Dark Horse - Weinstein & Heying - Is Cell Phone Radiation Good For You? The 317th Evolutionary Lens with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying
Aired: 2026-03-18
Duration: 01:59:49


=== Prime Number Live Stream (05:23) ===

[00:00:04]  Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse Podcast live stream number 317.
[00:00:10]  I'm so on my game.
[00:00:11]  I know it's 317.
[00:00:13]  But do you know if it's prime?
[00:00:14]  I have a strong sense that it is.
[00:00:17]  Strong sense, but no actual work on the subject.
[00:00:21]  You're correct.
[00:00:22]  I'm correct.
[00:00:22]  It is prime.
[00:00:23]  it's not like a cosmological prime and some special it's not a perfect prime or a stellar prime or a neptune prime whatever Whatever.
[00:00:34]  You know, the mathematicians, they don't get much excitement.
[00:00:37]  And so finding a prime that has some other property causes the.
[00:00:40]  A partner in prime, for instance.
[00:00:42]  Yeah.
[00:00:42]  Partner in prime.
[00:00:44]  That is so good.
[00:00:46]  We are partners.
[00:00:47]  I think your standards may be low.
[00:00:49]  At the moment, they are rock bottom.
[00:00:52]  Well, I've been having kind of a rough week.
[00:00:55]  You know, it turns out there are certain topics that one dare not speak out loud or all hell breaks loose.
[00:01:02]  I knew that.
[00:01:03]  And I must tell you, friends, you are mostly friends who watch this podcast.
[00:01:09]  I feel compelled to do these things.
[00:01:14]  I'm probably as well built to endure what comes back as anybody.
[00:01:19]  It's not fun.
[00:01:20]  It's really not enjoyable.
[00:01:22]  And especially when it's in close quarters.
[00:01:24]  I will say, however, as much.
[00:01:26]  I'm not talking about here.
[00:01:27]  No, no.
[00:01:28]  Here, it's lovely.
[00:01:29]  This is the closest quarters.
[00:01:30]  The closest quarters are so rock solid, I can't even tell you.
[00:01:35]  But obviously, you can see a lot of vitriol on the internet.
[00:01:41]  You cannot see the number of kind, decent people who show up out of the blue and tell you things you would have no access to if you hadn't spoken publicly.
[00:01:53]  And so anyway, it's a painful process.
[00:01:55]  It's a fascinating process each and every time.
[00:01:58]  And so what you're currently enduring is having dared to speak both to Tucker Carlson and about Israel and Iran.
[00:02:09]  But that thing that you just described is something that those who haven't been in a position of speaking publicly about things which some people feel vehemently opposed to your position on will not know.
[00:02:24]  And so we experienced this with Evergreen.
[00:02:27]  We experienced this with COVID.
[00:02:29]  You are experiencing this now, where, yes, publicly, a lot of what people can see is, oh my God, I know better than to do that then because that is horrifying.
[00:02:39]  But so much of what comes back privately is extraordinary and eye-opening and elucidating and kind and generous and human.
[00:02:49]  So, you know, thank you for that.
[00:02:51]  And also recognize those who are seeing what you are going through right now.
[00:02:55]  We have gone through in past versions of these, that it's not all terrible.
[00:03:03]  You get raked over the coals, but that is, in fact, and this is a point you have made often, that is a large part of the point, whether or not the people doing it know it or not.
[00:03:10]  That is a way to scare other people into silence.
[00:03:13]  Yep.
[00:03:13]  And we must not be silent because as much as the outcry is, you're so wrong.
[00:03:19]  It's incredible.
[00:03:19]  You've finally completely lost your marbles.
[00:03:22]  The point is what actually comes back includes evidence you didn't know of that suggests you're on the right track, all sorts of things.
[00:03:30]  So there's a it's a very mixed bag, but my sense is, yes, this was this was worth it, as awful as the cost taken in isolation is.
[00:03:42]  Getting back to our prime discussion a little bit where you were talking about the intrinsic boredom of mathematicians and them making up things like twin primes, not making up, but like just finding connections.
[00:03:54]  This makes a person wonder how many third rails there could possibly be.
[00:03:59]  It doesn't seem like they should be multiples of three or something.
[00:04:02]  Something.
[00:04:03]  Yeah.
[00:04:03]  Something.
[00:04:03]  Fourth fifth, six rails.
[00:04:04]  But you know, no, no, it's always the third rail.
[00:04:07]  It's always the third rail.
[00:04:08]  It's hard to get past the third rail.
[00:04:09]  It's very energetic.
[00:04:11]  So energetic.
[00:04:12]  But you know, we've touched a number of third rails, live to tell the tale.
[00:04:16]  You know, anyway, all sorts of stuff.
[00:04:19]  I will just say a tantalizing hint for the future.
[00:04:22]  One of the things that I mentioned on Tucker was that very few analyses of what we are currently doing in Iran add up even superficially.
[00:04:31]  The administration hasn't given us a coherent rationale.
[00:04:34]  And frankly, that's been freaking me out.
[00:04:36]  Why do we, you know, even if it were a cartoon, at least just some picture of what we're even supposed to be thinking?
[00:04:43]  They haven't done that.
[00:04:45]  Somebody.
[00:04:46]  Without even a coherent cover story, how can you not be wondering what the hell is going on?
[00:04:50]  Right, exactly.
[00:04:51]  They're throwing a lot of us.
[00:04:53]  Somebody, somebody I know and like, approached me this morning, actually, with a at least coherent explanation of what we might be doing that was not, on its face, easily falsified by anything I know.
[00:05:10]  So anyway, I can't imagine why we would have a coherent rationale and not at least have the administration hint at it.
[00:05:15]  But anyway, that is something I am now looking into.
[00:05:20]  And, you know, if there are forces interested in doing away with me, they should wait because who knows what it is that I'm saying.

=== Orcas and Transient Whales (05:24) ===

[00:05:28]  Yeah, please wait.
[00:05:29]  A lot of people.
[00:05:30]  Thank you.
[00:05:31]  All right.
[00:05:31]  I will say, out of nowhere, I was returning this morning on the ferry.
[00:05:37]  No, you were returning from the mainland.
[00:05:39]  It does not qualify as nowhere.
[00:05:42]  Right.
[00:05:42]  It wasn't out of nowhere.
[00:05:43]  I wasn't out of nowhere.
[00:05:44]  I was coming back from Redmond, where there was a Brownstone supper club, which are very fun, where I was giving the first supper club in the Seattle area talk.
[00:05:55]  And oh my God, there's video of me giving a talk.
[00:05:59]  In any case, Great Supper Club.
[00:06:01]  And anyway, I was returning this morning from the mainland, and something that occasionally happens but is not very common at all happened, which is a large pod of orca showed up and reminding me that the world is actually...
[00:06:20]  Is orca the plural?
[00:06:24]  I think it's Octopi.
[00:06:26]  Why is the island near us called Orcas and not pronounced Orcas, but Orcas, if Orca is the plural?
[00:06:33]  This is a fine question.
[00:06:35]  Here are some of your orca.
[00:06:37]  Here are the orca.
[00:06:39]  And that, in fact, maybe Orcas in the background.
[00:06:41]  I don't know.
[00:06:41]  I don't know exactly where you were.
[00:06:42]  So it restored my faith in planet Earth and humanity because the fairy, even though they take no end of crap for being late, which is sometimes their fault, but not always.
[00:06:55]  And they were a little bit late already.
[00:06:56]  They were a little bit late already.
[00:06:57]  They stopped and fully allowed us to watch this amazing display.
[00:07:01]  Now, I have a rule that I live by.
[00:07:06]  There are no exceptions to this rule.
[00:07:08]  Any day on which you see whales is a good day.
[00:07:12]  Okay.
[00:07:12]  And that includes, mind you, dolphins and porpoises, of which orca are the largest.
[00:07:19]  And fiercest.
[00:07:20]  Yeah.
[00:07:20]  But the point is people, you know, they see dolphins or porpoises and they think, oh, that's nice.
[00:07:25]  But no, you're seeing whales.
[00:07:26]  It's whales.
[00:07:27]  They're just small.
[00:07:28]  That's not their fault.
[00:07:31]  So anyway, if you've seen whales, that's a good day.
[00:07:35]  And, you know, I don't care that it's a, you know, a harbor porpoise or something like that.
[00:07:42]  This is a big group.
[00:07:44]  It's a gift from God, whether he exists or not, right?
[00:07:48]  Oh.
[00:07:48]  Yeah.
[00:07:49]  First time I saw that.
[00:07:50]  So was there anyone on board?
[00:07:52]  You and I don't know all of the local orcas, but many people in the area do.
[00:07:57]  Yeah.
[00:07:57]  I guess there's a lot of study of them.
[00:07:59]  Do we know what pod this is?
[00:08:01]  No, we don't.
[00:08:02]  I'm pretty sure it's transients.
[00:08:05]  But so that means mammal eaters.
[00:08:08]  We have a population of residents that eat salmon and they are on the back foot, despite not having feet.
[00:08:17]  Doesn't help as a result of various environmental influences.
[00:08:20]  It's very sad.
[00:08:20]  You used to be able to watch the resident orcas just simply by from land, just looking out for them in certain places.
[00:08:28]  And they're still out there, but they exactly.
[00:08:32]  I think they're juvenile here, not there.
[00:08:34]  I thought I saw a small fin.
[00:08:36]  I agree.
[00:08:36]  There's a calf.
[00:08:38]  It's hard to know, though.
[00:08:39]  Sometimes they just come up a little bit.
[00:08:40]  Yeah.
[00:08:41]  But anyway, so I saw whales.
[00:08:43]  And so there are a ton of seals here.
[00:08:45]  So the transients have a lot of food.
[00:08:48]  Whereas, you know, the salmon populations are having a bit of a tough time too.
[00:08:51]  There's a lot of reasons that the residents are declining.
[00:08:53]  But the transients, which are named differently based on their home ranges, but also they have very different diet habits, as you said.
[00:09:05]  And dialect.
[00:09:08]  But like we can watch, you can often, you can tell that the whales are around when you see the whale boats going.
[00:09:16]  And you can also tell that there are whales around when you see all the seals freaking out.
[00:09:20]  Yeah, that's true.
[00:09:21]  The seals have an uneasy relationship with the transients.
[00:09:28]  So anyway, that was glorious.
[00:09:30]  And I was glad for it.
[00:09:32]  It came at just the right moment to make this an excellent day, no matter what else happens.
[00:09:38]  That's fantastic.
[00:09:38]  And so at the end of today, we're going to talk a bit about whether cell phones and AirPods are bad for you with evidence from mice.
[00:09:50]  And we're going to talk about the Ninth Circuit decision to let men go into a Korean women's spa here in Washington and the amazing dissent by one of the judges.
[00:10:03]  And we're going to talk a little bit about the finding.
[00:10:05]  It's in pre-print.
[00:10:06]  It's not been peer-reviewed yet.
[00:10:08]  But the phylogenetic findings suggesting that sharks aren't real.
[00:10:12]  So whales include orcas.
[00:10:14]  Birds are real.
[00:10:16]  And that wasn't a phylogenetic argument.
[00:10:18]  It was a, I don't know what kind of an argument that was.
[00:10:21]  But that sharks appear to be potentially two groups within which are embedded the skates and the rays.
[00:10:29]  And this may sound like something you don't care about at all, but if you get to say sharks aren't real, it's kind of fun.
[00:10:36]  It's going to be never-endingly confusing to, you know, average people who have pretty good assumptions about what it is to be real.
[00:10:43]  She's not arguing they don't exist.
[00:10:45]  He's making a point about whether or not they belong on a single branch of the tree.
[00:10:50]  So anyway.

=== CrowdHealth Insurance Alternative (03:14) ===

[00:10:52]  It's probably time to pay the rent.
[00:10:53]  Yeah, we should probably do that.
[00:10:54]  Oh, well, we're going to have a Q ⁇ A after today's show.
[00:10:57]  We've got a locals watch party going on right now.
[00:11:00]  Join us there.
[00:11:01]  And that's where the Q ⁇ A will be after the show.
[00:11:04]  Please consider joining us there.
[00:11:05]  But for now, top of the hour, we have three, as always, carefully chosen, sponsors to start us off, even though we've been going now for a while already.
[00:11:14]  Okay, our first sponsor this week is CrowdHealth.
[00:11:17]  CrowdHealth is not health insurance.
[00:11:18]  It is better.
[00:11:20]  Health insurance in the United States is a mess, to put it mildly.
[00:11:22]  From overpriced premiums to confusing fine print, endless paperwork, claims that don't get paid, customer service that is unhelpful and hostile, these complicated systems aren't functional, and they wear us down.
[00:11:32]  We used to contend with this madness, but not anymore.
[00:11:35]  There is a better way.
[00:11:37]  You can stop playing the rigged insurance game.
[00:11:39]  You can use CrowdHealth instead.
[00:11:40]  CrowdHealth is a community of people funding each other's medical bills directly.
[00:11:43]  No middlemen, no networks, no nonsense.
[00:11:46]  With CrowdHealth, you can get health care for under $100 per month for your first three months, and it's not that much more after that, including access to a team of health bill negotiators, low-cost prescription on lab testing tools, and a database of low-cost, high-quality doctors vetted by CrowdHealth.
[00:12:01]  If something major happens, you pay the first $500, then the crowd steps in to help fund the rest.
[00:12:06]  CrowdHealth is not health insurance.
[00:12:08]  It's way better.
[00:12:10]  After we left our salaried jobs as college professors, we spent years buying health insurance in the marketplace.
[00:12:15]  It was awful.
[00:12:16]  Our family of four had health insurance for emergencies only, and we were paying more than $1,500 a month for a policy with a $17,000 annual deductible to a company that was unresponsive and unhelpful.
[00:12:26]  Tens of thousands of dollars paid out for no benefit whatsoever.
[00:12:30]  I went looking for alternatives, and I found CrowdHealth.
[00:12:33]  We have now had two great sets of experiences with CrowdHealth.
[00:12:36]  Our younger son, Toby, broke his foot in the summer of 2024, and I slipped on wet concrete, and he had a head CAT scan a year later.
[00:12:43]  Both times we went to the ER and got good but expensive treatment from the medical staff there.
[00:12:47]  In both cases, CrowdHealth paid our bills with no hassle.
[00:12:50]  Their app was simple and straightforward to use, and the real people who work at CrowdHealth were easy to reach, clear, and communicative.
[00:12:56]  With CrowdHeal, you pay for little stuff out of pocket, but for any event that costs more than $500, a diagnosis that requires ongoing treatment, a pregnancy, an accident, you pay the first $500 and the crowd pays the rest.
[00:13:07]  Seriously, it's easy, affordable, and so much better than health insurance.
[00:13:11]  We can still hardly believe it.
[00:13:12]  When we tell people that we don't have health insurance, they look at us like we're insane.
[00:13:19]  So I know it sounds scary to go without health insurance, but I can assure you this is so much better.
[00:13:25]  You are so much more safe with regard to risking your money on an out-of-control health insurance system if you go with CrowdHealth instead.
[00:13:36]  It's way better.
[00:13:38]  The health insurance system is hoping you'll stay stuck in their same overpriced, over-complicated mess, but you don't have to do it.
[00:13:45]  This year, take your power back.
[00:13:46]  Join CrowdHealth to get started today for $99 a month for your first three months using code darkhorse at joincrowdhealth.com.
[00:13:53]  That's joincrowdhealth.com.
[00:13:55]  It's code darkhorse.
[00:13:57]  Remember, crowdhealth is not insurance.
[00:13:59]  Opt out, take your power back.
[00:14:01]  This is how we win.
[00:14:03]  Joincrowdhealth.com.
[00:14:04]  CrowdHealth is awesome.

=== Tupes Skincare Secrets (02:43) ===

[00:14:06]  I was thinking about that as I got up.
[00:14:09]  I had to pee.
[00:14:10]  And anyway, I was thinking about how great CrowdHealth is the entire time I was gone.
[00:14:17]  Excellent.
[00:14:18]  That might be too much information.
[00:14:20]  I don't know that it's too much information.
[00:14:21]  Okay, it's information.
[00:14:23]  Okay, for our next ad, I have got a couple of props.
[00:14:26]  This is only the second time we've had these guys as our sponsor.
[00:14:29]  They're new to us this month.
[00:14:30]  It's Tupes, T-O-U-P S, which makes amazing skincare products.
[00:14:34]  Most skincare and makeup is chock full of toxins and plastics.
[00:14:37]  The trendy brands may have nice packaging and seem clean, but they almost never are.
[00:14:40]  People in the United States responding to Maha with enthusiasm.
[00:14:43]  Let's source good meat and grow our own food, filter our water, purify our air, get additives and colors out of the food that we buy, and reduce exposure to pharmaceuticals and over-the-counter drugs.
[00:14:52]  That's all fantastic.
[00:14:54]  But if we continue to slather mystery chemicals onto our skin, our body's largest organ, we aren't doing enough.
[00:14:59]  If you want to make yourself healthy again, don't bathe yourself in toxins.
[00:15:02]  try any of Tupes amazing products and you will come back for more.
[00:15:06]  When Tupes approached us, I figured that they were just another supposedly clean brand that actually hides lots of ingredients in their products.
[00:15:12]  I was wrong.
[00:15:13]  Tubes makes excellent products with just a few ingredients.
[00:15:15]  They are real and pronounceable and actually support your skin.
[00:15:18]  The tallow balm that Tupes makes is made from 100% grass-fed tallow, which mimics our skin's natural biology beautifully.
[00:15:25]  It's smooth and creamy and feels great.
[00:15:29]  Use it as moisturizer during day or night.
[00:15:31]  And this frankincense face balm is their tallow balm, but just with frankincense.
[00:15:37]  It has two different frankincense oils.
[00:15:38]  It smells fantastic.
[00:15:39]  It's got serata and carteriai.
[00:15:41]  It's amazing to put on, smells great.
[00:15:44]  And excuse me, I also love their glow serum, which includes oils of primrose and immortal magnolia and jasmine and smells utterly gorgeous.
[00:15:54]  Tupes also makes sunscreen and deodorant, cleansing oils and exfoliants, and a complete array of beautiful makeup too.
[00:15:59]  And their list of Never ingredients is comprehensive and impressive, including, but not limited to artificial colors and fragrances, synthetic chemicals and fills, GMOs, aluminum, microplastics, and silicons.
[00:16:10]  Tupes is made to standards much higher than those required in the United States, higher even than standards in the EU.
[00:16:15]  But tupes is handcrafted in coastal Alabama, right here in the United States.
[00:16:20]  Every one of their products that I've tried has been wonderful, truly.
[00:16:23]  If you're ready to simplify your routine and actually feel good about what you're putting on your skin, head to tupesandco, T-O-U-P-S-A-N-D-C-O dot com slash darkhorse.
[00:16:35]  They're offering our listeners 25% off your first order with code darkhorse.
[00:16:39]  That's tupesandco, T-O-U-P-S-A-N-D-C-O.com.
[00:16:43]  Tupesandco.com slash darkhorse.
[00:16:46]  Use code darkhorse for 25% off your first order.

=== Madagascar Vanilla Flavor (07:56) ===

[00:16:49]  Have you noticed that we seem to attract sponsors who are creative when it comes to spelling?
[00:16:56]  Yes, it's the only, it's the only thing that makes me wonder if we're doing something wrong.
[00:17:00]  No, we're doing something right.
[00:17:01]  But if I were spelling...
[00:17:02]  Because you were also creative with regard to spelling.
[00:17:04]  Yeah, creative is generous, but chaotic when it comes to spelling.
[00:17:09]  Isn't the obvious way to spell tubes 2PS?
[00:17:14]  I mean, there's three ways to spell two.
[00:17:16]  No, no, I mean the number.
[00:17:20]  I've gone too far.
[00:17:22]  Finally.
[00:17:23]  You know what that would spell?
[00:17:26]  No.
[00:17:27]  Swaps.
[00:17:28]  T-W-O-P-S?
[00:17:30]  No, no, the number two, P-S.
[00:17:33]  Toops.
[00:17:34]  The obvious way to spell it now that you've heard it, right?
[00:17:37]  My point about your spelling being creative was, as you said, generous.
[00:17:40]  Yes, it was beyond generous, and thank you.
[00:17:43]  Our next creative spelling sponsor, the final one for this episode, is also new to this year.
[00:17:48]  It's Puri.
[00:17:49]  You'll never guess how they spell it.
[00:17:51]  It's P-U-O-R-I.
[00:17:54]  And they make a wide array of supplements and powders from vitamin C to magnesium, B-complex to creatine, collagen, and protein powders.
[00:18:03]  What makes Puri different is more than just spelling, it is how clean and pure all of their products are.
[00:18:10]  All of them.
[00:18:12]  Puri was founded in 2009 by two men who wanted to create the cleanest and purest products to support their own active lifestyle.
[00:18:19]  Since then, their product portfolio has grown to address common nutritional deficiencies in the developed world as they have never compromised on quality.
[00:18:27]  From the fundamental understanding that health requires a good diet, physical activity, recovery, and balance, the founders of Puri reject quick fixes and have insisted on the most stringent purity testing on all of their products from the very beginning.
[00:18:41]  We're using Puri's magnesium, which is excellent.
[00:18:43]  Like all of Puri's products, their magnesium complex is third-party testified, that's not a thing.
[00:18:49]  Third-party tested and certified.
[00:18:51]  See, I was shooting for a contraction, but it was a bridge too far.
[00:18:56]  It is tested and certified by the Clean Label Project against over 200 contaminants.
[00:19:05]  And at any time, you can scan the QR code on your bottle for the test results for your particular batch.
[00:19:11]  Holy moly is that good.
[00:19:13]  They didn't just test a sample.
[00:19:15]  You can look at the results for your batch.
[00:19:17]  That's super cool.
[00:19:19]  They send it with the product.
[00:19:20]  That's amazing.
[00:19:22]  Heather's mom is expecting her first shipment of multivitamins and fish oil from Puri any day.
[00:19:27]  Oh, I haven't updated that.
[00:19:28]  Yeah, she's got them.
[00:19:29]  She's got them.
[00:19:30]  What does she think?
[00:19:30]  She loves them.
[00:19:31]  Awesome.
[00:19:32]  Okay.
[00:19:32]  So, yeah, Heather's mom's got them and she thinks they're awesome, or so I've heard just now.
[00:19:38]  And our son Toby has been making protein-enriched smoothies for a couple of years now, but has had a hard time finding a protein powder that he liked.
[00:19:45]  Most of them are strongly flavored and gritty, but he wanted one that would disappear into his shake, letting the other flavors shine.
[00:19:52]  Now at 19, he's found the protein powder, Puri's grass-fed whey protein powder.
[00:19:57]  Bourbon vanilla flavor.
[00:19:59]  I mean, he's closing in on old enough for bourbon flavor.
[00:20:03]  Bourbon vanilla is somehow a description of a branch of vanilla.
[00:20:09]  Oh, is it?
[00:20:09]  I think.
[00:20:10]  Oh, it's a bourbon hinting vanilla.
[00:20:11]  That's cool.
[00:20:12]  Yeah.
[00:20:13]  All right.
[00:20:13]  I liked rum raisin as a kid, and I wasn't old enough to be drinking rum.
[00:20:17]  So anyway, it's a flavor.
[00:20:19]  Live with it.
[00:20:20]  Toby says, out of all the protein powders I've tried, this is the best.
[00:20:24]  The flavor is mild.
[00:20:25]  It doesn't intrude on other flavors.
[00:20:26]  It's smooth going down and is full of great whey protein.
[00:20:30]  That was a quote from young Toby.
[00:20:32]  Right.
[00:20:32]  He could have said, it's full of whey great protein.
[00:20:36]  That would also have made sense.
[00:20:38]  But again, spelling.
[00:20:40]  Most protein powders aren't just gritty and artificial.
[00:20:43]  They're actually toxic.
[00:20:44]  Several studies, including those done by Consumer Reports, show that a significant fraction of protein powders on the market contain lead in amounts that are known to be dangerous.
[00:20:53]  Frankly, any lead is dangerous.
[00:20:55]  You shouldn't be eating lead at all, much less in a supplement you're taking to improve your health.
[00:20:59]  Not only is Puri whey protein powder free of lead, it also delivers a whopping 21 grams of whey protein in each serving and is free of GMOs, pesticides, and exogenous hormones.
[00:21:11]  Toby loves the bourbon vanilla flavor despite his age, but they've also got a dark chocolate flavor made from organic cocoa powder.
[00:21:20]  Did I get it right?
[00:21:22]  Whether you're looking for magnesium or multivitamin collagen or protein powder, you can't go wrong with Puri.
[00:21:28]  Use the code darkhorse at puri.com slash darkhorse to get 32% off Puri grass-fed whey protein when you start a subscription.
[00:21:37]  In addition, you get a free shaker worth $25 on your first subscription order, which brings a total savings of $49.
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[00:21:56]  Okay, I did a quick little check on why some vanilla is called bourbon vanilla.
[00:22:02]  Okay.
[00:22:02]  I have not fact-checked it.
[00:22:03]  Yeah.
[00:22:04]  If this is true, it makes me wonder why we don't know this already.
[00:22:10]  As you know, I spent a lot of time in Madagascar.
[00:22:13]  Yes, you did.
[00:22:14]  You also spent a lot of time in Madagascar, somewhat less, but that's where I did my dissertation.
[00:22:18]  And as we have talked about before, and as I've written about, vanilla, which is the only, it's an orchid, and it's the only human cultivar that we eat of the entire orchid family.
[00:22:32]  And it is native to Mexico, where there is, I think it's a solitary, maybe like a melaponine bee or euclosine bee.
[00:22:40]  It's pollinated by a very particular pollinator in Mexico.
[00:22:45]  But it's such an amazing flavor that it has been taken and is now also grown in Madagascar, where most of the world's vanilla comes from, and parts of Indonesia and also Tahiti.
[00:22:58]  Near Madagascar is the island of Réunion, right?
[00:23:02]  Réunion used to be called apparently Il Bourbon.
[00:23:06]  Il Bourbon.
[00:23:08]  So bourbon vanilla, bourbon vanilla, refers to Madagascan and environs vanilla only.
[00:23:14]  Wow.
[00:23:15]  That was grown in the western Indian Ocean, mostly in Madagascar, because Madagascar is huge, bigger than California, whereas Réunion, which I've never been to, you've never been to, is tiny.
[00:23:26]  All right.
[00:23:27]  That's fascinating.
[00:23:28]  And Toby is forgiven for liking bourbon flavor because it's not bourbon flavor.
[00:23:32]  It's Madagascar and Environs flavor.
[00:23:35]  All right, cool.
[00:23:36]  And it is going to be a euglossine bee, right?
[00:23:38]  That natively pollinates that isn't in Madagascar and therefore all the Madagascar vanilla has to be hand pollinated.
[00:23:45]  Yeah, everywhere but Mexico where vanilla is grown, it's hand pollinated, which is part of why vanilla, it's a long process, just like with chocolate and coffee, right?
[00:23:54]  It's a long process to turn what grows into something that we want to eat.
[00:23:58]  But it's a particularly arduous process to hand pollinate each individual bean with regard to vanilla, which is what happens everywhere that vanilla is grown outside of its native region of Mexico.
[00:24:11]  Which causes the vanilla farmers in Madagascar, at least the one that we came to know well, to hate vanilla because they have such intimate contact with it all the time that it just...
[00:24:21]  Hate the smell.
[00:24:22]  Yeah.
[00:24:23]  And I mean, and he reported solo reported that this was, he was not unusual.
[00:24:27]  Yes.
[00:24:28]  That he's just like, yes, I don't want to be around it.
[00:24:31]  Whereas to us, the idea that you can walk into a rainforest and come across a little cultivated patch that smells somewhat of vanilla is remarkable.
[00:24:40]  And, you know, not so remarkable for the farmers who are doing the arduous work.

=== Telomere Research Discussion (02:33) ===

[00:24:45]  Yeah.
[00:24:46]  Someday when the world is not melting down, maybe we will have a discussion about euglossine bees, orchids, speciation, and all that glorious stuff.
[00:24:58]  Because, man, is that a good topic?
[00:25:00]  It is a good topic.
[00:25:01]  This is not that day.
[00:25:02]  Might be a day for sharks, though.
[00:25:05]  I thought sharks weren't real.
[00:25:10]  I suppose I deserved that.
[00:25:11]  Yeah, you did.
[00:25:12]  You did.
[00:25:13]  All right.
[00:25:13]  So are we starting on the biology?
[00:25:17]  Sure.
[00:25:19]  But not the sharks.
[00:25:20]  No, no, there's a lot of biology.
[00:25:22]  It's not all sharks.
[00:25:23]  It's all biology.
[00:25:24]  The Ninth Circuit is biology, too.
[00:25:26]  Ew, you're right.
[00:25:27]  Yeah.
[00:25:28]  You're right.
[00:25:28]  We'll go there next.
[00:25:29]  Yeah, that's grisly.
[00:25:30]  But, all right.
[00:25:32]  So those of you who were around last week, I think it was last week, we had what I thought was a pretty fun discussion about my old work on telomeres, senescence, and cancer and how that work keeps spitting out tests where predictions that I have made turn out to be true.
[00:25:55]  And many of you will remember that I made a rule that I would accept the argument that I'm an idiot from anybody who's done work of that quality at least once in their life, but the rest of people are forbidden for leveling that particular accusation.
[00:26:07]  That you're an idiot.
[00:26:08]  Yes.
[00:26:09]  So far, it has not been effective.
[00:26:12]  But.
[00:26:14]  No, I wouldn't think so for one thing.
[00:26:16]  I mean, then no one gets to criticize you.
[00:26:19]  That's not fair.
[00:26:20]  I don't know about that.
[00:26:21]  You know, I mean, I'm willing to be generous about whether you got a piece of work that good, but I don't want to take it from, you know, you've either done some good work or you haven't.
[00:26:29]  And it would be greatly beneficial if we could filter the noise of those who have not contributed much from the accusations.
[00:26:38]  But anyway, I have digressed, as you all noticed.
[00:26:41]  But apparently it's great fun to yell at you on the internet.
[00:26:43]  Oh, my God.
[00:26:45]  It's like it's got to be I've never tried it.
[00:26:48]  It's got to be thrilling.
[00:26:50]  it's gotta be and you know and the and frankly the few times that i've yelled at you in real life i haven't found it thrilling so i don't get what they're all on about Yeah, you would know.
[00:26:59]  Yeah.
[00:26:59]  And yet on the internet, it doesn't turn out to be enjoyable.
[00:27:02]  Things are different.
[00:27:03]  Well, I'm glad to hear that.
[00:27:04]  It does explain why it doesn't happen very much.
[00:27:06]  So anyway, back to the biology.
[00:27:09]  Although, obviously this was too.
[00:27:12]  But here's the thing.
[00:27:13]  It just so happens that it happened again this week.
[00:27:17]  Something came to my awareness.

=== Hormesis and Mild Fever (15:11) ===

[00:27:19]  Well, yeah, can't be your word.
[00:27:20]  This is actually from 2018.
[00:27:22]  Yeah, but it came to my awareness because of a thread that I happened onto on X as I was taking a break from being browbeaten.
[00:27:33]  So can we show this thread?
[00:27:40]  All right, we're going to put up this thread.
[00:27:41]  The thread's topic is about, it's a person, I don't know, Zane Koch or Koch, who says, for a while I've had a slight fear that the Bluetooth from my AirPods could be frying my brain.
[00:27:58]  This weekend I pulled the wrong data.
[00:28:00]  Raw.
[00:28:01]  The wrong data.
[00:28:02]  I didn't see wrong.
[00:28:04]  I didn't mean to say wrong.
[00:28:05]  I'm sorry, Zane.
[00:28:07]  It says, this weekend I pulled the raw data from a $30 million government study of 1,679 mice blasted with cell phone radiation and reanalyzed it.
[00:28:20]  What I found was not what I expected.
[00:28:24]  So he goes on.
[00:28:25]  It's a little hard to read.
[00:28:27]  Do you want me to read it?
[00:28:27]  Yeah, would you read it?
[00:28:28]  Okay, this is Zane in a tweet thread from March 15th.
[00:28:31]  For two years, 820 mice and 859 rats lived in specially designed metal enclosures that scatter radio frequency signals uniformly, so every animal gets a consistent whole body dose.
[00:28:41]  They were exposed to 0.9 to 1.9 gigahertz of radiation nine hours a day.
[00:28:47]  For context, this is the same radio frequency used on your phone's 2G, 3G signal.
[00:28:52]  I don't know if 2G slash CG means 2G and 3G, but and it's similar to the 2.4 gigahertz frequency used in Bluetooth.
[00:29:00]  The intensity of radiation is roughly 100 times more powerful than that emitted by something like AirPods and 10 times that of a cell phone.
[00:29:09]  So what happened in the study?
[00:29:10]  He continues.
[00:29:11]  The radiated mice lived significantly longer.
[00:29:14]  They had a 53% lower risk of death, HR.475, P of less than a P of 0.003, then the mice dosed with no radiation.
[00:29:24]  Maybe something weird was going on with the mice, he asks.
[00:29:27]  Nope, exact same thing for the rats.
[00:29:29]  The rats that got the highest dose of cell phone radiation lived the longest.
[00:29:32]  And this is not some tiny study.
[00:29:34]  There were 210 mice and rats, mice or rats in each group, almost 2,000 total.
[00:29:40]  So what happened with cancer rates?
[00:29:43]  The rats had an increased risk of heart malignancies, but decreased risk of liver adenomas.
[00:29:48]  And the mice had no significant change in cancer risk at all.
[00:29:52]  Okay, so I want to just flag the distinction between heart and other cancer risk.
[00:29:58]  It may become important.
[00:30:03]  That's it.
[00:30:04]  Oh, oh, okay.
[00:30:07]  The cell phone radiation led to 28 significant health improvements, including decreased inflammation, less brain cell death, necrosis, less kidney disease, nephropathy, less mineralization of organs.
[00:30:19]  Mineralization of organs.
[00:30:20]  It's weird.
[00:30:21]  There was also, there were also five significant harms, including an increased risk of hemorrhage and a few other things.
[00:30:27]  If this was a pill, I'd be buying, he says.
[00:30:31]  So why might this be?
[00:30:33]  This continues the thread from Sky Zane.
[00:30:36]  My guess is it's sort of a hormesis effect, where a little of a bad thing ends up being good, kind of like exercise, wearing tear on your muscles causes them to grow back bigger and stronger.
[00:30:45]  Maybe here, the amount of DNA damage and other harms from the radiation is slight enough that it causes cells to upregulate, repairs, proteins and such, leading to net good effects.
[00:30:55]  Side note, we know from a companion study that there really was an increase in DNA damage from the radiation.
[00:31:03]  The mice and rats were bathed in radio frequency radiation at doses 10 to 100 times higher than AirPods, nine hours a day for two years, and lived longer and were healthier.
[00:31:13]  So at Thanksgiving this year, you can tell your crazy uncle that the cell phones are actually making you live longer.
[00:31:19]  And he has the original paper, which we have taken a look at.
[00:31:23]  Yes.
[00:31:23]  And I will just say up front, this paper is nothing if not complicated.
[00:31:30]  And so I'm not going to tell you that I completely understand it because it's actually technical on multiple different fronts.
[00:31:36]  It's technical at the level of the experimental design.
[00:31:43]  The way they dosed these mice and rats with radiation takes a certain amount of work to understand.
[00:31:50]  Frankly, it looked very careful to me.
[00:31:52]  I think it was a well-designed study.
[00:31:55]  It is also biologically complex.
[00:31:58]  The protocol for the necropsy where they're looking to see how the mice were, you know, takes some work to understand.
[00:32:08]  And, you know, there's also a lot of theoretical discussion in here about the particular kind of radiation that's being tested, why, how it relates to the technology at the time that the study was done.
[00:32:19]  So there's a lot of complexity and there's a lot of many decisions being made, each of which could affect the results downstream.
[00:32:28]  And it's hard to know how many of those compound each other, reverse each other.
[00:32:33]  Right.
[00:32:34]  So there's a lot of decisions by the scientists here because of the complexity of the study, which inherently makes it difficult to assess.
[00:32:41]  Right.
[00:32:42]  And it's a big study.
[00:32:44]  There's lots of noise in it.
[00:32:46]  In other words, patterns that are ambiguous.
[00:32:49]  And in fact, their conclusion in the study is ambiguous.
[00:32:54]  The evidence that they saw did not tell them that there was a clear pattern.
[00:32:59]  But let's just say the following things are true.
[00:33:02]  They were testing.
[00:33:03]  They were specifically trying to understand dosages that were reasonable to understand what the health impacts on humans would be of radiation emitted by cell phones.
[00:33:14]  They were trying to mimic the dosages in mice that humans, that weird, weird human beings using cell phones would be exposed to.
[00:33:22]  Right, which is not necessarily a good model for AirPods, although AirPods emit the same kind of radiation.
[00:33:29]  They do so in very close proximity.
[00:33:31]  And the radiation decays as an exponential matter with distance.
[00:33:37]  So being, some of you may remember back in the day when we got our first cell phones, I think roughly 21-ish years ago as you were pregnant with Zach, if I remember correctly, somewhere in that day.
[00:33:52]  I don't know why they would know that.
[00:33:54]  They wouldn't know.
[00:33:55]  But we got our first cell phones then.
[00:33:57]  And at the time, we had NextTel cell phones.
[00:34:02]  The major feature, which has now disappeared from planet Earth, was that they could function as walkie-talkies using the cell network.
[00:34:08]  So you didn't have to be near somebody, but you had effectively a walkie-talkie.
[00:34:11]  So they were very popular on work sites.
[00:34:13]  Whatever.
[00:34:14]  Point was.
[00:34:14]  And they looked like walkie-talkies.
[00:34:16]  They did.
[00:34:16]  They were cool.
[00:34:17]  I missed it.
[00:34:18]  But they came with a kind of an odd clip to put it on your belt that was strangely like it didn't hold it right to your side the way you would want it.
[00:34:31]  It was kind of stuck out from you a half an inch, and that made it more likely to catch on things, and it was just an odd design.
[00:34:36]  Turns out the reason for that design was that the manufacturers understood that the difference between it being pressed right against you and being a half an inch away was significant with respect to risks, and they were worried about liability.
[00:34:50]  There may have even been regulations that required a belt clip to look like that.
[00:34:53]  Of course, they don't tell you this when you buy a cell phone and you think you're going to put it in your pocket and you don't realize that the difference between a little bit away and in your pocket is significant.
[00:35:03]  But anyway, the point is, AirPods, similar radiation, but the proximity is so close, and the tissue to which it is close is also unique.
[00:35:16]  So you need it.
[00:35:18]  You're using it.
[00:35:19]  Not everybody's using it.
[00:35:21]  Using it a little bit.
[00:35:23]  You know, yeah, forget, I guess.
[00:35:26]  But, okay.
[00:35:27]  So what are we talking about when we say radiation?
[00:35:30]  Well, one thing that you should know, a key factor in this discussion, is that much of the comfort about the radiation emitted by things like cell phones and routers and stuff like that comes from the fact that the radiation is low energy.
[00:35:45]  It is non-ionizing.
[00:35:47]  And what that means is that there's not enough energy for it to knock the electrons off of the atoms and molecules that make you up.
[00:35:57]  that is reason for comfort if it was knocking that right there right there that's worth the price of admission Non-ionizing radiation means it's low enough energy that it can't knock electrons off.
[00:36:06]  That's just like, that's clarifying.
[00:36:07]  It's very clarifying.
[00:36:08]  And it is a reason for comfort.
[00:36:09]  Things would be way worse if we were talking about.
[00:36:11]  I didn't say comfort.
[00:36:12]  I just like, I think that putting those two things next to each other, non-ionizing radiation and low risk, are things that people will hear.
[00:36:21]  Like, what's non-ionizing?
[00:36:22]  The idea that it's low enough energy that it can't knock electrons off molecules is, you know, it's, it's a level of chemistry that most people, I think, can grok and then move forward in the world knowing something more about how to interpret claims made by others.
[00:36:38]  Right.
[00:36:38]  And I do take some comfort from it because if you start knocking electrons off, the point is it causes atoms to react with each other that wouldn't otherwise, right?
[00:36:48]  They try to balance the loss of the negative charge.
[00:36:51]  And one way they can do it is by forming a bond with another atom.
[00:36:54]  So you don't want radiation that is causing your atoms to seek each other in ways that they weren't doing before.
[00:37:00]  So it's a good thing that that's not there.
[00:37:02]  However, as they discuss extensively in this paper, there is evidence that there are harms of non-ionizing radiation, which is not always admitted by people.
[00:37:12]  Often people say it's non-ionizing.
[00:37:14]  Don't worry about it.
[00:37:14]  Sorry, not true.
[00:37:16]  There is evidence of harms.
[00:37:17]  Poorly understood.
[00:37:19]  In the paper, they discuss that the best explanation for the harm done by non-ionizing radiation is thermal.
[00:37:28]  That this radiation actually warms up your tissues.
[00:37:31]  And obviously, your tissues can handle a certain amount of that.
[00:37:34]  But if you warm a particular tissue enough times or to a high enough degree, that starts changing things.
[00:37:41]  Because even if it's not stripping electrons, what it is doing is it is, you know, it causes proteins to denature.
[00:37:48]  It can interrupt enzyme function so that it has a route to potentially disrupting your genes.
[00:37:56]  And, you know, we have a set body of temperature for a whole slew of reasons.
[00:38:03]  Mild fever can actually disrupt a lot of pathogenic pathways.
[00:38:07]  Why don't we all just walk around with mild fever all the time?
[00:38:10]  We don't walk around with mild fever all the time, in part because that increases the rate of reactions and increases the rate of tissue turnover and thus will increase the likelihood of tumors.
[00:38:22]  Yes, it can increase the rate of reactions.
[00:38:25]  I once foolishly stated in front of a chemistry colleague that I was teaching with at the time that increasing the temperature increases the rate of all reactions.
[00:38:34]  And she said, not so fast.
[00:38:36]  I was like, oh, boy.
[00:38:37]  She's like, enzymatic reaction.
[00:38:39]  It's like, yep, you're exactly right.
[00:38:41]  Why?
[00:38:42]  Because if you get enough increase in temperature that the natural conformation of the string of amino acids that makes up the enzyme becomes dislodged, if you introduce enough energy, two atoms that are supposed to be ionically attracted to each other, not covalently bonded, but ionically attracted, can become unattracted, which causes the enzyme to change shape.
[00:39:10]  And so what you get is the rate of reaction goes up until it starts going down.
[00:39:15]  So this is a pedantic response in light of the a mild fever.
[00:39:19]  A mild fever will increase the rate of reactions.
[00:39:23]  Well, actually.
[00:39:24]  Would anyone normal, would anyone who's thinking about it claim that you just increase temperature and all reactions increase in terms of their rate?
[00:39:32]  Of course not.
[00:39:33]  Well, I did claim it.
[00:39:34]  And, you know.
[00:39:35]  No, I basically don't believe it.
[00:39:38]  I wasn't thinking about enzymatic reactions at the time.
[00:39:41]  And it was obvious very quickly what she was talking about.
[00:39:44]  But in any case.
[00:39:45]  I mean, I know the colleague you're talking about.
[00:39:46]  She's good.
[00:39:47]  She's lovely.
[00:39:47]  She's love.
[00:39:48]  Lovely.
[00:39:48]  Wonderful person.
[00:39:50]  Paula, if you're out there.
[00:39:53]  But I wouldn't necessarily say that a mild fever doesn't have this potential.
[00:40:00]  Of disrupting enzymatic reactions.
[00:40:02]  Right.
[00:40:03]  In fact.
[00:40:03]  Given the very narrow tolerances at which human physiology operates, it is possible.
[00:40:10]  It is possible that part of the reason that you feel so cruddy is that the stuff that makes you work isn't working so well in the context of that fever.
[00:40:18]  But that's consistent, too, with the idea of if you are effectively giving yourself a highly localized, very low-grade fever over and over and over again in the same place, because most people who wear their phones on them put them in the same pocket all the time.
[00:40:32]  Yep.
[00:40:33]  Then you are effectively dosing yourself with temperature.
[00:40:36]  And oh, that doesn't sound non-ionizing radiation.
[00:40:39]  What could be the harm?
[00:40:40]  Well, you are messing with a very local part of your body repeatedly.
[00:40:46]  Yeah, you are.
[00:40:47]  And as you know from the discussion last week, you have a certain amount of capacity to repair damaged tissue, but it's not an infinite capacity.
[00:40:56]  So the point is you may be able to get away with that for a certain amount of time and not detect anything because you're doing some damage.
[00:41:03]  It gets repaired.
[00:41:04]  But the point is it's actually accelerating the aging of that particular part of you.
[00:41:09]  Okay.
[00:41:09]  So you got this large, I think very well constructed, complicated study of the effect of cell phone type radiation on the body.
[00:41:23]  And, well, what Zane in the thread is saying is actually it's weird.
[00:41:31]  But if you look at the data from this study, what it says is that actually contrary to the expectation that there's harm coming from this, you actually have both mice and rats living longer if they got the dose than the control animals who lived in the same compartments, just insulated from radiation.
[00:41:53]  So he's scratching his head and he invokes hormesis, which is a known phenomenon in which a little bit of a toxin actually paradoxically makes you healthier rather than sicker.
[00:42:04]  And hormesis is a real thing.
[00:42:06]  And it's the principle on which homeopathy is based, which seems to have some reality to it, despite what many of us have thought for a very long time.
[00:42:18]  But The hormetic, I think that would be the way you would say it, the hermetic effect, let me go back to something some of you will have heard me say before.

=== Sham Control Experiments (15:37) ===

[00:42:31]  I think we fear radiation too much and radioactive particles too little.
[00:42:37]  There's all the difference in the world between being exposed to radiation and ingesting a particle that is emitting radiation, right?
[00:42:46]  Particle that you take in, that lodges in your bone and it radiates the tissue immediately surrounding it is a huge freaking hazard.
[00:42:54]  And that's one of the reasons that we have to be very worried about things like nuclear meltdowns that release this stuff into the atmosphere and it gets dispersed and it gets bioconcentrated in the fish or whatever.
[00:43:06]  I don't think we are afraid enough of that.
[00:43:09]  But I think we spend too much time afraid of radiation in general.
[00:43:13]  The body's built to deal with radiation.
[00:43:15]  There's radiation in our world naturally.
[00:43:18]  Our ancestors experienced it, and we've got pretty good systems to deal with it.
[00:43:21]  But they don't anticipate the kind of technological emitters that you might put in your pocket.
[00:43:27]  I mean, your ancestors didn't have pockets.
[00:43:29]  So having an emitter in your pocket is abnormal, and it's going to irradiate the tissue right locally.
[00:43:38]  So in any case, good quality study here.
[00:43:42]  And what does it find?
[00:43:43]  So let's put up the longevity data.
[00:43:48]  Maybe put up the table first.
[00:43:54]  So I can barely read it.
[00:43:56]  So here's a table, and it's separated.
[00:43:58]  They've separated the male and female mice, which is good because they have different susceptibilities and things.
[00:44:06]  And this is the two-year.
[00:44:08]  So they did 28-day.
[00:44:09]  They had some populations they just looked at for 28 days and then for longer, which is better.
[00:44:14]  So you've pulled out the two-year.
[00:44:15]  Yeah.
[00:44:16]  And we're going to concentrate on the two-year ones because the effect is really seen there.
[00:44:21]  The 28-day ones, you don't really have longevity data because they sacrificed the animals to survey their tissues and basically they didn't have death.
[00:44:31]  They didn't have natural deaths, so there's no longevity difference.
[00:44:34]  So we're looking at the two-year studies.
[00:44:36]  In the first column, it says sham control.
[00:44:39]  What that means is they did everything they could think of to make the environment of the animals in the control group look identical from the point of view of the enclosures, the way the enclosures are put into the racks.
[00:44:55]  Everything about it is the same as for the treatment group.
[00:45:00]  I always wonder about this name for the group.
[00:45:03]  I mean, you're exactly right, but it sounds like it's not a real control.
[00:45:07]  What they mean, what it actually means is it's an excellent control.
[00:45:12]  It's like if vaccine manufacturers were actually comparing their products to true placebos, those would be true placebos rather than what they're actually doing, which is comparing them.
[00:45:21]  I think not placebos.
[00:45:22]  I think the term sham originates with sham surgeries.
[00:45:27]  So you can imagine if you are testing a surgical procedure to see whether it actually, let's say, increases.
[00:45:35]  But then it should be sham treatment.
[00:45:38]  This is just a semantic issue.
[00:45:39]  No, but it's just confusing.
[00:45:41]  It's an interesting one.
[00:45:43]  So if you're testing an arthroscopic surgery that addresses arthritis in the knee, you want a group that got the surgery and a group that didn't.
[00:45:54]  And then you want to see whether the functioning of their knee is any better or whether the pain is any reduced.
[00:45:59]  But if one group has a scar and the other one doesn't have a scar, then you've got a polluted experiment because the ones with the scar have a sense that they got an actual treatment and the ones that didn't get it may reason that there's no reason they should feel better.
[00:46:14]  So creating, this is actually done, creating a scar so that from the outside, you feel like you got a surgery, whether you did or not.
[00:46:22]  Is that's the sham surgery?
[00:46:24]  Is there was no arthroscopic?
[00:46:25]  This is a real control, though it's a sham treatment.
[00:46:27]  It's a sham treatment, exactly.
[00:46:28]  I agree.
[00:46:29]  The terminology is upside down, but anyway, that's what it means here is that the the left hand, the left column, both for males and females, is the group of mice that weren't messed with, except to mimic what all of their compatriot experienced.
[00:46:45]  Yeah, so what you see here focus on the males okay.
[00:46:51]  So, top half, you've got the sham control, which got no radiation at all, and their mean survival is 687 days.
[00:47:03]  And then you got the 2.5 I think it's watts per kilogram, something like that live for 715 days.
[00:47:14]  The 5 watts per kilogram, if that's what it is, for 706 days, and the 10 watts is 704 days.
[00:47:23]  So all of those numbers are greater than the animals that didn't get any radiation and in two of their cases, if I'm reading this correctly, these are statistically significant results.
[00:47:36]  One of them just the lowest dose yeah, oh yeah okay, so it's the 2.5.
[00:47:42]  So we've got a.
[00:47:46]  We've got an interesting paradox, which is they were looking for damage.
[00:47:52]  There is extensive discussion of the, the histology, the cellular dynamics in these animals, which is too uh too in the weeds to go into here.
[00:48:04]  But from the point of view of overall longevity, which is really the most important thing of all, is this good for me or bad for me?
[00:48:13]  Overall longevity is an integrative measure.
[00:48:15]  It means that the body worked for longer before death.
[00:48:20]  Okay, now do you want to show the chart uh, for males.
[00:48:28]  So here we're going to look at a graphical chart and Zane, in his thread, remakes these charts uh, using the raw data.
[00:48:38]  But anyway, here what you see.
[00:48:39]  This is a little hard to interpret, but what you've got this is a chart of male mice.
[00:48:46]  The probability of survival to a particular number of weeks is what's being measured.
[00:48:51]  So you've got the probability.
[00:48:53]  Stop it at two years, so 104 weeks yeah, so you've got the probability of survival on the y-axis and the x-axis is time.
[00:49:03]  So the point is, if you die before the study is over, you show up on this chart and you show up on one of these different lines based on whether you got no radiation because you were in the control group.
[00:49:15]  You got a little radiation, a little bit more radiation, a little bit more radiation and interestingly, all of the lines in which there's some radiation are above the line of the animals in the the control group.
[00:49:27]  Again, consistent, I mean because it's the same data, consistent with what you're just looking at, the control group, which is the dark boxes, and the two sets of mice that got the highest doses of radiation are pretty close to one another, although there's greater survivorship in the high dose, in the high dose radiation than the no-dose radiation group, but they're not apparently statistically significant if you trust their analysis.
[00:49:51]  Whereas the mice who got some but not very much radiation did have a significant survivor bias.
[00:49:58]  Right.
[00:49:58]  And if you think, well, that's just some kind of weird anomaly, the fact that it shows up in both males and females, in both mice and rats, begins to suggest that actually there's something real here.
[00:50:15]  Now, my claim is that I actually know what pattern we're looking at here because I've described it in another context.
[00:50:22]  I didn't think to describe it in this context, but it's so similar that you can't miss it.
[00:50:29]  Can I show the breeding protocols before you embark on it, or do you want to go there first?
[00:50:33]  I think I should lay out the prediction and why it exists.
[00:50:37]  So I've seen pattern where in my original paper, both the original paper, which we talked about last week, which was rejected by Nature, and then the revised version of it that was ultimately published in Experimental Gerontology in 2002.
[00:50:55]  In those cases, we were focused on the fact that drug safety testing utilizes mice that are known to have ultra-long telomeres, and that that, we argued, creates an alarming problem.
[00:51:17]  The problem is that, in fact, maybe, should we look at the abstract of that paper?
[00:51:22]  Yeah, Jen, you can show my screen if you can show my screen.
[00:51:27]  So this is your paper.
[00:51:29]  This is the ultimately published one in experimental gerontology, a couple years after the one that we discussed last week.
[00:51:38]  It's kind of a long abstract, but do you want to read it?
[00:51:40]  Sure.
[00:51:42]  Antagonistic pleiotropy.
[00:51:43]  The evolutionary theory of senescence posits that age-related somatic decline is the inevitable late-life byproduct of adaptations that increase fitness in early life.
[00:51:52]  That concept, coupled with recent findings in oncology and gerontology, provides the foundation for an integrative theory of vertebrate senescence that reconciles aspects of the accumulated damage, metabolic rate, and oxidative stress models.
[00:52:05]  We hypothesize, that's Brett and Debbie Seesak, your co-author, that one, in vertebrates, a telomeric fail-safe inhibits tumor formation by limiting cellular proliferation.
[00:52:15]  Two, the same system results in the progressive degradation of tissue function with age.
[00:52:20]  Three, these patterns are manifestations of an evolved antagonistic pleiotropy in which extrinsic causes of mortality favor a species optimal balance between tuber suppression and tissue repair.
[00:52:31]  Four, with that trade-off as a fundamental constraint, selection adjusts telomere lengths, longer telomeres increasing the capacity for repair, shorter telomeres increasing tumor resistance.
[00:52:44]  Five, in environments where extrinsically induced mortality is frequent, selection against senescence is comparatively weak as few individuals live long enough to suffer a substantial phenotypic decline.
[00:52:55]  The weaker the selection against senescence, the further the optimal balance points The weaker the selection against senescence, the further the optimal balance point moves towards shorter telomeres and increased tumor suppression.
[00:53:07]  The stronger the selection against senescence, the farther the optimal balance point moves towards longer telomeres, increasing the capacity for tissue repair, slowing senescence, and elevating tumor risks.
[00:53:19]  Six.
[00:53:20]  Sixth hypothesis of the paper.
[00:53:22]  In iteroparous organisms, that is organisms that tend to breed more than once in a lifetime, in iteroparous organisms, selection tends to coordinate rates of senescence between tissues such that no one organ generally limits lifespan.
[00:53:35]  A subsidiary hypothesis argues that senescent decline is the combined effect of one, uncompensated cellular attrition, and two, increasing histological entropy.
[00:53:45]  Entropy increases due to a loss of the intratissue positional information that normally regulates cell fate and function.
[00:53:50]  Informational loss is subject to positive feedback, producing the ever-accelerating pattern of senescence characteristic of iteroparis vertebrates.
[00:54:00]  Though telomere erosion begins early in development, the onset of senescence should, on average, be deferred to the species' typical age of first reproduction.
[00:54:08]  The balance point at which selection on this trade-off would allow exhaustion of replicative capacity to overtake some cell lines.
[00:54:15]  Okay.
[00:54:16]  Let me just summarize what's been said so far before you get to the part that's relevant here.
[00:54:20]  Yes.
[00:54:21]  What that says so far is we hypothesize, and now multiple predictions from this paper have turned out to be true, suggesting the hypotheses were correct.
[00:54:31]  We hypothesized that your tissues have limits on the amount of cellular reproduction, that that is a protection against the growth of tumors and cancer, that selection adjusts how much protection you have based on how likely you are to live a long life in an environment where things are very, very dangerous.
[00:54:51]  So let's say that you're a rodent in an environment with a lot of predation risk.
[00:54:57]  It doesn't make sense to give you the capacity to live a very long life because you're unlikely to live one.
[00:55:03]  So your cancer...
[00:55:03]  Given that that capacity will exert a cost elsewhere.
[00:55:07]  Right.
[00:55:07]  Right.
[00:55:07]  And the cost elsewhere is the risk of generating tumors.
[00:55:10]  So our point is that selection is constantly balancing these two risks based on your particular likelihood of living a long time or not in your habitat.
[00:55:19]  And so the punchline so far is the environment that you're in is adjusting that balance and therefore having powerful impacts on how quickly you're going to age and how likely you are to get tumors.
[00:55:34]  All right.
[00:55:35]  Good.
[00:55:35]  Okay.
[00:55:36]  So I just scrolled up to the top here so that we can see, again, this is the 2002 paper from Brett and WCSEC published in Experimental Gerontology, the Reserve Capacity Hypothesis.
[00:55:49]  The final part of the abstract.
[00:55:54]  It says, we observe.
[00:55:57]  Do you want to read it?
[00:55:58]  No.
[00:55:58]  No, no, I just want to get you back to the side.
[00:56:00]  I know where.
[00:56:01]  We observe that captive rodent breeding protocols designed to increase reproductive output simultaneously exert strong selection against reproductive senescence and virtually eliminate selection that would otherwise favor tumor suppression.
[00:56:13]  This appears to have greatly elongated the telomeres of laboratory mice.
[00:56:17]  With their telomeric fail-safe effectively disabled, these animals are unreliable models of normal senescence and tumor formation.
[00:56:24]  Safety tests employing these animals likely overestimate cancer risks and underestimate tissue damage and consequent accelerated senescence.
[00:56:33]  Okay, so the argument there is that in a captive rodent population, especially one that's being bred for profit, so that they're highly sensitive to how effective animals are at producing more animals, they want to produce the maximum number of mice per unit of mouse chow.
[00:56:53]  They have altered the environment in a way that eliminates selection to protect from cancer because the animals don't live long enough to die of it in the colonies.
[00:57:09]  So the value of being resistant to cancer drops at the same time that the animals are effectively in competition with each other for how much reproduction they can do.
[00:57:19]  So to the extent that they're built to fix any damage to their tissues really easily, they produce more offspring that then contribute to future generations in the population.
[00:57:31]  Okay, so in light of that, the pattern that I believe has emerged and that we should predict for future observations is if you give a mouse that came from one of these colonies where they have been bred so that their tumor resistance is non-existent and their tissue repair capacity is through the roof, that's the result of the breeding protocols.
[00:57:57]  If you do that, and then you give one of these animals a toxic insult, you give it some poison, you will paradoxically increase the length of its life.

=== NIH Mouse Breeding Limits (15:10) ===

[00:58:08]  If it doesn't kill the animal outright, you can give it a toxin that's so deadly that it won't survive it.
[00:58:12]  But if you give it something that's less deadly than that, it will tend to lengthen its life for the following weird reason.
[00:58:20]  The logic of chemotherapy, what they say in medical school when you study oncology, is that chemotherapy's purpose is to kill the tumor faster than you kill the patient.
[00:58:32]  Everybody understands that it's toxic to the body.
[00:58:34]  And the point is tumors are vulnerable more so than the regular parts of the body because they are constantly, the cells are constantly dividing.
[00:58:45]  And when a cell is divided and its DNA is separated, it's susceptible because if you do damage to one of the strands of DNA, the information to fix it isn't nearby.
[00:58:55]  It's a fragile moment because the error correction mode is offline.
[00:58:59]  Yeah, among other things.
[00:59:00]  So it's a fragile moment, which means that your tumors are more susceptible to being poisoned than you are.
[00:59:06]  And so the oncologist tries to poison your tumor at a higher rate that he poisons you.
[00:59:11]  And hopefully you survive to the tumor getting to zero and you're still alive.
[00:59:15]  That's the basic logic of chemotherapy.
[00:59:19]  If, therefore, you use these mice to test the safety of drugs, you are giving them toxins because all drugs are toxins.
[00:59:29]  And these animals, what they don't tell you in medical school or in science grad school is that they're all dying of tumors anyway.
[00:59:35]  Why?
[00:59:36]  Because the breeding protocols turned off their tumor suppression.
[00:59:39]  And we have no idea how many tumors we never find out about that started but that got arrested by the property that we described in that paper.
[00:59:51]  The point is tumors are starting all the time.
[00:59:54]  Cells go haywire.
[00:59:55]  They start reproducing.
[00:59:56]  They run into the limit on how much you can reproduce.
[00:59:59]  You never find out about them.
[01:00:00]  As I pointed out last time, every mole you have is one of these.
[01:00:03]  We now know that.
[01:00:04]  That was a prediction of this model.
[01:00:05]  We now know it to be true.
[01:00:07]  Moles are what we called prototumors.
[01:00:10]  They're cells that became unregulated and then stopped growing because they ran into their hayflick limit.
[01:00:16]  Okay, so this paper that reports a paradoxical increase in longevity in mice and rats who are exposed to radiation, I believe is detecting the very same thing, that the radiation is actually bad for you.
[01:00:36]  And that if you understood the mice and rats that they tested this on, you would understand that it should not comfort you that these animals lived longer.
[01:00:45]  It should alarm you because what it's saying is they've gotten a toxic dose that interrupted their tumors and increased their longevity because they died of cancer slower.
[01:00:57]  All right.
[01:00:58]  a lot of sleuthing goes into figuring out whether that's true you've done some sleuthing on a little I mean, it's hard to know.
[01:01:09]  The breeding protocols that you became intricately and intimately familiar with were coming out of the Jackson labs in May.
[01:01:17]  Jax Labs, colloquially known.
[01:01:21]  The mice that are, and I just went down the mice road.
[01:01:27]  I haven't thought explicitly about the rats in this particular research.
[01:01:30]  The mice that they were using in this paper were hybrid strains between two strains of lab-graded mice.
[01:01:39]  And this hybrid strain are not actually coming out of the JAX labs, but they're coming out of NIH labs, which are using protocols which are remarkably similar.
[01:01:47]  And so I don't know for sure, but I am directed to, and you can show my screen here, these protocols.
[01:01:53]  This is in a text 2018 called The Management of Animal Care and Use Programs in Research, Education, and Testing.
[01:02:02]  Second edition, Chapter 29, Management of Research Animal Breeding Colonies.
[01:02:09]  So, and this is just, this is potentially generic, but I think this is a match for what the NIH labs are doing, which is where these mice that are used in this study are coming out of.
[01:02:23]  And they're just general information about mice.
[01:02:25]  So this is their imagining, these are wild-type mice, is what we're hearing about now.
[01:02:31]  Number of chromosomes, 20.
[01:02:33]  Gestational length, 18 to 21 days.
[01:02:35]  Birth rate, litter size, wean age, sexual maturity, 28 to 60 days.
[01:02:40]  They breed fast.
[01:02:42]  Adult weight, doesn't matter, estrocycle.
[01:02:44]  Reproductive lifespan for females, 6 to 12 months.
[01:02:48]  Reproductive lifespan for male, 12 to 14 months.
[01:02:51]  Lifespan, 1.5 to 3 years.
[01:02:53]  That throws an error for me right there.
[01:02:55]  That doesn't make any sense.
[01:02:56]  Yeah.
[01:02:56]  Right.
[01:02:57]  Because menopause, which we know from humans and actually from orcas and or from elephants and a little, there's some weird stuff going on with orcas, but really from no other mammals at all, is a termination of reproductive capacity in females before average expected age of death.
[01:03:20]  And these numbers don't match that.
[01:03:22]  These numbers would suggest that you've got menopause in mice.
[01:03:24]  Right.
[01:03:25]  Which you don't.
[01:03:25]  You don't.
[01:03:26]  And if you did, it would force us to rethink everything we know about menopause because the tiny number of species in which we see it have the same characteristic, which is that they have important culture to pass on.
[01:03:40]  They have grandmother work to do.
[01:03:42]  They have grandmother work to do, exactly.
[01:03:43]  Exactly right.
[01:03:44]  And so that's not true in mice.
[01:03:46]  And we know from lots of different things that what they're not saying here is that the end of their reproductive life is because the protocol for breeding them specifies that that be the end for very explicit reasons, which I will show you in a second.
[01:04:00]  Right.
[01:04:01]  Okay, so I already question these data about supposedly wild mice because they just, they don't match from what must be true.
[01:04:11]  But then with regard to optimizing breeding performance, I made it a little bit too big here.
[01:04:16]  They recommend, and again, this is, I think, the protocols going into the NIH breeding colonies, which are the source of the mice being used in the paper that we've been talking about, replacements.
[01:04:25]  Maintain breeder units of various ages by replacing a percentage of them monthly or weekly.
[01:04:30]  A colony of mixed-age breeders produces a more consistent number of pups, so does a colony of even-age breeders.
[01:04:35]  Okay.
[01:04:35]  Good.
[01:04:36]  That's interesting.
[01:04:36]  Yep.
[01:04:37]  NP breeders.
[01:04:38]  As a general rule, replace breeders that do not produce, that's going to be non-productive, I guess.
[01:04:44]  As a general rule, replace breeders that do not produce litters within 90 days of their birth date, if it has been 60 days since the last litter, or if they produce two or three consecutive litters that do not wean any pups.
[01:04:54]  So subfertile individuals get wiped and are not in the breeding pool.
[01:05:00]  Most important for our purposes in this discussion here, use young mice.
[01:05:05]  Mate mice that are six to eight weeks of age.
[01:05:08]  Pairing young females with older males may also improve breeding.
[01:05:12]  Six to eight weeks.
[01:05:15]  And they say the lifespan, if they're not calling, which of course they will, is one and a half to three years.
[01:05:22]  That's going to be, you know, whatever, 75 to 150 weeks.
[01:05:28]  And they're breeding them early and they're culling them early.
[01:05:32]  And that is exactly the breeding protocol that you and Debbie were referring to in Life Slow Fuse, your hypothesis.
[01:05:39]  Your paper that was published as Hypothesis, but was actually a slew of very careful hypotheses with predictions.
[01:05:47]  Yep.
[01:05:48]  All right.
[01:05:48]  So let's look at what the JAX lab has to say because it's interesting too.
[01:05:51]  So the JAX lab is the big source for mice.
[01:05:55]  And I don't know if these subsidiary labs are originally JAX derived or not.
[01:06:03]  But nonetheless, the breeding protocols appear to be synchronized across these populations.
[01:06:09]  So let's look at the two pages from the JAX lab.
[01:06:14]  Okay.
[01:06:14]  So this is just an informational page intended for people working with lab mice ordered from the JAX lab so that they will know how to think about patterns that they're seeing and how to treat their animals for best success.
[01:06:34]  In fact, one of the pages is like how to manage, you know, is your mouse colony draining your resources?
[01:06:43]  Here's how to manage it.
[01:06:44]  But in any case, do you want to read this?
[01:06:47]  Sure.
[01:06:47]  So again, JAX Lab, retirement age for breeder mice.
[01:06:51]  This is up now.
[01:06:51]  This is a contemporary web page?
[01:06:54]  Yes, it's current, live.
[01:06:55]  After their litters are weaned, breeder mice may have...
[01:06:57]  Oh, excuse me.
[01:06:59]  After their litters are weaned, breeder mice that have reached specified ages are removed from the breeding colonies at the Jackson Laboratory.
[01:07:05]  These breeder mice are known as retired breeders.
[01:07:07]  Retirement age is the age at which reproductive performance declines below acceptable levels.
[01:07:12]  This age varies among inbred strains.
[01:07:14]  Mice from inbred strains that develop tumors at an early age have relatively young retirement ages.
[01:07:19]  For example, AKR slash J mice are retired at six months of age because many of these mice develop lymphocytic leukemia by eight to nine months of age.
[01:07:27]  MRL slash MPJ LPR mice retire at four months of age because these mice develop massive lymph node enlargement.
[01:07:34]  The lymphoproliporative disease that is characteristic of these mice begins around eight weeks of age and by four months of age interferes with the well-being of the mouse.
[01:07:42]  Holy cow.
[01:07:43]  Yes.
[01:07:44]  Most MRL slash MPJ LPR mice die between 17 and 22 weeks of age.
[01:07:51]  So that is half a year, less than half a year, whereas wild-type mice are living at least a year and a half on average, if not more.
[01:08:01]  You want me to keep going?
[01:08:01]  Yeah, well, I would just want to point out a couple of things here.
[01:08:04]  One, just the simple fact, which is, you know, one of the things that Carol Grider told me in our very first conversation when I called her up out of the blue and just started to ask her about my hypothesis and how it might fit with things was all mice die of cancer.
[01:08:21]  That is already telling you that these are not well constructed animals.
[01:08:27]  This is not a wild animal.
[01:08:29]  That's not true if you go.
[01:08:30]  There is not a species in existence for which all of them die of cancer.
[01:08:34]  That's not how selection works.
[01:08:35]  And why would there be, right?
[01:08:37]  Especially an animal that has telomeres that are five to ten times as long as humans.
[01:08:44]  You could dial that back and get a lot of cancer protection.
[01:08:48]  These animals are all dying of cancer.
[01:08:49]  So the irony here is that the short lives of mice aren't inherently this short.
[01:08:56]  That these animals are dying early from cancer, but late enough that it doesn't show up in the breeding colony.
[01:09:03]  So the point is.
[01:09:04]  Well, except it apparently even does.
[01:09:06]  Well.
[01:09:06]  Well, we've pushed it so far that you begin to have these effects.
[01:09:11]  But the basic point is an animal that could live four years is living a maximum of two years because it's being overrun by tumors.
[01:09:17]  That's insane.
[01:09:19]  And the idea that we're using them as our healthy specimens in which to test our new drugs.
[01:09:25]  Right.
[01:09:25]  Right.
[01:09:26]  It's madness.
[01:09:27]  And to test the possible toxicity of cell phone radiation.
[01:09:31]  Non-ionizing, it must be safe.
[01:09:33]  Right.
[01:09:34]  Think again.
[01:09:34]  This is madness.
[01:09:35]  And, you know, why are we using these animals?
[01:09:39]  Well, they do have one advantage.
[01:09:41]  The inbreeding, and they're literally breeding brothers with sisters.
[01:09:44]  So this is like the highest level of inbreeding you could get.
[01:09:46]  Yep.
[01:09:47]  Creates a uniform genetic background.
[01:09:49]  So why does that matter?
[01:09:51]  Well, because if the mice varied genetically the way wild mice would, it would introduce some noise to your experiment.
[01:09:57]  The way humans do.
[01:09:59]  Right, of course.
[01:10:01]  But here's the point.
[01:10:02]  You are obsessed with doing away with genetic noise.
[01:10:07]  Genetic noise is bad for an experiment.
[01:10:08]  It makes it harder to understand what you're seeing because you could get patterns just by random.
[01:10:13]  You could group mice that have a greater propensity for this or a lower propensity for that.
[01:10:18]  So yeah, noise is bad, all else being equal.
[01:10:20]  But all else isn't equal.
[01:10:21]  The obsession with getting rid of that noise has resulted in mice that don't have noise.
[01:10:28]  What they have is a radically distorted signal that misleads us scientifically.
[01:10:35]  In fact, in scientific circles, they say something like monkeys mislead mice lie.
[01:10:46]  What does mice lie mean?
[01:10:48]  So it means that they exactly mislead you in the wrong direction.
[01:10:50]  Here's one of the reasons.
[01:10:52]  Okay, so you want to go back to reading that Jackslab piece?
[01:11:01]  Mice from other frequently used inbred strains retire from breeding colonies at seven or eight months of age.
[01:11:08]  Inbred mice from one strain that are made to inbred mice of a second inbred strain tend to have a longer period of efficient reproductive performance.
[01:11:15]  No, duh.
[01:11:16]  Than inbred mice pay it to other mice of the same strain.
[01:11:18]  That's because they have outbred them.
[01:11:21]  I'm sorry, this is sorry to read.
[01:11:24]  Mice used in hybrid matings retire between 8 and 11 months of age.
[01:11:28]  Okay, now let's go to the other informational page that I just found this morning at the Jack's lab.
[01:11:35]  So before I start reading from, as Jen is finding that, I understand why, especially for lab scientists, you want to control as much as possible.
[01:11:45]  This is one of the fundamental differences between field science and lab science, actually.
[01:11:49]  And I think one of the things I'm developing in my head is that actually the mistake that most of the modern world is making, people who think of themselves as scientists and not with regard to what science is, is a misunderstanding of science as the highly controlled reductionist environment of lab science.
[01:12:11]  So I do understand that you would prefer to be able to control everything.
[01:12:16]  However, if what you're fundamentally doing is biology and you're not working on asexual organisms, the idea that you have an invariant gene pool in your population is insane.
[01:12:29]  It is so unlike what the circumstances would be that I can't actually figure out the justification beyond an economic and an efficiency one.
[01:12:40]  Well, the irony here is that you don't actually have to create this problem with the telomeres in order to get the uniform genetic background.
[01:12:53]  So I agree with you.
[01:12:55]  I think there's two different problems.
[01:12:57]  We're focused on the telomere one here, and it's huge.
[01:13:01]  But imagine back when the Human Genome Project was in full swing, we're like, oh, we're going to get it.
[01:13:08]  We're going to have the human genome.
[01:13:10]  And everyone who knew anything about anything is like, well, we're going to have the genome of one person.
[01:13:15]  It's going to be one guy.
[01:13:17]  One guy.
[01:13:17]  That's cool.

=== Genome Project Confusion (14:11) ===

[01:13:18]  That's awesome.
[01:13:19]  But it's one guy.
[01:13:21]  We don't have the genome for humanity.
[01:13:25]  Right.
[01:13:26]  We don't, we're nowhere close.
[01:13:28]  We don't know what all of the allelic variations are across any of the genes, I think, probably.
[01:13:34]  Well.
[01:13:34]  Right.
[01:13:35]  So, you know, the idea that the one, like, what if.
[01:13:39]  Everything that was decided about what is healthy for humans in which genetic testing could be done was based on that one guy that the Human Genome Project managed to map.
[01:13:49]  We'd be screwed.
[01:13:51]  Yes.
[01:13:51]  That certainly a problem was a problem to begin with.
[01:13:54]  Although I will say, where did I read last week that full genome sequence is now down below 100 bucks?
[01:14:01]  So, you know, the point.
[01:14:03]  We got there fairly fast.
[01:14:04]  We got there fast.
[01:14:06]  But the irony is the answer isn't in the genome.
[01:14:10]  Although, hold up.
[01:14:11]  In recent years, full genome sequence still didn't mean full genome sequence.
[01:14:15]  It meant introns.
[01:14:17]  Exons.
[01:14:17]  Sorry, it meant exons.
[01:14:18]  Yes.
[01:14:19]  So yeah.
[01:14:21]  And, you know, as the discussion I did with Joe Rogan about this other part of the genome that isn't written in the same language and may in fact be a massive power increaser in terms of the power of natural selection, the point is there's a lot about the genome we don't understand.
[01:14:39]  And the fact of having the raw transcript of the gene, the protein coding sequences just isn't as useful as you'd think because selection is so good that you wouldn't expect there to be, you know, we do have single gene errors that cause pathologies, but those are pretty rare because selection gets rid of them.
[01:15:05]  And so the point is the pathologies that we were promised would be fixed when we finally had this transcript just weren't because that was not the cause of disease.
[01:15:14]  So anyway, there's a lot down that road.
[01:15:17]  But the irony of the elongated telomeres.
[01:15:24]  Carol Grider, back when this was a live issue, tested the hypothesis, not mine, mind you.
[01:15:32]  It was one that was on the table, that the elongation of the telomeres was the result of inbreeding itself.
[01:15:39]  In other words, inbreeding causes lots of harm, and maybe this is one of the harms.
[01:15:43]  She showed that it wasn't, leaving my hypothesis for what it was as the only hypothesis standing, and it's never been addressed.
[01:15:52]  But one of the consequences of my hypothesis is if uniform genetic background is what you're after, and maybe it shouldn't be, but we all understand why it's good, all else being equal, you don't want genetic noise misleading you.
[01:16:06]  You can get that without elongating the telomeres.
[01:16:09]  There are lots of ways to do that, right?
[01:16:11]  You could monitor telomere lengths, and you could breed animals that have a telomere length shorter or longer than the average in your colony in order to push it one way or the other.
[01:16:21]  I noticed actually in one of the things that you put up there that males and females are bred for different lengths of time.
[01:16:29]  Hmm, what's that about?
[01:16:31]  Well, one of the interesting facts that I ran across in my original research was that telomere lengths in males go in the reproductive cells of males go up the older the male is.
[01:16:47]  Why would that be?
[01:16:49]  Because you remember a few minutes ago, we were talking about the fact that if you live in an environment that's very, very dangerous, it doesn't make sense to give you a lot of longevity because you're not going to be able to profit from it.
[01:17:02]  So it's better to protect you from cancer when you're young than it is to make you have a capacity for a long life.
[01:17:07]  Well, what if the environment is safe enough that you might well profit from a very long life?
[01:17:12]  How is selection going to discover that and alter your telomeres?
[01:17:15]  Well, the older a male is when he breeds, the longer the telomeres are in the sperm that he passes on his genes with.
[01:17:21]  And so the point is that's a mechanism whereby selection in one generation can make an alteration in the right direction.
[01:17:28]  That's an amazing discovery.
[01:17:30]  So anyway, there's lots going on here, but you could push the telomeres around either through monitoring and pushing them intentionally in the direction of whatever's best for a study animal.
[01:17:42]  You could make animals that were cancer prone at some useful level or cancer resistant at some useful level that you could run an experiment.
[01:17:51]  If you were trying to understand the tumor dynamics, maybe you want some prone to cancer mice and some resistant to cancer mice and some normal mice.
[01:17:59]  You want to run three of these experiments in tandem.
[01:18:01]  That's perfectly foreseeable.
[01:18:03]  You could also stop throwing out the older mice.
[01:18:07]  It's economically more efficient to breed younger animals, but if it produces better test subjects, you could allow them to have slower breeding and have their telomeres correct.
[01:18:19]  There's all sorts of things you can do.
[01:18:20]  In fact, I tried to patent these methods.
[01:18:22]  It went through the process, got to the point where we had satisfied all of the complaints of the examiner.
[01:18:29]  We were right there.
[01:18:31]  They swapped out the examiner, all the complaints were restored, and it was like, this is pointless.
[01:18:35]  So we walked away.
[01:18:37]  But anyway, there's lots of things.
[01:18:38]  That was fun.
[01:18:41]  The whole story is madness.
[01:18:43]  But, okay.
[01:18:44]  You want to read the other Jax lab page?
[01:18:48]  So check this one out.
[01:18:49]  I am about to.
[01:18:50]  Yes, you are.
[01:18:51]  Telomere length in animals is not significantly affected by inbreeding and domestication.
[01:18:57]  So that's going to be citing without citing the result that the Greider lab did.
[01:19:02]  It varies across strains and substrains of mice, as does lifespan, and there is no direct correlation between telomere length and longevity within a population.
[01:19:10]  The telomere conundrum.
[01:19:12]  The use of mice as a model for human biology, as a stand-in for ourselves, began more than a century ago.
[01:19:18]  Since that time, and for more than 90 years at the Jackson Laboratory, JAX, countless discoveries in mice have taught us about mammalian genetics, cancer, immunology, reproductive biology, neuroscience, and much more.
[01:19:28]  Nonetheless, there have been questions about how well discoveries made in mice actually translate to human clinical care.
[01:19:34]  recently conflicting data about the biology of telomeres the specialized structures at the ends of chromosomes so recently conflicting data about the biology of telomeres the specialized structures at the ends of chromosomes has led to an assumption that puts into you know what they need there is an m-dash Two of them, actually.
[01:19:50]  They should consult the AI.
[01:19:51]  Yeah, I think it gives those things out like candy.
[01:19:53]  Okay, I'm going to start.
[01:19:54]  I'm going to read the sentence again.
[01:19:55]  Recently, conflicting data about the biology of telomeres, the specialized structures at the ends of chromosomes, has led to an assumption that puts into question the usefulness of mice for preclinical discovery and therapy development.
[01:20:06]  The problem is the assumption is wrong.
[01:20:09]  Why are telomeres important?
[01:20:11]  Telomeres are needed for cell division, and because they shorten with each cell division, over time cells become unable to divide.
[01:20:17]  This has obvious implications for aging as well as for cancer, because cancer cells overcome the limitations of their telomeres and just keep dividing.
[01:20:24]  If mouse telomeres have significantly different properties from human telomeres, that would certainly affect findings from aging and cancer research in mice.
[01:20:32]  Just keep going?
[01:20:33]  Yeah.
[01:20:33]  Okay.
[01:20:35]  What do people assume about mouse telomeres?
[01:20:38]  Carol Grider, who won the Nobel Prize for discovering and characterizing telomeres, observed more than 20 years ago that telomeres in some inbred mouse strains are significantly longer than they are in some wild species.
[01:20:48]  Okay.
[01:20:49]  Yeah, she did.
[01:20:50]  Testing my hypothesis, which they don't say anything about.
[01:20:54]  Go ahead.
[01:20:55]  The data indicated that telomere length isn't a major factor in determining how long the mice live.
[01:21:00]  But some researchers inferred that inbred laboratory strains, because of their controlled breeding regimens and other factors, had developed longer telomeres over time.
[01:21:09]  If true, that inference had the potential to skew cancer and aging research data and the quality of the drugs and therapies ultimately produced based on mass experiments.
[01:21:16]  Okay, so the other researchers is at least an oblique reference to me.
[01:21:21]  I'm saying it's me alone, but they know that this question circulates, and so they're trying to address it and dispel it.
[01:21:29]  Yep.
[01:21:30]  How do you know the assumptions are wrong?
[01:21:32]  Jax Lab continues.
[01:21:34]  Further inquiry at JAX and its efforts to fully characterize the mice it uses in its own research and distributes to the global biomedical community.
[01:21:40]  Wait, they do their own research, too?
[01:21:43]  They actually have a guy who specializes in telomeres.
[01:21:45]  Yeah, they have a research wing.
[01:21:47]  Okay.
[01:21:48]  Further inquiry at JAX has revealed that telomere length varies between mouse species and subspecies.
[01:21:53]  Length is not determined by whether a mouse is inbred or wild-derived.
[01:21:56]  See, that's Carol's proof.
[01:21:59]  Maybe there have been others, but inbred is not the key.
[01:22:03]  Yeah, okay, got it.
[01:22:05]  And it is not a, but you could totally read that if you didn't, if you weren't paying close attention, that can sound like lab mice look the same as wild-type mice.
[01:22:17]  It is, I believe, intentionally obscuring of reality.
[01:22:23]  Length is not determined by whether a mouse is inbred or wild-derived, and it is not affected by how long an inbred strain has been domesticated.
[01:22:30]  Indeed, various wild-derived mice have telomeres that are shorter or longer on average than those of C57BL slash 6J, one of the original inbred mouse strains.
[01:22:41]  And as Greider hypothesized 20 years ago, telomere length does not predict lifespan.
[01:22:45]  Okay, so we can stop there.
[01:22:48]  So this is all confused, right?
[01:22:51]  Telomere length does not predict lifespan because it's having a paradoxical effect here.
[01:22:55]  The telomeres are so long that the animals aren't dying from a failure to repair their bodies, as we discussed last week.
[01:23:02]  Actually, their tissues look young even when they're old, unlike human tissues and other animals, because they have a capacity to repair their tissues.
[01:23:10]  What they're dying of is cancer, which they start getting in use as a result of this madness with the breeding protocols.
[01:23:17]  And it's hard to compare across species with such wildly different lifespans, but their tissues continuing to look young when they're old are still new tissues in comparison to what mammal tissues can be.
[01:23:29]  Right, exactly.
[01:23:31]  So anyway, I think the whole thing is just so fascinating.
[01:23:35]  And I will remind people, when I did this work back in 98, 99, I thought that the result was going to be profound embarrassment, ass covering.
[01:23:53]  I was not expecting this to be well metabolized by the scientific community.
[01:23:59]  But I did not imagine that they were going to just stare it down and keep doing what they do.
[01:24:05]  I did not imagine that they could possibly fail to fix the problem because the problem compounds itself.
[01:24:14]  When you start building a literature based on mice that are broken in a very systematic way, that literature starts informing future experiments.
[01:24:22]  And so the point is you build a house of cards, and no reasonable scientist could want a house of cards.
[01:24:29]  They should want to actually fix, just if you, it's like if you had a broken apparatus that kept giving you skewed results, you would want to fix it because you're hollowing out your own, you know, source of well-being.
[01:24:43]  You want to be able to predict things that are true and relevant to humans.
[01:24:46]  You don't want a mouse that lies to you.
[01:24:49]  So anyway, I did not think that they would simply stare this down.
[01:24:52]  And yet here we are, more than 20 years later.
[01:24:56]  Yep.
[01:24:56]  And they're staring it down.
[01:24:58]  And it just, I don't get it.
[01:25:01]  I don't get it.
[01:25:02]  But that's where we are.
[01:25:04]  But the upshot is, which you did mention in the middle of all of this, is that the expectation is that the non-ionizing radiation being, that is being, that the rats and mice in the study are being exposed to is acting the same way that toxins in drugs are acting in other studies and that we can see as evidence in the recall of drugs from Fenfen to, I can't remember all the drugs that have been pulled.
[01:25:33]  Seldane.
[01:25:34]  Seldane.
[01:25:36]  Viox.
[01:25:37]  And presumably many more warrants being pulled.
[01:25:40]  Absolutely.
[01:25:41]  And it just takes forever to find out how much damage they do to people.
[01:25:44]  But the point is the mice lied to us in the first place, which I didn't think pharma knew at the beginning, but they figured it out pretty quickly.
[01:25:50]  And now they have an incentive to preserve it, which might be why the system is staring this down, because there's a huge, there's a couple of financial incentives for maintaining this.
[01:26:00]  One, pharma.
[01:26:02]  And the business model doesn't benefit when humanity gets healthier.
[01:26:05]  It doesn't benefit when humanity gets healthier, and it certainly does benefit by mice that lie and say whatever you think is toxic isn't, right?
[01:26:13]  That means you can bring a lot of stuff to market that would never get there otherwise.
[01:26:17]  And as I've said before, the federal government after Viox did a 300-page report on the future of drug safety.
[01:26:27]  You can find it online.
[01:26:28]  You can search it online.
[01:26:30]  You will not find mice mentioned.
[01:26:33]  You will not find the genus Mus mentioned.
[01:26:35]  And you will not find telomeres mentioned.
[01:26:37]  So they're trying to explain what happened during Viox.
[01:26:41]  They do not touch this issue.
[01:26:43]  They get nowhere near it, which I tried to alert them to, and they blew me off.
[01:26:49]  But anyway, from your perspective, how good are your AirPods for you?
[01:26:54]  The answer is that depends if you're a mouse that was bred in one of these idiotic protocols.
[01:27:00]  If you are a mouse, you probably want AirPods, maybe more than one set.
[01:27:05]  If you're not a mouse, then this is an indicator that it's actually dangerous.
[01:27:10]  The fact that the mice live longer is not good news.
[01:27:13]  It's bad news because a toxin that you will not tolerate well will function like chemotherapy, or in this case, like radiation therapy does on a cancer patient.
[01:27:27]  Fantastic.

=== Sexual Orientation Debate (11:52) ===

[01:27:30]  Man, it just gets weirder.
[01:27:32]  Yeah, it does just get weirder.
[01:27:34]  So, okay, we're going to talk a bit about the Ninth Circuit here.
[01:27:38]  We're going to save sharks for next time.
[01:27:40]  I know you're relieved.
[01:27:42]  Okay, yeah.
[01:27:42]  Fair enough.
[01:27:44]  So.
[01:27:44]  Is the Ninth Circuit composed of judges who are below average in height?
[01:27:54]  It would be cool if we could call them the short circuit.
[01:27:56]  I just think that would be all right.
[01:27:58]  Yeah.
[01:27:58]  Well, I mean, we got some live ones there.
[01:28:01]  Okay.
[01:28:03]  Okay, so we have talked before, I think, about this Korean women's spa, which there are two branches in Washington State where we live, both one north of Seattle, one south of Seattle.
[01:28:17]  It is a traditional Korean spa where most of it is a series of baths of different temperatures, and there's a dry sauna and a steam sauna.
[01:28:30]  And then there are services you can get like a traditional Korean body scrub.
[01:28:34]  And there are showers, both sort of Western standing showers and more traditional seated showers.
[01:28:40]  And then there's another part of the spa where you are not expected to be naked where you wear a robe.
[01:28:46]  And those are where the infrared sauna rooms are.
[01:28:49]  But in everything in the first part that I was just, I was describing, you are required to be naked.
[01:28:54]  That is traditional.
[01:28:56]  And it is women only.
[01:28:58]  A few years back, a dude who decided that he got off on having the world view him as female tried to gain access to the spa.
[01:29:07]  And the not just Korean, but conservative Christian Korean owners of the spa said, sorry, sir, no, no penises allowed.
[01:29:17]  I believe it's penai.
[01:29:20]  I think it's peens, actually.
[01:29:23]  If what's going on in squa mates is any indication.
[01:29:27]  Well, and hammers where it's ball peens.
[01:29:29]  So those things travel together.
[01:29:31]  I think that's a different peen.
[01:29:36]  I think it is a different peen.
[01:29:37]  Lizards have hemipenes.
[01:29:39]  Right.
[01:29:40]  Right.
[01:29:40]  And every time I talk about hemipenes, someone is like, it's peenies.
[01:29:46]  Like, you know what?
[01:29:47]  Frickin' herpetologist.
[01:29:49]  I'm not saying that all of us aren't pronouncing it wrong, but in herpetology, where we study these things, we call them hemipenes.
[01:29:55]  Hemipens.
[01:29:57]  I'm going to go with penises for now.
[01:30:02]  What did you correct?
[01:30:03]  Peenai.
[01:30:04]  Peeni.
[01:30:04]  Obviously.
[01:30:05]  Penix, perhaps.
[01:30:07]  Okay, so Dude Walks In, tries to get access to the traditional Korean women's spa, a spa that I have been to both places many, many times.
[01:30:17]  It's wonderful.
[01:30:20]  And when this was first beginning to get public attention, actually, I tweeted about it.
[01:30:26]  So I wanted to start there.
[01:30:29]  If you can see my screen here.
[01:30:30]  So back in, this is November of 2024, I think, I was quote tweeting a Katie Davis court tweet saying, she was saying, I'm maybe mispronouncing people's names.
[01:30:42]  Judge Margaret McCown, appointed by Bill Clinton, pushed back on Snyder and argued a business cannot discriminate based on gender identity.
[01:30:49]  She said, it's not biological women.
[01:30:53]  Oh my God.
[01:30:54]  It's not biological women are welcome, she said.
[01:30:57]  This is just, this is confusing.
[01:30:58]  So I'm going to go back.
[01:31:00]  This is talking about this judge is saying, no, that dude who claims is a woman has to be allowed because he's actually a woman.
[01:31:11]  The confusion is they call themselves trans women, therefore they're women.
[01:31:16]  So I said, Olympus Spa, a fantastic Korean female-only nude spa with two locations near Seattle, was told in 2022 that it needed to stop being so bigoted and just let in dudes who were pretending to be women.
[01:31:26]  The fight continues.
[01:31:27]  If this judge gets her way, Olympus Spa will surely fail.
[01:31:30]  I won't be going back if naked cosplaying men are there.
[01:31:32]  Who wins then?
[01:31:33]  Only the delusional and the predatory.
[01:31:35]  The rest of us lose.
[01:31:37]  Someone responded to me and said, I like Koreans and I like nude women.
[01:31:42]  Tell me more about this gender ID thing, LOL.
[01:31:45]  Yep, it's going to fail.
[01:31:47]  And I said, yep, this is exactly it, isn't it?
[01:31:50]  Straight men like naked women.
[01:31:52]  The idea of an all-women nude spa is therefore of interest to straight men.
[01:31:55]  Add a strong dose of depravity with a dash of cult behavior and you've got a perfect storm.
[01:32:00]  The all-women nude spa has to go because its existence isn't fair to depraved men.
[01:32:06]  And my original interlocutor said, the depravity barrier would mean you would only get depraved or inebriated men showing up.
[01:32:12]  It would be a horrible experience.
[01:32:14]  This is exactly right.
[01:32:15]  So what has happened now is March 12th, a few days, almost a week ago, we had the Ninth Circuit of Appeals finally bring down a decision on this matter.
[01:32:30]  And wouldn't you know it, they sided with the dude.
[01:32:35]  So I'm just going to share a few things.
[01:32:36]  I've got a number of bookmarks here.
[01:32:39]  This is in the decision, siding with the dude.
[01:32:43]  They say, among other things, that the HRC, which is the Washington's Human Rights Commission, which is who is actually bringing this case on behalf of the dude who's declared that he's a woman, the HRC alleged the entrance policy violated WLAD, a state public accommodations law that prohibits public facilities from discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation.
[01:33:05]  Under Washington law, sexual orientation is defined to include, quote, heterosexuality, homosexuality, bisexuality, and gender expression or identity.
[01:33:17]  So that was news to me.
[01:33:19]  A, because that would seem to be Washington state conflating all people who are claiming they are trans with, ooh, autogynophiles.
[01:33:27]  Because autogynophiles, you know, men who walk around like getting off on the idea that they are perceived as women, that is a kind of a sexual orientation.
[01:33:37]  That is a kink, right?
[01:33:39]  But the vast majority of people who are pulling this are claiming it's not that.
[01:33:45]  It has nothing to do with sexual orientation.
[01:33:47]  But Washington state law says it does.
[01:33:50]  And that is the basis on which the judges said, yeah, you got to let the dude in because this is his sexual orientation that you are acting against.
[01:34:00]  So it's so twisted.
[01:34:02]  It is so.
[01:34:03]  Effectively, the logic is you couldn't prevent lesbians from going to the spa.
[01:34:07]  Good.
[01:34:07]  You shouldn't be able to.
[01:34:09]  But because you can't prevent lesbians, you can't keep a straight man out as long as he pretends to be a woman and therefore a lesbian or something like that.
[01:34:16]  Yeah.
[01:34:17]  Wow.
[01:34:17]  Yep.
[01:34:18]  Okay.
[01:34:18]  So next one we have in the same case that just got released.
[01:34:24]  We turn to this, and this is still the majority opinion.
[01:34:28]  We turn to the spa's final First Amendment claim that the HRC's enforcement of WLAD interferes with both the intimate and expressive association between women at the spa.
[01:34:38]  The Constitution protects the freedom of association as, quote, a fundamental element of personal liberty and quote, an indispensable means of preserving other individual liberties.
[01:34:47]  That right protects both intimate association, that is, the choices to enter into and maintain certain intimate human relationships, and expressive association, which is, quote, a right to associate for the purpose of engaging in those activities protected by the First Amendment, speech, assembly, petition for the redress of grievances, and the exercise of religion.
[01:35:04]  These are fundamental and important rights, but none of them are implicated here.
[01:35:08]  To begin, the spa is not an intimate association.
[01:35:11]  The bottom line is that payment of the entrance fee is the price of admission.
[01:35:15]  And any woman, except a transgender woman who has not yet received gender confirmation surgery affecting her genitalia, who can pay the fee can be admitted.
[01:35:25]  So this is them just being confused about what a woman is.
[01:35:28]  Again, all the activists had to do was start getting the majority of us for a very long time to say, okay, I guess I'll call you a trans woman, even though you're a man.
[01:35:40]  And suddenly a whole bunch of people are very confused, apparently, or pretending to be confused about that making them somehow magically transforming them into women, which of course it doesn't.
[01:35:50]  We had three dissents.
[01:35:52]  The first...
[01:35:53]  So hold on.
[01:35:53]  Before you get to the dissents, I want to point out that the people who were...
[01:35:59]  Actually, we had four dissents.
[01:36:00]  Most alarmed by the linguistic changes were right.
[01:36:10]  Yes.
[01:36:11]  That the point is getting people like me, frankly, to behave out of courtesy by calling.
[01:36:21]  I did it too for a while.
[01:36:22]  It's been longer for me.
[01:36:23]  But nonetheless, the point, I mean, and it was well-intentioned, and I still believe in it.
[01:36:26]  And in a decent world, the point is you do not want to confront somebody who has gender dysphoria and has decided to live as the other sex.
[01:36:33]  You don't want to be constantly, you know, rubbing it in their face.
[01:36:37]  But it's a matter of courtesy, as Jordan Peterson famously said back in 2015 or 16.
[01:36:45]  But the point is, if you allow that, okay, I'll call you what it seems like I should call you based on your presentation, then the point is, oh, well, that creates the impression that actually you agree that this person is actually a woman.
[01:37:00]  And once you have this agreement, then the point is the court is composed of people who've been circulating in that milieu where it's understood that this is the right thing to do.
[01:37:09]  And it turns it into a fact, right?
[01:37:12]  From their perspective, even though it's not a biological fact.
[01:37:16]  So anyway, I just think that's stunning, that the language stuff actually turns out, even if you just try to do the right thing linguistically, it ends up coming back to haunt you in some material way.
[01:37:28]  Well, and I mean, I think this does point out, and we've talked a lot privately, and maybe some on Darkhorse as well, about some of the extraordinary differences between science and the law.
[01:37:40]  And science ultimately is not a semantic game, although it can be played that way.
[01:37:46]  But science is about discovering the truth.
[01:37:48]  And if it turns out that we're using the wrong words for things that are themselves misleading, we change the words.
[01:37:52]  And that can mean the communication going back into history can get confusing.
[01:37:56]  And in our world, this happens the most when we discover cladistic relationships that we misunderstood before and we change those scientific names of organisms.
[01:38:04]  And people are like, what is that?
[01:38:05]  I don't even know what that is now.
[01:38:06]  It's like, well, we are trying to match up.
[01:38:09]  We are trying to communicate, but we are also trying to describe history accurately.
[01:38:13]  And that is, you know, sorry if it's confusing, but ultimately, what we are beholden to is the truth.
[01:38:20]  And the law is inherently a social construct in which it is beholden to pre-existing writing that can be interpreted.
[01:38:29]  And so it is always a human game.
[01:38:31]  It's always a social construct.
[01:38:33]  And that's not to say that many in the law are not trying to discover what is best and what is true.
[01:38:39]  But if you have people who are actively engaged at a professional level with the interpretation of what people say, they are more likely to get confused when people walk up to them and say, well, I'm a woman because I'm a trans woman.
[01:38:54]  Now, what I just said would seem to suggest that scientists would be more resistant to this nonsense.
[01:39:01]  They don't seem to be.
[01:39:02]  So I have no excuse for the scientists who have fallen prey to this.
[01:39:05]  But I think it is not okay, but a little bit understandable that people who have devoted themselves to interpretation of words should be confused when words have been weaponized and then thrown at people as if they are the truth.

=== Courtroom Assault Analysis (15:38) ===

[01:39:22]  Yeah.
[01:39:22]  Well, you know, there's this Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which in its strong form just isn't true.
[01:39:29]  The idea is if you don't have language for something, you can't even comprehend it.
[01:39:33]  And that's not right.
[01:39:35]  Well, and that what languages have words for tells you something inherent about the brains of the people who are using that language.
[01:39:44]  Right.
[01:39:44]  And the point is, it's not true in its strong form, but in its weak form, there's a lot to it.
[01:39:48]  Yes.
[01:39:49]  Right.
[01:39:49]  The idea that things for which you have language get elaborated in the mind, you can deal with them more easily than something for which you just don't even have the materials with which to handle it.
[01:39:59]  And so the point is maybe this is why this is why Orwell's frankly ridiculous proposal about what would happen to language turns out to be exactly true and literal, right?
[01:40:12]  Is because the point is that's going to be the first front is we're going to grab your mind by altering what is said.
[01:40:20]  And once we alter what is said, then the point is all of the stuff, the actual material shifting of stuff becomes way easier.
[01:40:26]  Yep.
[01:40:26]  I bet that is it.
[01:40:27]  Yeah.
[01:40:29]  Okay.
[01:40:29]  So I've read a couple of little excerpts from the majority opinion that says Olympus Spa, the Korean women's spa with a couple of outposts outside of Seattle has to let in dudes as long as they say they're women.
[01:40:43]  And the primary dissent begins as such.
[01:40:50]  This is a three-judge panel from the Ninth Circuit that made this decision.
[01:40:54]  Two judges on the majority and Lee in the dissent.
[01:40:58]  He writes, Korean spas are not like spas of the four seasons or Ritz-Carlton with their soothing ambient music and lavender aroma in private lounges.
[01:41:05]  Steeped in, and his last name is Lee.
[01:41:08]  He may actually be of Korean descent.
[01:41:11]  I'm not sure.
[01:41:12]  Stepped in centuries-old tradition, Korean spas require their patrons to be fully naked as they sit in communal saunas and undergo deep tissue scrubbing for their entire bodies in an open-air area filled with other unclothed patrons.
[01:41:23]  Given this intimate environment, Korean spas separate patrons as well as employees by their sex.
[01:41:28]  The state of Washington, however, threatened prosecution against Olympus Spa, a female-only Korean spa, because it denied entry to a pre-operative transgender female, that is, a biological male who identifies as female but has not undergone a sex or assignment surgery.
[01:41:41]  Now, under edict from the state, women, and even girls as young as 13 years old, must be nude alongside patrons with exposed male genitalia as they receive treatment.
[01:41:50]  And female spa employees must provide full-body massages to naked, pre-operative, transgender women with intact male sexual organs.
[01:41:57]  This is not what Washington state law requires.
[01:41:59]  So Lee goes on to write a very considered dissent.
[01:42:04]  Actually, I know I got a little brief thing there.
[01:42:08]  If you could just give me my screen back for a second.
[01:42:12]  In, I don't know the legal stuff.
[01:42:14]  You may know it better than I do.
[01:42:15]  But the full court, so that was three judges from the Ninth Circuit that we've heard a little bit from the main majority opinion and the dissent.
[01:42:29]  But the full court was asked to rehear the case en banc.
[01:42:32]  I'm using a French pronunciation, but I don't know.
[01:42:35]  The court refused.
[01:42:37]  And one of the other judges in the Ninth Circuit, Van Dyke, disagreed with that refusal, writing his dissent, which is technically a dissent from denial of rehearing on banquet.
[01:42:46]  And so there's actually three of these dissent from denial of rehearing on bank.
[01:42:51]  So she thought it should be here.
[01:42:53]  He thought it should be reheard.
[01:42:55]  Yes.
[01:42:55]  Yeah.
[01:42:57]  And okay, or maybe there were two of these.
[01:43:00]  I don't remember.
[01:43:02]  You know, there were three dissent of these.
[01:43:07]  Again, I just don't know the language.
[01:43:09]  Can you see my screen now?
[01:43:11]  Yes.
[01:43:12]  Okay.
[01:43:14]  So one of them I'm not going to read anything from.
[01:43:17]  It basically agrees with this guy, Tung.
[01:43:20]  He says, you know, fairly measured.
[01:43:24]  Let us be clear about what the law in Washington requires.
[01:43:27]  Under its law, the state can disregard a small business owner's beliefs, Christian beliefs, and force her family-run Korean spa to allow a nude man who claims to be a woman into an intimate space reserved for its female patrons.
[01:43:38]  Yet under that same law, private clubs embracing secular values can refuse entry to that man.
[01:43:43]  Schools and cemeteries can refuse service to that man too, so long as they are run by institutions deemed sectarian.
[01:43:49]  Thus, while the law purports to protect any Washington resident from so-called gender identity discrimination, the state's prohibition exempts some secular organizations and certain religious ones.
[01:43:59]  It just does not exempt the small business in its exercise of its religious beliefs here.
[01:44:05]  How is it that, how is this at all, how is this at all a neutral law of general applicability?
[01:44:10]  It is not.
[01:44:11]  The panel's conclusion to the contrary, immunizing the law from any serious First Amendment scrutiny should have been vacated, I dissent.
[01:44:19]  Okay.
[01:44:21]  And then we have the dissent that got the attention on social media this week, Which begins as such from Van Dyke.
[01:44:31]  This is a case about swinging dicks.
[01:44:35]  The Christian owners of Olympus Spa, a traditional Korean women-only nud spa.
[01:44:39]  Excuse me.
[01:44:44]  I'm going to start again.
[01:44:47]  Writes Circuit Judge Van Dyke.
[01:44:50]  This is a case about swinging dicks.
[01:44:52]  The Christian owners of Olympus Spa, a traditional Korean women-only nude spa, understandably don't want them in their spa.
[01:44:58]  Their female employees and female clients don't want them in their spa either.
[01:45:02]  But Washington state insists on them, and now so does the Ninth Circuit.
[01:45:06]  You may think that swinging dicks shouldn't appear in a judicial opinion.
[01:45:09]  You're not wrong.
[01:45:11]  But as much as you might understandably be shocked and displeased to merely encounter that phrase in this opinion, I hope we all can agree that it is far more jarring for the unsuspecting and exposed women at Olympus spa, some as young as 13, to be visually assaulted by the real thing.
[01:45:25]  Sometimes, it feels like the supposed adults in the room have collectively lost their minds.
[01:45:30]  Woke regulators and complicit judges seem entirely willing, even eager, to ignore the consequences that their Frankenstein social experiments impose on real women and young girls.
[01:45:39]  Yet, if harmful and unfortunate consequences were all this case was about, we'd have to shrug and say, that's what comes with living in a democracy.
[01:45:46]  Unless the Constitution is implicated, we get what we voted for, good and hard.
[01:45:51]  He goes on, but the judges who wrote the majority opinion are outraged.
[01:45:58]  Really?
[01:45:59]  So, and this actually shows up earlier in the published set of opinions, which is why I have it outlined here the way I do.
[01:46:06]  They respond to him.
[01:46:09]  Van Dyke, they said the American legal system has long been regarded as a place to resolve disputes in a dignified and civil manner, or as Justice O'Connor put it, to, quote, disagree without being disagreeable.
[01:46:20]  It is not a place for vulgar barroom talk, nor is it a place to suggest that fellow judges have collectively lost their minds, or that they are woke judges complicit in a scheme to harm ordinary Americans.
[01:46:30]  That language makes us sound like juveniles, not judges, and it undermines public trust in the courts.
[01:46:38]  No.
[01:46:39]  No, it does not.
[01:46:41]  Do you know what undermines public trust in the courts?
[01:46:44]  It's you guys.
[01:46:45]  And your majority opinion and the fact that you are letting a dude with yes, a swinging dick show up in a traditional Korean women's spa.
[01:46:53]  That's not Van Dyke writing it into his opinion because it's the only way apparently to get anyone's attention.
[01:46:59]  That is you.
[01:47:00]  They write, again, that language makes us sound like juveniles, not judges, and it undermines public trust in the courts.
[01:47:06]  The lead dissent's use of such coarse language and invective may make for publicity or entertainment value, but it has no place in a judicial opinion.
[01:47:13]  The lead dissent ignores ordinary principles of dignity and civility and demeans this court.
[01:47:18]  Neither the parties nor the panel dissent found it necessary to invoke such crude and vitriolic language.
[01:47:23]  Decorum and collegiality demand more.
[01:47:28]  These are such clowns.
[01:47:31]  These judges are such clowns.
[01:47:34]  And one of them is a woman who apparently gives no fucks about the women and girls as young as 13 who might go to this amazing spa and be exposed to a very confused and mentally unstable man who's got his balls and dick out.
[01:47:58]  More likely, frankly, most of us who once went to this amazing business are not going to go anymore.
[01:48:05]  They're going to have put out of business a Korean family who happened to be conservative Christians because of what?
[01:48:14]  Because of confusion about basic biology and ideology that is driving the entire state mad.
[01:48:22]  All of the West Coast, certainly the state of Washington.
[01:48:25]  It's frankly unbelievable.
[01:48:27]  And I just, I love their outrage that is directed at the one guy who stood up, was like, you know what this is actually about?
[01:48:36]  I'll tell you what this is actually about since we're so busy having decorum that no one is talking about it.
[01:48:42]  This is actually about the swinging dicks and the fact that women who've gone to a naked spa for women don't want to see him at the moment.
[01:48:49]  I love the construction that it makes them look like.
[01:48:55]  No.
[01:48:56]  It's like imagine that, you know, the king's court had a rebuttal to the little boy who pointed out that the king was in effect not wearing any clothes.
[01:49:06]  And it's like, this makes him sound naked.
[01:49:08]  It's like, no, he is naked.
[01:49:11]  That makes him sound so.
[01:49:13]  No, it's preposterous.
[01:49:15]  Feelings have to be protected.
[01:49:17]  The kings, the emperors, the naked emperor's feelings have to be protected.
[01:49:21]  The confused, mentally unstable, perhaps the mentally unstable man who thinks he's a woman's feelings have to be protected.
[01:49:30]  You know who doesn't have to be protected?
[01:49:32]  The child who points out that the emperor is naked.
[01:49:35]  The women who are having body scrubs next to some dude doesn't matter.
[01:49:41]  We don't matter.
[01:49:43]  It's the feelings of the deranged people.
[01:49:46]  Yeah, the feelings of the deranged people.
[01:49:47]  That's what needs to be protected.
[01:49:48]  That is what the state of Washington and the Ninth Circuit is protecting.
[01:49:52]  You know, good job, guys.
[01:49:54]  Especially, you know, deranged is one thing.
[01:49:56]  There are a lot of ways to not understand reality.
[01:50:00]  You're talking about a version of misunderstanding reality that is actually materially dangerous and well understood to be one of the most terrible crimes.
[01:50:12]  Yeah.
[01:50:13]  Right.
[01:50:13]  Rape is a crime that is perpetrated by men on women because of differential biology.
[01:50:22]  And so the point is this is not.
[01:50:24]  To be fair, rape is very unlikely to happen in the middle of a spa where you're the one guy.
[01:50:28]  Yeah, okay, but let's follow this through then.
[01:50:31]  The idea is you have a pervert.
[01:50:34]  And I'm not synonymizing a trans person with a pervert, but I'm saying this is a trans person.
[01:50:39]  Any dude who's trying to force his way into this spa is a pervert.
[01:50:43]  That's what I'm saying.
[01:50:43]  Yes.
[01:50:44]  That's a pervert.
[01:50:45]  And so the point is, okay, how many ingredients do you have to add to this stew before you've created the very toxic environment in which that crime is going to happen?
[01:50:55]  Not necessarily in the spa.
[01:50:57]  But the point is you're talking about a pervert who likes the idea of bringing his dick into this environment because of a legal loophole that somehow the Ninth Circuit can't see or refuses to acknowledge.
[01:51:10]  That is a dangerous situation.
[01:51:12]  And it is going to result in actual women being hurt.
[01:51:16]  So there is a part of me that wonders if there is not some creative solution here.
[01:51:22]  Like imagine six large level-headed men go to the spa, declare themselves women, and stand at the entrance and make sure that nobody would want to come in, right?
[01:51:39]  In other words, I don't want those guys in there.
[01:51:41]  But if the loophole is carved out, then maybe the loophole could be used to actually protect the women who want to be in the part of the spa where you're naked by, you know, saying, hey, who are you to say I'm not one?
[01:51:52]  Right.
[01:51:52]  If you're going to let that guy in, then guys who are willing to stand up to this madness could potentially use that loophole to protect the women there.
[01:52:02]  I don't see how that would work at this spa.
[01:52:05]  I mean, even if I could see how it worked, I can't imagine what cost effective.
[01:52:09]  I've never seen the inside of the spa for reasons you'll have.
[01:52:13]  You have never tried to see the inside of the spa.
[01:52:16]  That is true.
[01:52:18]  But I will actually say, you know, I was very quick to say, you know, rape's not really the issue here.
[01:52:25]  Actually, the spa, they've got two of them.
[01:52:30]  They're a little bit different, but the idea is the same.
[01:52:33]  And they're really, there are two, there are several parts of each of them.
[01:52:37]  One of them is naked required.
[01:52:40]  You are not allowed to wear clothes, but for something on your hair so that your hair doesn't get in the pools and such.
[01:52:48]  And then in the infrared sauna parts of the spa, which is a series of, which is a bunch of different rooms at different temperatures, most of which are fairly small, all of which are hard to see into, all of which have closed doors, you only have on a light, loose-fitting rope.
[01:53:08]  In the very brightly lit, big, open part of the spa where everyone is required to be naked, you know, a rape is not going to happen.
[01:53:15]  But in those infrared sauna rooms where, okay, fine, you're not technically naked, someone could get it.
[01:53:25]  Actually, so I think there is actually risk.
[01:53:29]  There is actually physical risk in addition to psychological harm and, you know, just the harm of continuing to live under Orwellian conditions in which we pretend that up is down and black is white.
[01:53:44]  And what we all know to be true, because we are part of a lineage that's half a billion years old at least, in which it has been true, isn't true because some idiot judges don't want to be told they're juvenile but are acting like babies.
[01:54:00]  The danger I was pointing to is not necessarily in the spa.
[01:54:04]  The spa is being forced to participate in a perverted delusion in somebody who is dangerous, presumably, in the rest of their life.
[01:54:14]  So the point is the encouraging of that delusion in this case by the courts even is a dangerous thing in and of itself.
[01:54:22]  But short of rape, what the court is doing is it is sanctioning an assault.
[01:54:31]  Assault is not battery.
[01:54:33]  Assault is a threat.
[01:54:34]  And the point is, a guy who gets off on the idea of being allowed into a naked female space and having his dick show, that guy is in a position to be threatening just by his very nature in that condition.
[01:54:51]  The fact that he gets off on that threat, he gets off on the fact that he can get into this place is an assault and the court is facilitating it.

=== Shark Phylogeny Truths (03:49) ===

[01:55:00]  Yes, they are.
[01:55:02]  Yes, they are.
[01:55:05]  Yeah, I think they did all the work here for us.
[01:55:09]  All I did was find the right sections and read them in the right order.
[01:55:11]  But that language makes us sound like juveniles, not judges.
[01:55:16]  And it, and it, meaning the language that Van Dyke used, undermines public trust in the courts.
[01:55:21]  No, That is you, people.
[01:55:24]  Well, it's not even that.
[01:55:27]  Undermines trust.
[01:55:28]  No, what undermines trust is not being trustworthy.
[01:55:32]  Just think about the word, trustworthy.
[01:55:34]  Are you worthy of trust?
[01:55:35]  No, obviously not.
[01:55:36]  You're obviously not smart enough to protect women.
[01:55:38]  Having judges that are not trustworthy undermines trust in the courts.
[01:55:41]  Yeah, that's the thing that does it right there.
[01:55:43]  Yeah, that's stunning.
[01:55:46]  But I also think it reminds me a little bit of the, I've told this story before, but at some point, my wonderful grandfather got very angry at my brother for cursing in some context long forgotten, I think.
[01:56:04]  Although Eric might remember, but I don't remember.
[01:56:07]  And what he said to him was, what my grandfather said to Eric was, don't you dare do that.
[01:56:14]  Someday you're going to need those words.
[01:56:17]  Right?
[01:56:17]  And his point was don't burn them out because there's a reason that we have the capability to do that.
[01:56:23]  And my point would be that dissent, as much as it is absolutely jarring to encounter that kind of language in a dissent, boy, is this the place for it.
[01:56:31]  Absolutely.
[01:56:33]  And it's literally relevant.
[01:56:38]  Yes.
[01:56:39]  So it's not just, I am fed up and I'm going to swear now to get your attention.
[01:56:43]  Like, can anyone else see that what we're actually talking about here is letting a dude, fully intact, into women's faces?
[01:56:53]  What's the difference?
[01:56:54]  How would you tell?
[01:56:56]  I know.
[01:56:58]  There's an easy one here.
[01:56:59]  Yep.
[01:57:00]  Yeah.
[01:57:00]  Yeah.
[01:57:01]  All right.
[01:57:01]  Well, that's wild.
[01:57:02]  Yeah, that is wild.
[01:57:04]  Next time on Dark Horse, sharks aren't real.
[01:57:09]  Surely, surely, even if the worst is true and sharks are maybe not even paraphyletic, but polyphyletic, even if that's true, some group is going to retain the designation shark.
[01:57:22]  You know what's actually going to end up being true if this phylogenic work is true, and I will come back to it, even though it might bore the pants off almost everyone, is that skates and rays, do you know what the Latin name for the skates and rays are?
[01:57:35]  Who is the skates and rays are and how did he get that awesome position?
[01:57:39]  So rays, like stingrays and manta rays, which we've talked about recently, and skates, which no one ever really thinks about them very much except the skates themselves.
[01:57:48]  But rays and skates are a monophyletic group.
[01:57:51]  They have the batoidia.
[01:57:53]  Batoids.
[01:57:54]  Nice.
[01:57:54]  Yeah, because they sort of flip it.
[01:57:56]  Perfect.
[01:57:56]  Yeah, yeah.
[01:57:57]  But it's going to turn out to be, I'll just, you know, maybe I won't even come back to it because I'm just going to give the punchline here of this work, if it's true, the phylogenetic work, is that the rays and skates, the batoids are also sharks.
[01:58:14]  They're also sharks.
[01:58:15]  Yeah, they're embedded within the sharks.
[01:58:16]  They're embedded within the sharks.
[01:58:18]  So it's monophyletic, but had excluded a group that needed to be included, rendering it.
[01:58:28]  It was paraphyletic.
[01:58:30]  Got it.
[01:58:31]  Okay, that's wild.
[01:58:32]  I would point out that in a sexual context, it is more normal to bore the pants onto someone.
[01:58:41]  This is not a sexual context?
[01:58:43]  No, it's not, but that's a great joke.
[01:58:45]  And I think I got the timing right, even though nobody laughed.
[01:58:49]  Jen might have snickered.

=== Paraphyletic Group Joke (00:59) ===

[01:58:50]  But go back and watch the tape.
[01:58:54]  It's a good joke, and it was pretty well delivered.
[01:58:57]  All right.
[01:58:59]  Okay, we're going to take a little break and then we'll be back with the Q ⁇ A.
[01:59:02]  So join us.
[01:59:03]  Please consider joining us at locals.
[01:59:06]  And if you can't join us right now, you can ask questions now, but it'll still be up, as are all the past Q ⁇ As and some other original content.
[01:59:16]  So check this out there.
[01:59:18]  And also take a look at our sponsors this week, which were CrowdHealth and Tupes and Puree.
[01:59:25]  That's Tupes T-O-U-P-S, which makes, among other things, this fabulous frankincense face balm.
[01:59:32]  And Puree, which makes great, really clean supplements.
[01:59:37]  And yeah, we'll be back next week.
[01:59:41]  Same time, same place.
[01:59:42]  And until you see us next time, be good to the ones you love.
[01:59:45]  Eat good food and get outside.
[01:59:48]  Be well and don't read the