, however, regarding implications of applying the labeled terminal to anorexia nervosa and the risk it will lead to unjustifies unjustified deaths in individuals whose mental illness impairs their capacity to make a reasoned treatment decision.
They say anorexia nervosa is a treatable psychiatric disorder.
Evidence suggests the majority of those affected will eventually recover, although recovery is often protracted, occurring after years and sometimes decades of illness.
Risk factors for mortality are poorly defined and there are no clear staging criteria for anorexia, comparable to those used for cancer to help define terminal cases with an estimated survival of six months or less.
So first off, they're pointing out that uh the idea of a terminal case here is unwarranted because there are literally no criteria.
And one more thing from this piece, the danger of a label.
Again, this is in the rejoinder to the paper that proposes introducing terminal anorexia nervosa as a formal diagnosis for some people uh who have already been diagnosed with anorexia.
Defining criteria for terminal anorexia has potential risks.
We urge extreme caution discussing these ideas as vulnerable patients and their caregivers are but a Google search away.
Increased public demand for PAS for psychiatric illnesses in Europe following legalization of uh medical assisted medical aid in dying is a warnings, uh assisted suicide.
That's what the MAID uh acronym stands for.
Uh introducing the diagnosis of terminal anorexia risks countering hope for recovery and increasing demand for my god, I don't remember what all of these acronyms stand for, but for physician-assisted suicide by patients with severe and enduring anorexia.
Like social contagion and suicide, demoralized patients who read about terminal anorexia may self-identify with a label and seek out concierge physicians who offer physician-assisted suicide as an elective treatment.
This is horrifying at just about every level.
But it put me in mind specifically, and I've got to have my screen back just for a second so I can um go to another another piece.
This put me in mind of social contagions.
Yeah.
And the idea that once a thing has a name, it will tend to spread.
And most of us have experienced um having something be wrong with us physically and not knowing what it is, and uh going to a doctor or a physical therapist or you know, some something uh and and being told, ah, you have X and feeling the relief.
Oh, it's a thing.
What I'm experiencing is not something new to science, thankfully.
Uh it's not one-off.
It's a thing.
Uh as long as it's a thing that's known, probably there's a cure that's of course that confidence is often misplaced.
And the fact that something has a name doesn't mean that it's uh a good name.
Categories are often bad.
There are a lot of categories where we've just collected a bunch of things that sort of look together, look the same and stuffed them into one category, and they're not actually the same at all.
Schizophrenia, for instance, I believe.
Um, but specifically having a name for something makes it findable and makes it more likely that people will end up self-diagnosing with that thing.
And so I was reminded, just one more piece of reading before we start talking about this.
Um, I was reminded of a Twitter thread put out by the excellent Mia Hughes back in 2022.
So she um she was the person who put together the WPATH files uh and is uh now working um leading up Gen Spect in Canada.
She's she's excellent, and so she, of course, has um not only been thinking about social contagions generally, but specifically thinking about social contagions contagions with regard to uh the trans phenomena.
So in February on February 8th of 2022.
She would be really great if that just filled in here.
Uh apparently I don't have internet at the moment.
Um, let's just see if that fills in.
Um, it's there.
It's just very, very slow.
Um I don't know what to do besides uh I'm gonna read a couple of pieces from her thread and then we'll see if it it fills and I can show you my screen.
Uh that's fantastic to that.
Yeah.
Okay.
Hold on, guys.
Sorry.
Uh technical issues.
Let's just try this again.
All right.
Um again, February 8th, 2022, Mia Hughes puts out a long thread on social contagions.
I'm just going to read the first few.
In 1972, she writes, British psychologist Gerald Russell treated a woman with an unusual eating disorder involving binging and purging.
Over the next seven years, he saw further 30 women presenting with the same condition.
In 1979, he wrote a paper published in psychological medicine, in which he gave it the name bulimia nervosa.
The condition was included in the DSM III the following year.
Then something remarkable happened.
The illness swept the globe like wildfire, affecting an estimated 30 million people by the mid-1990s, the majority of whom were teenage girls and young women, who, side note, uh we know to be particularly susceptible to social contagions.
Mia's threat continues.
The explanation for this rapid spread is what philosopher Ian Hacking calls semantic contagion.
How the process of naming and describing a condition creates the means by which the condition spreads.
The epidemic of multiple personality disorder in the 1990s was spread this way.
Bulimia entered the lexicon via women's magazines such as Mademoiselle and Better Homes and Gardens, which were in stories about this new and worrying disorder affecting women and girls.
Multiple studies demonstrate the media's culpability in the spread of social contagions.
In the first decade of the 21st century, the seeds were sown for another global contagion.
A rights movement that started out with the aim of improving the lives of transgender people has given the rise g given rise to a new type of gender dysphoria with all the hallmarks of a social contagion.
And I'll just finish with this, although the rest of the um thread is excellent as well.
Just like bulimia, gender dysphoria was virtually unheard of in the teenage girl population prior to 2010.
And then all of a sudden, countries all over the industrialized world saw an explosion of adolescent girls identifying as transgender.
So I don't know, I did not dig into the history of anorexia.
Um Mia Hier is reporting on um the history of bulimia as a first identified and then written about and then it gets into DSM and boom it spreads across the world like wildfire.
Uh case of bulimia, I suspect that anorexia has something similar.
Um we have talked before uh about uh having decided individually and never having talked about one of the very few things that we would never discuss with our children before they came uh to be a certain age, uh and you know, probably mid mid-teens or so, which was suicide.
Why would you introduce to a child an idea that they have not come up with themselves, which is horrifying and awful every time it happens?
You should not.
Why would you introduce to a child or a young person the idea that a destructive debilitating thing that a few people have discovered how to do is actually a normal part of human experience, anorexia, bulimia, or that fantasy is truth and that myth is reality, that you can change sexes, which you cannot.
The trans phenomenon.
So on top of that, on top of the horror that is social contagion and the particular susceptibility that both children and uh young people, specifically women um have to social contagion.
How dare anyone in a position of authority to potentially influence what goes into the DSM?
Add to an already questionable diagnosis the word terminal, when there are no diagnostic criteria either existing or possible for such a thing.
Why would you ever take away hope from people?
This is the opposite of what we are told that we should be doing for people in the throes of mental crisis, which is what people who think they are trans or too fat when they're too skinny or need to throw up all of their food or any of these social contagions are.
They are in the throes of mental illness.
You do not take away hope from them at that point.
I have many things, of course, that I want to say.
I want to start just with one baseline consideration.
Um I don't like saying this in the context of a story like this, but it has to be said.
I do think a human being has a fundamental right not to be, if necessary.
And then almost everybody who exercises that right is making a mistake.
But that does not mean essentially that you can be forced to endure suffering for legal reasons.
This is actually this is the point I wanted to end on.
So we'll come back to this.
Okay.
We'll come back to it.
So anyway, I'm not making an argument in favor of this at all.
I think this is obscene but somehow we have to navigate the what are your rights as a human being relative to existence and suffering and all of that.
But there are a couple errors here that are so glaring and longtime viewers and listeners will find these things familiar.
Yes.
We've talked about them before.
One of them I've argued that there is a problem with psychology.
Just one.
There's a fundamental one.
Yeah.
Which is that psychology is two different things.
One is a therapeutic art which is not inherently about science or medicine or anything like that.
Clinical psychology.
Yeah.
And the other is a science in which we aspire to understand how the mind works.
Okay.
The idea that we know enough about how the mind works to proceed therapeutically from that understanding bullshit.
Yep.
We do not understand the mind at any level.
And so the idea that these two things are one and the same and that we are sophisticated about understanding the mind and therefore hey we know when your anorexia is not going to clear up really what you haven't done here.
This is the second thing.
So psychology, the clinical art, should have a different name.
It should not pretend to be a science.
I'm not saying it can't use science on those occasions where there's a question to be answered.
But it is really about hearing a patient and delivering feedback that is useful to them.
The second thing though is this pretends that anorexia is a disease in which we understand the cause which is preposterous in light of the fact that the cause just showed up this is a new disease so it's the result of some kind of exposure, you know, informational chemical both who knows but the point is it's a brand new disease.
You're pretending that you know enough about it to say when somebody can't be cured even though you don't know what the thing is that causes it that if you took it away it might be better.
So the point is yeah we have a category it's called syndrome.
A syndrome is you've got a bunch of symptoms.
We've seen these symptoms show up before that's a syndrome.
That's not the same thing as saying we know why you're sick.
It's that we recognize this pattern of things happens together, right?
It's a lot lower level of understanding it's not like you have measles and we know the pathogen that causes it right it is basically a black box for cause that says something happens and then a bunch of symptoms show up.
Yeah.
Right?
Could be multiple things cause that set of symptoms because you've interrupted a cascade 10 different ways and everything downstream in that cascade falls apart in the same way once you do.
We don't know.
But the point is if you're dealing with the syndrome you are not remotely close to the place where you would be able to say yeah this is a case that's not going to go away.
Right.
You don't know anything yet.
So get over your goddamn selves.
Yeah.
You're not entitled to do this especially as you point out when it results in you you know you've got a patient in front of you.
They're not well and you're telling them oh well you know it says right here in the the DSM if you've got these Seven things.
Uh, your case is uh I'm sorry to tell you, it's terminal.
What?
Have we, you know, has anybody tried, you know, moving the ill person to another culture where they don't speak the language and are therefore forced to reboot aspects of their brain.
You don't know that this is terminal.
Well, and you know, one of the things that I noted in the op-ed about um Jane Allen who was extracted with the help of her father from the, you know, from the drugs that would end up her in her life, um, canalization that she had been set up for,
but then died um from the complications of decades with anorexia, and the op-ed writer uh wonders if that time when she was in the terminal anorexia sort of orbit didn't contribute badly to her health.
And what he says, the the op-ed writer, uh, is that uh she weaned herself off the drugs that she had been on in hospice care that were giving her brain fog.
This reminds me very much of Laura Delano's experience in Unshrunk, um, which instantly I just excerpted on natural selections.
Excellent book, highly recommend it, and she is an extraordinary woman as well.
Uh that in both of these cases, we see evidence that actually some of what you're experiencing is aatrogenic.
Maybe all of it.
Now, presumably, uh, in you know, in Laura's case, we know she was experiencing the sort of the sturm and drong of adolescence in uh in high pressure um social world, and we don't know any, I don't know anything about what was going on with this woman before she started starving herself.
Uh, but even if the medical intervention doesn't come before the first signs of anxiety or mental distress, anxiety and mental distress aren't inherently unhealthy.
They aren't inherently a sign of illness or of a misapprehension about what is true about the universe.
Because very often when people are actually anxious or angry or fearful, uh, they are responding to something real in the universe that is giving them reason to be anxious or angry or fearful.
And by flattening that out, we are making people more anxious and angry and fearful in part because they know that they can no longer determine what is true and what is not.
Yeah, you're actually shifting the blame onto the patient when here's the the feature of the story that is not going to get said, which is these are new disorders.
That tells you something.
Yeah.
It tells you because these are new disorders that afflict many people, it's not a bad gene that somehow got fostered.
It's something that is it is a novel exposure to something.
So here's the question.
What kind of a sick society discovers that it is novelly exposing people to something that causes them to ruin their own lives and it doesn't go looking for the something?
Yeah.
I mean, here's the thing.
We know in this case that the something is transmitted by mass media.
It's transmitted over televisions, it's transmitted over the internet, it's transmitted over phones and social media.
Here's the thing though.
It's also transmitted by the expert class in the form of the DSM.
Right, of course, which interfaces with these things.
So you know a lot about the cause.
We used to know, medically speaking, that prevention was the right approach to making people healthy, that treating them and giving up on them by declaring them terminal would be that's like surrender.
Yeah.
So how is it that all of the effort that's put into this is put into, you know, pretending that we know more about the diseases than we do.
Deciding what category of people is beyond our health, which is really an indictment of the field.
It's not an you know, an indicator of the condition.
What it says is, hey, you goons aren't good enough at your job to figure out what to do with somebody who has a severe case of this.
So you've decided to declare it terminal as if that's a God-given category.
It's insane, right?
We should be looking for the cause each and every time.
And, you know, here's one of the lessons that I think you and I both got as a result of what was triggered by COVID, right?
All the investigation we've done into all the things that we had taken at face value medically is that a whole suite of diseases that you think are ancient aren't.
Right?
Things like allergies, things like Alzheimer's disease.
These things showed up out of nowhere, which tells you what you should be doing about them.
Yes, it's all well and good to try to help the people who've got them, but you have an opportunity to prevent people from getting it anew, and you're doing nothing about it.
You're just gonna pretend to scratch your head over the fact that oh, something showed up.
There's a new cause.
Let's not worry about that.
Let's just invest in treatment or, you know, useless diagnoses or whatever.
It's whole system is turned on his head any time you have a new disorder.
The focus should be figuring out, okay, well, what factor is causing this that wasn't here before?
Is the class of things that we call chronic disease itself new?
I think broadly it is.
I I I wonder if chronic disease itself isn't largely downstream of the industrial revolution.
I think it's largely.
It can't be entirely.
But I but largely, yes, the vast bulk of the cases are you're being exposed to something either developmentally or on an ongoing basis, and it's disrupted something that would otherwise regulate itself.
Yeah.
I think so.
Um so you mentioned in first responding to what I was sharing here that you you feel that it is a human right to to take your own life.
Uh and that every almost everybody, almost everybody who does it is making a mistake.
Yes.
Um so I wanted to say something relevant to that.
Uh so the author of the Denver Post piece ends with this line.
How many collateral deaths are acceptable to you?
For whatever purported good they do, these laws just aren't safe.
I read that and I thought with the surprise with something of a jolt, wow, that's the same argument against the death penalty, uh, which had not occurred to me before.
Uh I've always, as you know, Brett, been opposed to the death penalty.
Not because I think violent criminals' lives need to be saved, uh, but because one error is too many.
Um the state will make mistakes and the state should never be in a position to put an innocent man to death.
Full stop, not okay.
Well, the argument against assisted suicide against physician-assisted aid in dying, uh, seems to me to be a similar argument, actually.
Uh and we've talked before uh about positions, you know, we are asked sometimes, you know, what what positions have changed since you went through the ringer at Evergreen uh in 2017.
Uh and the thing that I've said most frequently is uh my position on affirmative action has changed.
I used to uh think it was a good idea, and now I I see, I think accurately, that it is uh bad for everyone, um, including and perhaps especially the very people whom it is purported to help.
And um I'm gonna add to my list of positions about which I have changed my mind, I think, and I'm not sure of this yet, but I think um assisted suicide.
I think that the risks are just too high.
Um in part in part because of what we've just been talking about, and then in part because of what is talked about more frequently, which is the perverse incentives of a system that wants your organs or is concerned about population levels or health care costs, right?
If if a system can benefit from having you dead, making it easier to have you be dead is not good for you.
You don't want you don't want the state or the healthcare system or if it's the same thing or not to be in a position where it benefits from you dying uh ever.
Uh and yet it is true that I do think um, you know, so my friend Alex uh who died at his own hand, uh actually I I talked about him very briefly, so it happened once we were already doing dark horse.
I think it was in um either tw it was in 2020 or 2021, I don't remember at the moment.
Um but he used to say to me, um, because he did he did have that darkness in him and he um he knew that there was a possibility that he would do this.
And I asked him over and over again not to, um, and to tell me if he felt that he was going there.
Uh but he used to say to me all the time that it is a person's right to do so.
And I agree with him.
I agree that it is a person's right to do so, and I wish fervently that he had not it was the wrong choice.
Um but he did.
Um but having the state be in a position to sanction such an action, facilitate it, that's not okay.
I don't think that is ever going to be okay, actually.
Yeah, I mean, I think there are cases in which it's okay.
But the problem is once you open the door to it, there are going to be plenty of cases in which it isn't.
Just as the state has executed truly violent and heinous people who were benefiting no one by being alive.
Yep.
Um the errors, the potential for errors and the fact of errors make it too dangerous apology.
And not even errors.
In the case of uh assisted suicide, the danger of abuse is absolutely profound.
I mean, abuse by family members who want to be rid of you, or a medical establishment that wants your organs or whatever it is.
There's lots of um reason that will be hidden from the patient or irresistible because the patient is not in a position to to comprehend it and those dangers are too great.
And so I don't know what you do about the sum total of the picture because if you do have a right, and I think you I think it's a fundamental right.
I think there's a there's a reason that the most famous speech in Shakespeare is about this very topic.
Um are almost always making a mistake when they do this.
It's as people have famously said, uh permanent solution to a temporary problem.
Um and people botch the job.
They die horribly.
Um and so the temptation to uh you know, if people have this right to at least make it painless and seamless and all of that, I get it, but the r the uh the potential for abuse is so spectacular.
Um there and it can't be allowed.
No, I I I I think you're right.
Uh you know, even though we have presumably all heard stories of people who were able to live their final months uh with a progressive disease that would take away their facility to make their own decisions, knowing that they had it they had the capacity um to be under their own control.
Yep.
Yep.
It is unfortunately not uh not a simple issue for all of those reasons.
Yeah.
Um I will also just say uh I wish it didn't have to be said.
You and I have no instinct towards suicide, won't do it, I will say in my personal case, I wouldn't do it unless I had a terrible disease and there was nothing but suffering and a burden to to my family ahead.
I just wouldn't do it in any other circumstance.
Um That's right.
Yeah.
Never not not um not an option for all of the reasons.
Yep, for all the reasons.
All right.
Is there more on that topic?
A lot more, but that's good for now.
All right.
Yeah.
Okay.
Final topic is a little bit of an odd one.
It sort of fits with the first thing we discussed.
Something uh, you know, the world that we returned to uh contained, of course, progress on fronts that were rapidly moving, including AI.
And one thing particularly caught my attention.
Uh of particular interest to me given um my well-known obsessions Oh, this is gonna be good.
Well, the well-known obsession in this case is correcting people who misuse the word theory and telling them that what they in fact have.
Oh, that's a minor obsession.
Oh, it's a major.
No, I think actually you have very interesting major obsessions.
I do, but this one, my feeling is if we just simply in our own, I realize it's cumbersome that hypothesis people feel like they're putting on airs.
Can you count it at the syllables, Brett?
You're wasting people's time.
Four syllables versus two.
Come on, man.
Uh I yeah, as you know, I I have an agreement with you here.
Yeah, but I just think the world would be uh so much better if we were clear on when we're talking about a hypothesis and when we're in the much rarer case talking about something that is actually progressed to being a theory.
Anyway, that's the obsession.
So the story, do you have the tweet that I sent you, Jen?
Okay, so you want to scroll back a little bit and show whose tweet this is?
Okay, this is Vittorio, an interesting account, who says, massive white pill with two alarms.
He said, AI just generated new scientific knowledge.
Google and Yale used a 27 billion Gemma model, and it discovered a new cancer mechanism.
It predicted a drug, and I struggle over the pronunciation of this, cimetacertib, would only make tumors visible in the immune system if low interferon was present and lab tests confirmed it.
AI made new biological hypothesis, and it was right.
How is this not AGI?
AGI meaning artificial general intelligence, which is something, you know.
Yeah, go ahead.
No, just the sentence up above would have benefited from a comma.
So they go back up just a little bit more.
There we go.
The AI predicted that a particular drug would only make tumors visible to the immune system if low interferon was present, period.
Lab tests on actual cells then confirmed it.
I only spent five minutes looking at this right before, but it's not...
Anyway, the prediction wasn't the lab test confirmed it.
That's the verification, apparent verification of the prediction.
Yeah, that's the test.
So I found this fascinating.
I dug into it a little bit, and I'll tell you, you know, I think the details don't matter terribly much, but here's some interesting stuff.
What they did was they took cellular data.
I think the cellular data in question was the mRNA, messenger RNA,
RNA transcripts inside of cells so you've got the DNA which houses all of the genes of the cell and the organism and then you've got the mRNA transcripts which are moving from the cellular genome to the ribosomes to make protein and the reason that these mRNA transcripts tell you something you know all of what's in the mRNA is also encoded in the DNA in a slightly different form.
But what's interesting, what the mRNA does for you is it tells you what the cell is actually doing, right?
The cell knows how to do lots of things that it never does because it's not that kind of cell.
The mRNA tells you what the cell is up to, either because that's the nature of this particular cell or because that's the nature of what the cell is doing at the moment.
If the cell is fending off an infection, it will have certain transcripts, you know, if it's responding to damage.
So anyway, those mRNA transcripts have meaning.
and what they did super clever is they figured out how to create sentence like structures from the mRNA for the purpose of feeding it into the LLS.
So as a occasional phylogenic systematist who has thought a lot about how it is that we decide what data to include and what the heuristics are by which we choose which patterns to spend time looking at and which patterns to not spend time looking at, I have to wonder what's in the big black box that is.
And we turn the mRNA transcripts into sentences.
Totally.
Now, here's what I would say.
Absent this result and I don't know if this result's true or not I have no reason to doubt it but you know there's lots of fraud out there this could be fraud and I can imagine reasons you You the AI models are in competition for lots of things for achievements, but also for investment.
And so pretending your AI model is better than it is, you know, there's a reason to do that.
So I'm not ruling out the possibility that this was fraud, though as I read it, everything here is plausible.
The we turned mRNA into sentence-like structures and then trained an LLM on it.
Strikes me as well, were your sentences any good, and what was your rubric?
And there's all sorts of questions to be asked.
The result is That's it.
The result is that uh there was a prediction made and uh early tests anyway suggests the prediction is borne out.
Right.
And in fact, one the prediction I don't know, I like knowing nothing here, but presumably the prediction was somewhat risky.
The prediction wasn't something obvious.
Well, this prediction is not obvious.
Um, and I will get to what the prediction was in a second.
But um the the hypothesis here is weakly novel, I would say.
Okay.
Um so it's not the slam dunk that I would have looked for, but the point is it's just to be clear.
When I said the prediction is risky, what we want it's a better test of a hypothesis when the prediction is so unusual that there's no other possible hypothesis that would result in that prediction being worn out.
Right.
And so like uh you know, we're hoping for the riskiest prediction that is then you know, f fail that we fail to falsify it, and like, oh wow, that looks like really good support for that hypothesis.
So you're saying this hypothesis was or this prediction was not all that out there?
No, it given what you've just said about riskiness, it's risky enough.
Okay, so that the result is impressive.
What it is not is a big leap away from what was known.
It's a small leap away from what was known.
Okay.
Um so it's two different things, two different things.
Like is is the hypothesis um standing stronger in the wake of this test of this prediction, and was the hypothesis, regardless of what the result would be, um, going to be an important breakthrough if it turned out to be true.
Right.
And uh the second question appears to be eh, not really, but but the but the first one is really you know the the foundation of science.
It's just you know, do you have a hypothesis that is testable and have you tested it and have you failed to falsify it and voila, here we go.
Right.
And um, although I think we can conclusively dismiss that this is AGI, I think this is that's an over uh interpretation of of what this is.
What it does say is unless this was a total fluke, which is a possibility, but unless it was a total fluke, we are on the foothill of AI creating hypotheses.
And so the point is give it five minutes and you'll get some radical stuff out of it that you wouldn't have spotted on your own.
And then we're in a whole new universe.
So if this paper is what it appears, we are somewhere new, and although uh not AGI, we are on the foothill of something that probably leads there.
So overall, uh does this work as far as you can tell what it is, give you hope or give you pause?
Oh, it scares the crap out of me.
It's fascinating.
But um, yeah, I don't know.
I mean, uh personally, I don't know what I do for a living at the point that AI can train on my work and all sorts of stuff I've never read and outthink me.
That's not a good world for me.
I don't like that idea at all.
And so anyway, um that's frightening, but so let me just run through what the what the hypothesis was and then what the test means.
So there is a distinction between cold and hot tumors.
Cold and hot is like um visible to the immune system.
So a cold tumor is a tumor that's growing, it's dangerous, but it is not chemically triggering the immune system to recognize it as foreign and dangerous, and so the immune system is not attacking it.
So a cold tumor is bad.
A hot tumor is putting out signals that cause the immune system to fight it.
And the immune system, we are learning ever more, is responsible for doing away with a lot of would-be cancerous stuff.
The immune system is very effective at dealing with this.
And when we get a dangerous tumor or a cancer, it's because it has evaded the immune system.
So how much do we think we know about the difference in origin or developmental trajectory of cold versus hot tumors?
Um, it's not a clean story, but there is a piece of it that is prominent.
Um that there is selection in the context of the tumor, um for immune evasion.
So another tumors can become cold tumors?
That's a good question.
I mean, that sounds like what that sounds like.
Sounds like the prediction of the model.
So I'm gonna say yes, whether that is a common trajectory, I don't know.
There's a question.
So also it sounds like a possible prediction of that model is uh no tumor is either or all tumors begin as hot tumors, and if the immune system takes care of them before um they become invisible to the immune system, great for the body.
And uh if they become cold tumors before the immune system takes care of them, then the body has a problem.
Right.
So what these folks did is they asked the AI to find a combination of drugs that would cause a cold tumor to become hot.
And what they effectively found was interferon, which is a common uh cellular product used as a drug in combination with this other drug, but not in the absence of interferon would cause the tumor to turn hot, would cause it to become visible.
Now, the test that they ran was not in tumorogenic tissue, as far as I can tell.
It was in normal tissue.
It was not in a living creature, it was on a bench, but it was in living tissue.
And they demonstrated that in fact you could trigger antigen presentation that would cause the immune system to react in the context of interferon, but not in its absence.
So that's what that's what the AI did here.
And they claim, and I have no reason to disbelieve them, that they've done a search that says this is not anticipated by anything in the literature.
This is not the aid AI reproducing something we already knew.
This is the AI telling us something we didn't know that has potential therapeutic value.
Now, the fact that it's being done in cells that aren't tumorous and aren't in a body means that this is we're many steps away from knowing if it will have it will if it will have therapeutic value, but it has potential therapeutic value.
And the claim is uh that humans didn't know this before.
Right.
In the if you, as a graduate student came to your advisor and you said, hey, check this out.
I can get this tissue to trigger the immune system in the context of interferon that has potential utility against tumors, it'd be a kind of, hey, that's super cool, keep going, see if see if this pans out uh moment.
So anyway, I think what we've got here is if the work is what it presents itself as, if it is to be taken at felt face value, it's highly unlikely to be a pure fluke, though that's possible.
It is borne out by experiment.
That's very cool, and it suggests that AI, it's not AGI because it's not general.
It's a highly specific use.
Yeah.
Um, but nonetheless, where is AGI going to come from?
It's going to come from cultivating these specific uses and then voila, it's gonna land on your doorstep before you know it.
So being on that foothill.
We're gonna need better locks.
And better bagels.
Oh, yeah, sure.
All right.
Um, but yeah, I think uh so I do think this is again, if it's all to be taken at face value, this is an important moment because it's the moment at which, you know, the the fish starts breathing air.
It's like that.
It's the foothill of something potentially huge.
Well, that's a way of thinking about AGI that I had not thought about before.
As you know, I'm um somewhat of a devotee of the very many transitions that are required for vertebrates to come onto land to become tetrapods.
So the fish breathing air thing uh puts puts a different spin on what is happening over in AI world for me.
I think it's the right thing.
But everything needs to be retooled at some level if the tetrapod analogy is right.
I think it's not like you have to bear your weight, your different refractive indices of air versus water, you gotta not lose all your water out your gills, like just everything needs to be retooled, and yet it happened.
Here we are.
I think the thing that's important about it is that once you get to the foothill of something like Petropod Land.
Every improvement you make opens up opportunities.
They seem like tiny non-opportunities to us having already gotten there, but they were worlds.
Right.
For those who didn't yet have them.
It's self-fueling.
Yeah.
And so that positive feedback means that um from the foothill, this moves very quickly.
Yeah.
All right.
You think by next Wednesday we'll still be here?
That's our plan.
Um you and I will seem to still be here from the point of the audience, having gotten up, left this room, other things, and then come back.
But from their perspective, they will have to be.
This is where we live.
Yep.
We just sit in these chairs.
Sad life.
At least we have our dunk beetle.
Uh at least we have our dung beetle and our labrador, snoring labrador in the corner.
So it could be a lot worse.
Um all right.
Is that it?
That's it.
Uh it's a weird conglomeration of topics, but there it is.
Um yeah, uh, we'll be back on Wednesday.
So uh not too not too long from now.
Uh check out our sponsors this week, which were Fresh Pressed Olive Oil, Helix, and Manukora, uh, all amazing sponsors as always.
Uh find us on locals and um Brett's doing conversations on Patreon.
I've got natural selections going on Substack.
And till you come and find us again next time.
Be good to the ones you love, eat good food, and get outside.
